Are you pitching your stories to the right people?
Getting in front of your target audiences via the media has become both harder and more time consuming. Whilst tempting to focus your PR outreach on high-profile media outlets with large audiences, this could be a waste of your time and budget.
Meeting a prospective new client for the first time is always fascinating. When we ask the organisational leader or their marketing and communications colleagues what media they see themselves appearing in, nine times out of 10 the BBC, Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times will be among those they list as their target outlets.
They’re not alone. A report published a few years ago analysed 500,000 press releases to see what media outlets organisations of all sizes and sectors were focusing their pitches. One in four were sent to top tier publications such as those listed above with the likes of Forbes, Business Insider, and ITV thrown into the mix.
But is focusing on generating top tier media coverage really the best use of an organisation’s PR resources, time, and investment?
We have secured interviews, profiles, and quotes for several clients on BBC TV, CNN, Times Radio and ITV, within The Times, FT, and Forbes and more over the years. It really does do wonders for increasing their brand awareness and boosting the public profiles of the organisation’s key people at scale.
We’ve done this for ourselves too. Indeed, our managing director has featured across a number of major media in the last 12 months, including ITV, The Daily Telegraph, The Express, to METRO, and The Times.
However, opportunities like this are few and far between. They are infrequently repeated. In fact, you can have four or five great stories over a 12 month period but it is very unlikely that you will generate national media coverage for each of those unless you are a major ‘name’ in your space.
To ensure a steady flow of media coverage organisations to think about other ways to reach their target audiences on a more consistent basis.
This is why targeting niche media can yield better results both from a brand and bottom line perspective. By focusing on media outlets specific to their sector or location, organisations stand a far better chance of gaining exposure to more relevant audiences more often.
Wanting to be published by a ‘known’ name is all the very well, but if you want to generate an ROI from your PR you need to ensure that you are getting your business in front of the right people in the media that they consume, not the outlets that you fancy the look of.
Need support getting your stories into the media? We can do that for you.
