How To Pitch a Story to a Journalist

Journalists are very picky people and for good reason. You would be, too, if you had hundreds of people a day emailing you and asking if they could feature your story….Especially when every caller is thinking that their story is more important than the last person that called or emailed you.

Try implementing the following 5 tips to help build relationships with key journalists and boost the odds of getting coverage.

Write a catchy subject line. If you want to break through the clutter, you need to stand out. It also helps to noticeably indicate that you are sending a release or pitch, so the recipient knows it’s not an email that is meant to be in the junk box.

Personalize it. Avoid mass emails with no personalized messages. Research the journalists who cover your area and focus on what they want to hear. Target your pitch to the individual journalist and make reference to their individual work. Don’t overgeneralize.

Get to the point. Your pitch is going to a journalist, not the readers just yet. You don’t need to quote each person or list every source. Offer them the general summary (abstract); the journalist will decide what to feature and what not to.

Timing can be everything. Try to time your pitch with the relevant news of the day. If you are launching a snow-removal service, don’t start pitching in the middle of summer. For example, no one wants to be pitched about Christmas in March.

Be story focused.  Focus the story on the facts, rather than the opinions and speculations. If you want to add an opinion, put it in quotations. Follow the 5W AND 1H rule.

Sales people should also pay attention to these tips as they are applicable to those who do email marketing campaigns. InfoFlo is an on-premise CRM tool that offers an email marketing add-on to all interested enterprises looking to build their customer base this way. Each user with email marketing access can easily create professional email marketing campaigns and email templates, manage subscribers, and send to unlimited contacts all for one flat fee of $49/user.

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