Getting press coverage offers you exposure to a relevant audience right away. Done properly, your PR outreach campaigns can give your website a major SEO boost. And that translates into attracting more potential customers and bringing more awareness to your brand.
You can get your brand featured in guest posts on blogs. Or you can be invited as a guest on podcasts. The opportunities are endless.
The key to a successful PR campaign is to pitch your brand to relevant journalists. Reaching out only to those who are specialized in your niche will help you network better in your field. Plus, you’ll interact with a new audience that’s already interested in your business, and that’ll boost your online visibility.
But that is not all. All the mentions in various media outlets will transform into social media coverage (and other types of brand exposure). This is how respondents picked the main advantages of social media coverage according to Statista
In this article, we’re going to break this process down so you’ll increase the chances of getting a good response.
In this article
A Step-By-Step Guide to Getting Press Coverage
In this guide, we will go over several outreach strategies that will help you to get relevant press coverage. While at first, it may seem overwhelming, do not worry. Chances are that after trying them all (or some of them) you will discover that there is one or two that outperform the others when applied to your brand.
The goal of this guide is to provide you with an overview of all the approaches that will lead to finding that right one on which you will double down!
Find Relevant Websites
Doing research is the most important step when you start planning your press outreach. Don’t send emails to random people hoping they’ll respond. Instead, focus only on relevant media in your niche that can promote your business.
Keep in mind that there is a notable difference between press coverage influence on your SEO rankings.
In the case of a small business SEO, you might have a hard time getting the attention of more popular outlets, but even smaller ones will give you a notable SEO boost. So no opportunity should be wasted.
On the other hand, those small publications would not move the needle that much for a bigger brand. But chances are that at this point you are well known, so more PR specialists and journalists will be willing to cover you.
Here’s where to find people that can help you grow your brand:
- Blogs
- Podcasts
- Influencers
- Social media
To make things easy, you can make a list of the most important requirements your target prospects must meet. Anyone who doesn’t meet your criteria can be filtered out, so you’ll have to focus only on what matters the most. Consider things like:
- Are they relevant to your industry?
- Is their audience relevant to your niche?
- How well does their audience engage with their posts?
- Did they interview your competitors too?
- Does this collaboration help you achieve your business goals?
- What is something valuable that you can offer in return?
- Do they have recently published posts?
Now that you’ve found the right places where you can become more visible, you can focus on finding the right people.
Find the Correct Contact Details
To better understand why this is important, consider these 2 things:
One – If you send your offer to the wrong person or an inactive email, you’ve wasted your time. With a strategy that gives you no results, your efforts = 0.
Two – The wrong people can’t help you. So even if you get in touch with them, 2 things will happen:
- They mark your email as spam/ block you
- They will not answer back.
Anyway, each situation is undesirable. That’s why finding the correct information is a must – so you can connect with your prospects.
To speed things up, you can automate this stage by using email lookup tools. In just a matter of minutes, you’ll find everything you need to know about a certain website. And that includes the name and the position of the contact person. The best thing is that you can do it in bulk, which is essential for successful outreach.
Craft Your Pitch and Send It
Sending your email is not hard at all, but writing them is a whole different story. Especially when you need to come up with a unique topic that will make your contacts interested in covering your business. Creating a tailored pitch that’s relevant to their site can be difficult, so you need to craft a unique and attractive collaboration email.
The main aspect you should keep in mind when you’re writing your pitch is to focus on the benefits for their audience. Sending your pitch to a person you’ve never talked to before is intimidating. But think about this from another perspective – an average office worker receives up to 121 emails per day. Things can get overwhelming quickly for them. At the same time, this highlights how important it is to craft an engaging message right from the first line.
So, make sure you tell your prospects what’s in it for them if they were to collaborate with you. You should include things like:
- Why would their audience be interested in hearing about your brand?
- What are some strong credentials that recommend you?
- How can you bring value to their website?
Keep the balance between all of these aspects always tipped in their favor.
Rules for Doing Press Outreach
A PR campaign is a complex process that requires attention to detail and organizational skills. That’s why keeping a checklist with all the do’s and don’ts before pressing that Send button will come in handy.
Do Your Research and Target Relevant Websites
We’ve already seen why it’s good to stick only to those relevant to your niche. However, some influencers argue that limiting yourself to 1 niche is detrimental for your business because you narrow your audience.
So, let’s say that, for any reason, you decide to contact more people that are not in your area of expertise. What will happen then?
More doesn’t equal better. Promoting your business to people that are not in your industry can be detrimental to your business.
Firstly, you’ll waste everyone’s time, including yourself. It doesn’t matter how engaging and well-thought your pitch is. If your new audience is not interested in what you have to say, they won’t even listen to you.
Secondly, the blogs or podcasts that think you’re irrelevant for them won’t cover your story. After all, wasn’t this campaign’s whole point to expose your brand to a new, targeted audience? Your campaign is doomed to fail no matter how much effort you put into it.
