Before You Pitch A Story To Reporters…
Getting press may not turn your company into a million dollar business overnight, but it certainly never hurts to get stories about you written in print publications, online, or television/radio/online video appearances. Press has a tendency to give some validity to your product/company and shows that no matter how small you are, your still legit. So if you’re planning to actively go out and pitch reporters/bloggers this year, make sure you don’t forget this one critical thing:
Press – no matter what vehicle you’re looking at (print vs. online vs. broadcast) isn’t necessarily interested in your new product. They are inundated daily with new product press releases and samples from the latest and greatest new version of pretty much everything. But think of it from their standpoint, they are trying to write/produce pieces that people will find interesting. How often would you keep coming back to your local paper/tv news/even this site for example, if all I did was sit here and tell you about this new great X and new great Y all the time. Not really a good use of your time, right?
So unless you’re Apple (who seems to be able to get away with new product pitches that do grab reporters’ attention), your pitch needs to have more meat than just that. What reporters are more interested in is not your new product but actually you. You have a story that’s interesting and compelling and that’s the story that they’d be interested in telling. So whether you’re pitching reporters for the first time or you’ve been down this road before, don’t fall in the trap of simply sending them your new product info because, to be brutally honest, that’s pretty boring. However, if you’re new product was the result of a Kickstarter campaign, grew out of a family need, was something you learned about on vacation….as you can see, there are a 101 ways you can take this story and give it a new spin. Just stay true to the facts and let your passion and your story shine through.
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hmmm..very helpful