The ‘Relations’ Component of ‘Media Relations’ Has A Function.
There’s a purpose for the ‘relations’ portion of ‘media relations’. As a communicator, cultivating relationships with a network of essential media contacts is critical. It will take time to build your network, but those connections will benefit you in a variety of ways for years to come. In my opinion, these are the most effective ways to build a strong network of media contacts:
• Establishing a press list and keeping track of your industry.
• How do you organize your contacts?
• How to Make Friends with Journalists.
• How to use events to strengthen media ties.
Now we are going to take each one in detail:
Establishing a press list and keeping track of your industry:
it is important that you create a list of media contacts for a campaign to be able to find the right person at the right time. As a starting point, media databases might be helpful. But here’s the thing: journalists are extremely movable. As a result, they’re frequently outdated. Every seasoned public relation professional we spoke with agreed. These lists aren’t bought by them.
“If we’re going to have to check all the contact data anyway, we may as well establish a new list with people we know are relevant,” they all agreed. This is quite reasonable. All successful proposals have one trait: relevancy to a journalist or magazine. The best pitches also display an understanding of what their audience would find attractive. This will require time and effort. However, it is definitely worth your effort because it produces major effects.
We asked a PR pro for tips on how to approach list building:
• Maintain your interests in mind. Twotone’s founder, Jon Woodroof, used to work as a bike messenger and at a bike shop. He’s now made a company out of his global bicycle network. Guy, a DJ, used his contacts in the music industry to help Bian Eno with his project.
• Previous coverage should be included with your pitches to establish credibility.
• Make connections instead of a list. Instead of writing down contact information, your goal should always be to build a long-term network of important contacts.
• Contact information for journalists may be found in their profiles. If it doesn’t work, try Google, LinkedIn, or applications like Rocket Search.
• Assemble all of the story’s details into a package for journalists. If you provide low-resolution photographs or leave out important information, there will be a lot of emails back and forth, and you may miss the deadline.
How to Divide Your Contacts:
Divide your contact list for more effective outreach.
As you gain a deeper understanding of your industry’s media environment and your media list grows, you’ll undoubtedly find that it’s nearly hard to make personalized pitches to each of these connections. While it is simple to send an email to your complete press list, please do not.
It’s a good idea to organize your media connections into distinct lists. Many public relations professionals have their own approach to segmenting connections, however, in general, there are two ways to segment your connections:
1. Divide your contacts by publication size: larger publications receive more pitches. As a result, your connections may be divided into three tiers: tier 1 is the big fish with a large reach and domain authority, tier 2 is publishing in specialized industry journals, and tier 3 is contributed pieces in smaller industry blogs.
2. Divide your connections based on relevance: Some contacts are simply perfect – they reach your specific target audience and are only interested in your business. These are true treasures. Others may write about your industry on occasion, but their primary focus is elsewhere. You may determine which pitches to focus on by creating three lists: one with your important connections, one with high potential contacts, and one with pitches that could be interesting. List 1 requires you to personalize the pitch as much as possible for the individual, List 2 requires you to search up current stories and include them in your presentation, and List 3 requires you to make a more general news announcement.
One last tiny tip, for B-list, C-list, or third-tier contacts, many of our clients divide contacts in their CRM based on the contacts’ preferred language. This is an excellent method to avoid the awkward issue of sending a German pitch to English contacts.