Last but not least, people will mark your email as spam. There’s nothing more annoying than receiving unsolicited and irrelevant emails all day long. You’ll be more likely to end up in the spam folder. And this is a serious problem that can get your account blocked.
Write a Good Pitch
When you’re crafting your cold outreach emails, always highlight the benefits of having you as a guest. Sure, your brand is great, but their audience must be interested in what you have to say. Otherwise, there is no point in promoting you.
Show your prospects why their audience can be excited and intrigued about your topics. Maybe they’ve already discussed a topic similar to yours and their audience showed great interest in it. Or maybe you come up with a no-brainer solution for some problems their audience has.
The point is, don’t just brag about your brand. Approaching people with ideas that boosts engagement with their public is a more successful strategy.
Tools Are Your Friend
When you start planning your press coverage outreach, you must:
- Find prospects on Google
- Search for email addresses and make sure they are active
- Scour LinkedIn for the right contacts
- Allocate a few hours for research daily
- Write the emails and the follow-ups
Sounds like a lot? Well, it is.
While you can do this manually, it’s always better to use quality tools to help you automate this process.
Faster is smarter. And now you have access to a lot of useful ones:
- Research tools
- Email finding and validating tools
- Email marketing tools
Even more, you can find all-in-ones tools that will save you time and money.
Use Different Approaches for Brand Promotion
Committing to one specific strategy is not a good tactic. However, having a multi-strategy approach can boost your brands’ awareness and put your business on the map. Plus, it’s always a nice way to make sure that things won’t get boring for your audience.
Besides, trying more than one approach can give you useful insights about what works in your PR campaigns and what doesn’t.
So let’s talk about 2 different and effective tactics that you can use to get press coverage:
- “Review my Product” outreach
- “Guest Podcasting” outreach
- Tools outreach
Guest Podcasting
There are so many articles about the benefits of guest posting that everyone can say them from memory. One of the main arguments to pay more attention to them is of course growth:
But guest podcasting is the next best thing. For once, you have access to a highly engaged audience. At the same time, the effort put into this process is minimal. Of course, you still need to make a list of the main things you want to discuss and do the outreach. But other than that, it’s really simple – you just have to show up.
Guest podcasting is becoming more and more popular, as many discovered that it is a viable link-building strategy that allows you to get exposure and links naturally, rather than through a challenging outreach process.
What is guest podcasting?
To get the definition out of the way, a podcast is a series of audio episodes that focuses on a specific theme. Hence, guest podcasting is when you are invited by the host of that podcast to talk about a particular topic.
Statistics show that 69% of podcast listeners hear about new services or products through podcast ads. And a lot of them perceived that brand as being more trustworthy because of this.
That’s why, over the years, guest podcasting has become a cool way to build your brand. Actually, it’s so efficient that many consider it to be the new guest posting.
How to apply this strategy?
Big podcasts have booking people that reach out to guests. But that’s the best-case scenario. In most cases, you’ll have to pitch them. When you’re sending your email, highlight the advantages of having you as a guest. Also, come up with a topic that’s relevant to their audience and which you’re an expert on.
Finding Good Podcasts
Here are some quick, simple, and useful ways to find podcasts that will help you grow your brand:
Google. With many positive reviews, Google Podcasts is a free option to find people in your industry. All you have to do is download the app and look up podcasts that might interest you. Also, Google’s algorithm can help you find relevant podcasters based on your likes and listening habits.
SparkToro. This tool has a special feature called Audience Intelligence which helps you discover relevant audiences for your business. You’ll get information about what content they like, what social platforms they use, their interests, and much more. Everything you want to know about your audience is in one place.
Listen Notes. With more than 2 million podcasts, they’re the biggest podcast database. So if there is anyone you want to find, this is the place to do it.
How to pitch for a guest podcast?
Engaging, personalized, interesting…automated – your pitch must have them all. It sounds almost impossible to come up with something that is special and unique every time you’re reaching out to someone.
But most importantly, keep it simple. People don’t like to waste time before you finally get to the point. A few jokes here and there are fine, but keep your messages short and clear.
The Pitch Structure:
- I am excited about your podcast
- I would love to be a guest
- Here are my topic ideas that are relevant to your audience
- Here is why I would be a great guest
What makes it work?
First, flattery helps. Of course, don’t overdo it. Otherwise, you end up sounding fake. But don’t say something generic either, like “I love your podcasts”. Their DMs are likely full of this.
Second, sharing episode ideas makes the podcaster’s job easier. It shows that you did your research and you know what topics they didn’t talk about too much. Plus, you save the podcaster time. It’s a win-win situation.
Third, you show the host you know what you’re talking about. By telling them all the important and relevant information about you, they can understand why you are a perfect fit for their channel. So, share why you’re a good guest, share your credentials, and the experience in your niche.
Example
Dear Steven,
I recently came across your article (post, podcast) about marketing transformation (include a link), which resonated with me a lot as I had been through a couple of those myself.
Just in the last two years, I had to completely re-do the way our in-house marketing team works and managed to increase our ARR by 200%.
