How Founders Can Win Media Coverage for Zero Cost
Top 3 DIY tactics, according to a former BBC journalist turned media relations troubleshooter
I sifted at least 100,000 story pitches when I worked on the main planning desks for BBC News (radio, tv, and online) and its investigative show Panorama. Since 2010, I’ve worked as a media relations troubleshooter for some of the world’s leading organizations (NHS, HERE Technologies, Virgin). I’ve both reported on and landed big stories.
I discovered that most businesses genuinely have no idea how to collaborate with journalists because little insight is ever shared into the media’s processes. Businesses can only make guesses based on their own processes or what they see journalists doing in films and tv dramas. The problem is that none of that matches what really happens inside newsrooms.
For any business to scale, it’s vital to gain positive media exposure and its independent endorsement.
As leading venture capital investor in tech Eileen Burbidge MBE writes in the foreword to my new book, Exposure: ‘Seeking out media coverage may seem a vanity project. However, what’s needed to help develop a stronger talent pipeline or customer acquisition funnel is, in fact, media coverage and establishing the company’s position as a thought leader, expert and innovator in its field.’
Many entrepreneurs don’t have the resources or skills to ‘cut through the noise.’ But thanks to the rise of online platforms which share live media requests (e.g., Lightbulb, HARO, ResponseSource), there’s no better time for business founders and leaders to generate their own coverage.
They just need the right insights and tools to pitch successfully.
So here are the top 3 things you can do yourself to get media coverage:
1. Start with clarity about what you want to gain
Working with journalists can be time-consuming and risky. They are under no obligation to share with you what they plan to write about you and your business. Nor do they have to correct any mistakes. Or even let you know they’ve covered you!
There is so much in the media relations process, the process for getting unpaid news coverage, that is out of your control. That’s what makes it ultimately valuable as an independent third-party endorsement.
You want to enter this process with an awareness of the risks and opportunities.
So here is a quick exercise to help you gain clarity about what you want to gain from media coverage, to help you figure out if you want to make the investment of your time and take the risk:
Imagine yourself visiting a news source you respect and use or is valued by the people you most want to reach.
Now imagine there’s a fantastic story on it about your business, quoting you accurately.
Now think about the reader of that story, the person you are trying to stand out to. What do you want them to do after reading that story? What action do you want them to take? For example, do you want them to contact you about investment opportunities? Or apply for a job? Or become a customer?
Look at your business growth strategy — what are the goals and targets you’ve set for your business? What do you want most and when?
Create a list of ‘calls to action’, giving you what you want to get out of media coverage. Get realistic with this list. Are these all priorities? Do you have time to deal with journalists at all these points?
Journalists are almost always interested in you when you are busiest because this is when you are most likely doing something ‘new’, and of course, news is about the new. (More on this on #2 below).
Why does this starting point matter so much for founders?
When I was a journalist, I would be astounded and infuriated by organisations that would send me press releases only for the CEO to be unavailable when I made interview requests. This would make me very wary of working with them both then and in the future.
News is made by teams, and journalists almost always have to repitch your pitch several times — to news meetings, editors and through handovers — for it to get the chance to be taken on as a story. For this reason, journalists are very risk-averse, and a CEO unavailable to answer questions on their own story is a huge red flag.
On the other side of the pitch, as a media relations strategist, I have been surprised by clients who hire me, but when I ask, ‘what do you want to get out of media coverage in line with your business strategy,’ display freeze, fight or flight responses. Frequently they say, ‘we want quick wins’.
But I have also been hired as a firefighter to help a business cope with the fallout of a ‘quick win’ gone very wrong.
One of the worst things that can happen to a business is getting extensive media coverage for something it doesn’t actually do. You may have heard of ‘anchoring bias,’ which occurs when people rely too much on the first information they find when making decisions.
If you get lots of media coverage positioning you as edtech when you are fintech, and education is one of the smaller sectors you serve, you’ve got a problem. Your ‘quick win’ can skew the whole direction of travel for your business and how you want to grow it.
2. Do you have a story?
Next, think about the story you want to pitch, which best fits your calls to action. Everything is possible with storytelling and media relations, so don’t waste your valuable time and energy prioritizing a story you like the sound of, or somebody has suggested, but which doesn’t fit with your calls to action. Be very clear about what you want to get from your exposure, and then retrofit your story.
However… You do need a story that works for journalists. They are very unlikely to care about helping you grow your business and making money. The ‘currency’ they do care about is if you have a story that will make them valued by their audiences.
So, there are two tests of what makes a story that all journalists apply, regardless of where they work. And these are:
- Is this new?
- Does this affect a lot of people (out of the audience I write for)?
You need to apply these two tests to your own story ideas.
A common situation I’ve encountered is being brought in to help a client win media coverage for a specific campaign that isn’t gaining the traction or momentum it was designed to deliver.
What I discover is buckets of enthusiasm for the campaign, the new thing in the client’s world, but unless you’re a household name, this is usually doomed to failure or, at best, off-centre and meagre exposure.
This is because the client’s campaign is contextless, as is their passion for it, which they’ve splashed all over the homepage of their website. Perhaps they’ve even created a campaign logo completely different to their own business logo.
What they’ve done is buried their core and largely unknown identity within their campaign. This makes journalists avoid the story because they find it too confusing as they can’t get clarity on the source and the full significance of the campaign or they get the story wrong, muddling the business up with its campaign.
Businesses usually, not always, understand the logic behind why they’re doing a specific campaign and spend a lot of time working it through to reach delivery. This can make them completely unaware that all that logic needs to be unpacked, but very quickly for journalists at the point of engaging them in the campaign. Not just the purpose of the campaign, but how this purpose fits that of the whole business.
If your business particularly wants to hold some very targeted community events to warm up a few people to grow a very specific project with you, do it! It’s powerful and meaningful to start at grassroots.
But don’t go out to the media with this focus. Not even local media. You need to give them the much bigger picture — what’s new about this on the largest scale, and ultimately the trend, the impact that you’re working towards.
You need to give them your business first, then the campaign. You tell them the story of how you’ve set yourself a target of turning every disused phone box in the UK into an information point for homeless people because your business is founded to ultimately end homelessness. Then you can get into the detail of what you’re doing in one city.
This way round, your campaign is a pilot, a case study in a much bigger story.
Journalists LOVE stories that evidence not just the new but also new trends, because that affects even more people.
3. Always use a press release
Always introduce your story to any journalist with a press release.
Briefly, a press release is an official statement of some information you wish to share via the media.
Once you share this release with the media, you have little to zero control over how it is used. However, what you do have control over is what you put out there in the first place.
If you can give journalists this information quickly and clearly, they are far more likely to understand your story and cover it accurately. In some cases, they may even cut and paste part of your press release, effectively getting your own words about your own business out into the world.
It’s critical to include a section title About [insert name of your business] at the bottom of your release, which gives a straightforward description of your business in around 50 words.
That way, you position yourself as a source. Trustworthy sources are fundamental to journalists who are time-poor and risk-averse, so only follow up stories with sources that look like they understand themselves and fit the story they are telling.
For further advice, including a media relations toolkit with actionable templates for press releases and articulating business descriptions, scripts for pitching and cheat sheets to find journalists, get my book Exposure: Insider Secrets to Make Your Business a Go-To Authority for Journalists
