It’s impossible to overstate the importance of media coverage for businesses. Major world leading brands are in the headlines every day, and this is for good reason.

Nowadays, there is something called the ‘content crunch’ – businesses are struggling to produce the amount of content they need to, to keep audiences engaged in a saturated, competitive market. Instead, there is growing emphasis on distribution, and maximizing the benefit of every piece of content that can be produced by getting it to as large an audience as possible.

Media coverage is one of the best ways to maximize an audience. Facebook and Google have extraordinarily strong brands, and they lead the world, making headlines every day. These headlines keep us thinking about them.

But what about start-ups? They can get headlines too, and when they do, it can lead to the rapid growth of audiences. (Think UBER!) Novelty, innovation, and ideas that capture the imagination all result in features.

Media coverage is also an essential form of endorsement – it allows companies to appear visibly successful in the eyes of others. These ‘others’ are not just customers. Potential investors, business partners, and even potential future employees can all be attracted, swayed and convinced by coverage in the media. It immediately makes you look as though you operate on a different level to the thousands of competitors around you.

So, with all these advantages, how do you actually secure media coverage?

Journalists.

Journalists lead the field in storytelling, understanding public interest, and making messaging compelling. In many ways, journalists are the ultimate PR consultant, creating messaging that is important, relevant, current, and compelling.

So how do you recruit journalists to your cause? Here’s a few of the best ways we’ve discovered:

1) More Time = More Impact

The timeframe will determine the effort and commitment you can put in. Thinking strategically means you should allow as much time for preparation as possible.

This is not always possible, and in the modern world it is increasingly likely that you have to get information out there in an immediate and widespread way to try and capture the momentum of the moment. There are ways you can do this, e.g. sending a press release, if you have to. If you have to, you absolutely should.

But don’t beat yourself up about having missed an opportunity to court journalists and get them personally invested in the story. Establishing these relationships is a long game, and if they didn’t bite this time, that doesn’t mean they won’t in future.

The biggest mistake I see businesses make is to be responsive instead of pro-active. Don’t write the press release after you’ve appointed your new CEO, THEN go around looking for people to pick it up. As soon as you know a change is coming, notify those who matter in your field and assure them they will get the information first. That way, you are delivering a scoop on what’s going to happen, not just notifying people after it’s already too late.

2) Research and Shortlist The Most Appropriate Journalists

Any process worth undertaking should begin with research. Finding and recruiting journalists should be no different. It would be far more time consuming, laborious and inefficient to send identical emails to every journalist you can identify.

When I think about how to advertise my business, blanket emailing simply never factors in. Take a look at your spam folder and tell me the last time you bought a product from it. That’s the experience a journalist has every day with their regular inbox – hundreds of pointless blanket emails.

Instead, start by looking to your industry or niche. Look for the most influential websites, magazines and newspaper sections in that area. From there, research the journalists’ body of work and identify those who have covered similar businesses before. You will find some journalists are more pro-business than others, so emphasize those who are.

From here, shortlist twenty top prospects and do a deep-dive – check their social media presences, and take time to understand where they’re coming from. What benefits are they trying to deliver to their readers? How can you align your approach with those benefits?

From there, you can prepare a compelling pitch for each, in a fraction of the time it would take for you to churn through hundreds of people who will simply never cover you.

3) Understand What You’re REALLY Talking About

Compelling messaging is easiest when the message is something people will care about. Your message is the nucleus of all the efforts to come – it’s the one thing people should ‘get’ above everything else should your article ever run.

In most cases, this is the most important or significant piece of information – a new product release, successful investment, business expansion.

But in order to get impact out, you have to put impact in. So you have a new product – why does it matter? What does it change? How does it affect people?

You need to put the emphasis on your message not only on the thing itself, but it’s significance and implications. This will ‘humanize’ the dry data, and give a journalist something to work on. There’s a reason they’re called news stories.

Think of it this way: if you don’t understand your messaging inside and out, why would anyone else?

The bin is full of pitches people couldn’t understand – no one is going to spend time trying. They have to get it first time.

4) Appoint A Spokesperson

Another step you can take in humanizing your stories is to appoint a spokesperson from your company to speak on the issue.

A good spokesperson should contextualise the story in a way that focuses entirely on the customers, and how the company’s philosophy and values are grown out of a genuine desire to help them. They can show that this latest news is an expression of a continual instinct to help customers.

The spokesperson should also be prepared with all the facts and details on the story, including having a broader context on what competitors are doing, how the development sits within the current economy, and more.

A spokesperson is the go-to expert on the subject, and someone who a journalist could establish a strong relationship with. This spokesperson should have a lot of the qualities we recommend in a PR specialist .

5) Twitter Is The Journalists’ Watercooler

Journalists love Twitter – it’s immediacy and global reach mean most breaking news breaks not even from journalists, but from members of the public on the ground near events.

So go where they are. Get yourself on Twitter and follow the journalists who are of interest to your area. Already you will benefit from keeping up to date with what they post and what is going on in your industry.

From here, you can go much further. Retweet the most interesting and relevant content they produce. Reply to their tweets when you have something meaningful to add. Begin to build a long term, slow burn strategy.

Think of this process as ‘seeding’ your company in a journalist’s mind. Regular interaction will passively increase brand awareness and develop roots, so once you pitch them, you already have a relationship and an image they are aware of.

6) Laziness, Copy/Paste Are The Enemies Of Good Press

Journalists talk to each other. Especially journalists who work for different media outlets. They need to make sure they aren’t going to tread on each other’s toes or get scooped on key stories. As a result, if five journalists receive the same email within hours or days of each other, and that comes up in a conversation, your whole campaign could be treated like spam and dismissed out of hand.

Approach journalists one at a time, and use original content to pitch them. Using a spam pitch where all you change is the names is not only horrible, it’s prone to errors. I have seen people learn this the hard way, when they have sent pitches addressed to the wrong people, or worse, citing articles they didn’t write, and have been blacklisted because of it.

Instead, take it slower. Desperation isn’t a good look on anyone, and blanket emails across as just that.

7) Harness The Power Of Press Releases

Developing on the above, press releases are a potent way to maximize the impact of your messaging, so long as they are properly distributed.

A Press Release should serve as a summary introduction to your broader messaging campaign. It should include the top-line information on the event in question, insight on the the significance, a quote from the spokesperson on the human implications and a brief summary of the company’s mission.

With a catchy title and contact details, this press release can serve as a hook to draw the attention of journalists.

Journalist still use newswires to hunt for stories, and even if you are pitching them individually, seeing the story on news outlets – especially on high profile sites such as Reuters, ABC, and CBS News – will affirm the significance of your story in their minds.

PRWire Asia can reach more than 300 different news outlet to help you maximize the breadth of your exposure. Because PRWire Asia can distribute a single release across so many touch points, it is one of the most cost efficient and effective ways to maximize the number of eyes on your latest business developments, while reaping a whole host of related SEO benefits.

Make Your Impact

So there you have it – an overview of tools, approaches and perspectives that will help you maximize your impact in the media. Quality media coverage can build your brand and increase exposure for your business.

Journalists are the gatekeepers and the kingmakers in this game, and it’s important you have respect for them and their work. That said, it’s also important to appreciate that they need content, high-value and high-quality stories to maintain their reputations. If you can provide these, you will be as much an asset to them as they will to you.

This symbiotic relationship is the ideal you should be aspiring to. Help them help you.

Do you have questions on how to get media coverage we haven’t answered here? Ask them in the comments section below! Equally, feel free to share your own top tips and success stories with our community of like-minded business readers.