When reading your article, I had a lot of ideas that I would be glad to share with your audience. So they can avoid my mistakes and that would make their road much easier.
Let’s schedule a call and I would tell you what golden nuggets I could share with you and your audience through your podcast.
Do not take it word for word. But you get the idea. Personal, respectful and to the point.
Review My Product
Almost all of us had doubts about the credibility of reviews we found on the Internet at some point. Many stories about brands using bots to write positive reviews about themselves infuriated a lot of people. And for a good reason – their trust was deceived.
For this reason, a blogger that writes genuine reviews about the products or apps they’re testing is more credible. Their audience follows them because they feel the content is genuine and their opinions are sincere. That’s why a blogger can connect with the public on a different level.
How does this work?
Simply put, this approach is addressed for those blogs that review products and apps.
The advantage of this strategy is that you get both an in-depth article about your brand and backlinks to your website.
If these people reviewed similar products to yours, that means their audience is already interested in your niche. So, finding potential customers should be easier.
How to apply product review strategy?
Start by searching for blog articles written about your competitors or other complementary products in your space. If those guys got write-ups on certain blogs, their products (and therefore your products) are relevant to that audience. Thus, having another product review about something similar will spark their public’s interest.
Finding Relevant Blogs
A simple Google search can be your best friend here. Type something like “[competitor name] review “and look for anything that seems promising.
Be sure to exclude results from mass review sites like G2 or Capterra, because this is not what you need. Focus only on blog posts because they’re the ones who you’ll pitch.
Product review pitch
Just like other strategies, make sure it’s on-point, no fluff, and draws attention right from the first line. However, consider that this is another type of strategy, so your pitch should be a bit different than what we’ve talked about so far.
The Pitch Structure Can Be:
- I saw you did an excellent write-up of this company
- Since that’s relevant to your audience, I think they might also be interested in a write-up of our product
- Here is a 1 sentence pitch of how our product helps people like your audience members
- I would be happy to give you a free product or account to try it out.
Why this pitch works?
It’s very direct and clear. No matter how you look at this, you’re contacting a blogger you know nothing about. So this implies only one thing – you want something from them. In this case, a review on their blog about your products. Don’t overthink your pitch. Otherwise, you might make things confusing and people won’t answer.
At the same time, by offering them everything they need to write a review, you make their job easier. Moreover, by having access to all the features, they can understand how your products work.
Example
Dear SoftwareReview team,
I noticed that you have quite a wide range of reviews of chatbot tools. Recently, we had launched our own chatbot building with a goal to improve on all the weaknesses that other tools have.
We will be glad to give you a trial account to test out the tool and review it on your site.
How can we move further with this?
Most review sites will want payment for the review. In some cases, you can substitute that with the promotion of their site on your social media channels. Or just try to barter it for something else of value.
Tools Outreach
Bloggers are not the only ones who write reviews for their audience. There are also other websites where marketing experts and tech reviewers share their opinions about the latest software on the market. And in many cases, being promoted on these blogs can help you reach a wider audience.
What does tool outreach work?
If your business is an app, then your potential number of prospects increases exponentially. After all, you’re not exposing your brand only to bloggers. Bigger businesses can hear about your software and might be interested in using it too.
How to execute this strategy?
Just like before, we’re going to google “[your product category] tools” and carefully review the results to find relevant articles. Make sure that these web entries include write-ups about your competitors and other products in your category. Otherwise, you might land on pages that have a different audience.
Pitching in Tools Outreach
Sometimes, you can find the best guidelines about how to write your pitch on your prospects’ websites. There, you can see their requirements for what they consider a high-quality submission. From that, you can get an idea of how you should craft an attractive pitch tailored to their taste.
How Your Pitch Can Look Like:
- I saw you did an excellent write-up of tools in this space
- I noticed you didn’t mention our product
- Here is a 1 sentence pitch of how our product helps people like your audience members
- I would be happy to give you a free product or account to try it out
Why It Works
The simpler your pitch is, the better. In many cases, all these websites want is to offer their audience something valuable. Either a solution for their problem or useful information. So show them you understand that and know exactly what to offer – another interesting app that their audience wants to hear about.
Plus, you’re telling them right from the start you’ll give them everything they need to cover your brand. The easier you make this process for them, the more likely to get a response.
Example
Dear James,
You recently wrote an article about how outreach may be time-consuming – as it requires several tools and quite a bit of manual data entry.
We had the same experience and as a response to this bottleneck, we created Postaga. If you would be interested, you could try our tool and see how it completely eliminates this bottleneck for yourself!
You can check out a free trial, or I would be glad to guide you through our platform. Won’t take more than 30 minutes.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Conclusion
Doing digital PR outreach to get press coverage for your brand can be difficult. Especially if you don’t prepare yourself with patience and tools to help you throughout this process. However, it’s worth all the effort you put into it.
The most undeniable advantage of investing your time into this is that your brand reaches a new audience. Not only will you grow your business, but you’ll network better with people in your niche. And in the future, you can fructify these new relationships by creating useful events to bring people with the same interests as you together!
