Lunch and Learn: How to pitch your business to journalists

How to pitch your business to journalists

Securing media coverage is a highly effective way to promote your business. Get a mention in the right publication and it can lead to increased sales and a big boost to your reputation. But there is an art to pitching the press.

In this webinar, Dan Martin, freelance small business journalist and former Enterprise Nation head of content, shares tips from a journalist's perspective on how your business can make headlines.

Among the tips shared by Dan are:

Relevance is vital when pitching journalists

Before pitching a journalist, make sure you've looked at the previous content they've written or broadcast so that you know that they are likely to be interested in your business. If you pitch your business to a irrelevant journalist, you'll likely to get no response or an angry reply!

Have great images ready to send

If there's one thing that you spend money on when pitching to journalists, it should be imagery of you and your business. Having good, strong images ready to send when a journalists asks for them could be the difference between you getting the coverage or one of your competitors.

Don't send images as attachments in an email as they could be blocked. Have them ready in something like Google Drive or Dropbox so you have a link of several images to send and the journalist can select the ones they like.

The power of #JournoRequest

#JournoRequest is a hashtag on Twitter that journalists use when they're looking for specific people to interview. Follow that hashtag and reply if the ask is relevant to you. It's a brilliant and free way to get featured in the media.

Have an opinion

Journalists are not salespeople for your business and they are unlikely to write a heavily promotional story but having an opinion on topical issues is a good way to get featured. Look for journalists covering topical issues, especially those who use #JournoRequest, and reply with your thoughts.

Use Twitter lists to follow journalists

Twitter is the main platform used by journalists and a good way to monitor what they are talking about is by using Twitter lists. You can create a list of journalists you're interested in which will filter out all other posts and you'll just see their tweets. You can make the list private so no-one else can see it and people added to it don't know they're on it.