How to get a journalist to actually respond to you and your pitch

How to get a journalist to actually respond to you and your pitch

It doesn't matter if you're in business for yourself or you're working for a company, getting a journalist to respond to your pitch is a difficult thing to do if you're new at pitching.  You'll need to refine your pitching techniques in order to get the word out about your new, or old, business model.  Contacting journalists is a great thing to do if you want to get the word out about your new business and build authority quickly. 

Most people will write up a huge amount of letters and emails in order to get their names in front of journalists who can help them out, and they always think "They have my information, now they'll write about me!" which usually doesn't happen according to plan.  Normally, you'll send out a few dozen emails and letter to not get a single response wanting to write up some content about your business or website.  In order to increase the chances of getting someone to call, or email, you back after you send out a wave of letters and emails, you should read though my 5 simple tricks to help increase your journalist conversions.


You need to follow up after your pitch
Think about it, you probably get a dozen emails every day to your inbox and you don't even read all of them.  A journalist gets 300 to 500 emails a day just consisting of people pitching them businesses and ideas to write on so they can get in the publics eye.  How often do you think emails get missed when read just a single time and they journalist moves on?  It's fairly frequent actually, and this is why you need to follow up with the journalists after you send your initial pitch.  I would say if you haven't heard back from the journalist within 3 or 4 days, you should follow up with them. 

After your initial follow up, I would wait a few more days to send a second follow up.  After your second follow up email, you don't want to send any more.  You don't want to send any additional emails to the journalist because they could just ghost your future emails and get them sent directly to their spam box since you're pretty much just annoying them at this point.  If you haven't heard back from them after your initial email and two follow ups, you need to consider that they won't be responding to you.  Don't burn that bridge by constantly emailing them and guaranteeing that you will get sent directly to their spam box, then deleted.


Have a unique pitching angle a journalist isn't use to
Think about it, if you're pitching just like the rest of the emails a journalist gets, you won't see much attention coming your way.  Like I said above, they get 300 to 500 emails a day that consist of pitches, and if you're blending in with the rest of the emails, you're not going to get much of a response.  What you'll need to do is have your own angle that is backed by an emerging trend as well as have some statistics to prove you're going to be the next big thing. 

If you're writing journalists and saying "Hi there!  I'm the best at something!" you won't get a single response because there's no information there.  The journalist needs to know all about you before they do any research to back up your words.  Give them the meat AND potatoes of your business and let them decide if they want to write about your business.


Pitch the right journalist
Journalists are like bloggers, they all write about different things and usually stick within a specific industry.  You won't likely get a response from a journalist who focuses on politics and you're pitching them a health and fitness business.  You need to know a little bit about the journalist, especially what they write about, before you send them your own pitch.

If you're just pitching any journalist out there, you're going to be making a lot more work for yourself than you need to.  Think about it, you'll be pitching 100 journalists and only 10 of them will actually think about writing for you.  That means you're sending out 90 emails that didn't need to be sent becuase they had no chance of getting a response.

You can research the journalists on LinkedIn to make sure they write about your niche and industry.  You can also connect with them and see a lot more details about their profiles, as long as they accept your connection request. 

Do your research, pick the right journalists, and send out the best pitches.


Pitch multiple journalists at the same location
If you have every journalists email in your list that you're going to be contacting, you're likely going to hit a ton of people at the same media outlet.  Again, you'll need to target the right people who will write about you and your business.  Just sending out an email to every journalist you can, spreading a much wider net, will likely annoy people and get you listed as spam.

You're better off sending out emails to journalists who are within the same outlet and also cover your topic, so you're still weeding out a lot of people, but you're still getting your email to the right people.


Media outlets have an editorial calendar they follow
If you've sent out a bunch of emails, to 20 or 30 media outlets and haven't heard anything back yet, you might not be targeting them at the right time of the year.  All media outlets have an editorial calendar and they will only write about certain topics during a specific time of year. 

Look through their posting pattern and you'll be able to figure out the best time to pitch a journalist about your new company.  Sure, you'll have to play a waiting game, but it will be worth it in the long run.  If you don't want to wait, you can always contact the journalists prior to the season and always add in "I understand that this may be outside of your editorial calendar, but I just wanted to get on your radar now instead of when you have a bunch of similar emails populating your inbox" then add in your pitch   After that, you don't really need to follow up with them since they won't write about your anyway.



In Conclusion
What you'll need to do is provide the journalist with valuable information about your company and why they should be writing about you and your company.  You need to pitch an interesting story that the journalist can write in a way that will intrigue their readers, which will boost your authority in the long run.  Getting your journalists to respond is just the first hurdle, if you get them to respond and you have a bad business, they likely won't write about you after they're done doing research.  Be sure you have a good foundation for them to write about before you contact them.



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Thanks!

Razzy