Track the Results of Your Online PR Submissions

You may never actually pitch anyone if all you do is submissions. Most of our clients use the online wire services and don’t do full media outreach, so they need to know they can track this apart from full PR.

• Use Analytics to see what media and blog sites drove traffic and which converted to sales.
• Track pickups via the wire service tracking tools and Google alerts. Share these with your team and put together background info on how big the sites/blogs are that featured you.

Pitching Tips

Start an Excel document or journalist database of people to target. Bulldog Reporter, MEDIAtlas, Batchbook, Highrise, and Salesforce are good tools to consider.

Identify media outlets—both online and off—in your targeted industries; for example, business and marketing. Add local, regional, national, and international channels to cover television, radio/talk radio, newspapers, magazines, online publications, newswires, and other services.

After submitting your release to the wire services, you can also share it with journalists via email, calls, Twitter, etc. Never—ever—send a press release as an attachment. It will never be opened. Make sure your headline (see “What’s the Hook?” above) grabs attention in the message line. The text of the press release should be the body of the email message. Attachments should be limited to photographs and other visuals.

When pitching the media, keep the following in mind:

1. Know your audience and target only the media people who make sense for your story.
2. Be brief.
3. Accept “no” if they turn you down after a couple tries.
4. Read their publication/blog and point out exactly how your information helps their audience.
5. Make sure your hook/angle is worthwhile for that audience.
6. Create amazing content and use that as the hook if you don’t have much of a news hook. In other words, you can create news.

To whom do you pitch your press releases?

photo credit: Noah Sussman via photopin cc