3 reasons you shouldn't buy a media database (and what you can do instead)

Google the words “PR software” and you’ll instantly be bombarded with a plethora of businesses promising you an always up-to-date database of media contacts, jam-packed with relevant journalists across all regions of the world, across all sectors, who are all sat staring wide-eyed at their email just waiting for your pitch. 

It sounds perfect – a solution to all of PR’s problems! There’s only one problem… such a thing does not exist. I repeat,

There is no such thing as an evergreen media database.

With how much people in the media are moving around these days, the task of keeping a mammoth database like this up to date is simply impossible, no matter the number of “researchers” such companies throw at it. Little wonder then that 20–50% of pitches sent to these bought contacts never even make it to their inbox, while those that do garner little engagement from journalists.

If you’ve ever paid for one of these services before, I’m sure you’ll be the first to tell me, yes Jesse, of course these media lists overpromise – but I have deadlines and it’s not like anyone else is suggesting a better solution.

And that, my friend, is where you’d be mistaken. You see, you’ve never met Prezly.

Read on to find out why paying for a media database may not be the best option, and how you can use an audience research tool like SparkToro to build a better media list.

Mid-level journalists get around 150 emails a day. To keep moderately sane, they have strict criteria to help them scan through their mailbox rapidly. What’s the subject line? Who is the email from? Do I know this person? Have I worked with them before?

Can I trust them not to waste my time?

Bought media lists work directly against this principle. In fact, a bought media list becomes less effective each time it’s used.

Every sale means another PR team vying for that journalist’s attention, and the journalist’s inbox count spirals from 150 to 200, 250, 300 – an endless stream of unread emails from people who, more likely than not, didn’t even bother to check whether their story fits with that journalist’s audience. 

More people buying means more pitches, more pitches means less attention can be spent on each email delivered. It’s not like journalists are getting more time in a day. In fact, it’s the contrary: fewer journalists are now responsible for delivering more news. So please, do them a favour and help stop the spamming.

Cision vs Meltwater vs Prezly: Which One Is Better? [2024]

We put all three to the test, so you can see which has the right strengths to fit your needs.

To be honest, there’s a lot of confusion around this since there are no precedents to go off. GDPR has a pretty fluffy exception titled “Legitimate Interest” under which all this selling of personal information is being justified. But this is much like lying by omission: even if the rules can technically be bent to excuse it, in your heart you know you have your hand in the cookie jar. 

Make no mistake, whenever you buy a database of media contacts, you are getting someone’s personal information without that person ever giving you their consent. It doesn’t matter if it’s their work email or work phone number, GDPR doesn’t make any distinction; it’s still personal information. 

Ask your vendor about how they got consent from the journalist to process and re-sell their personal information and see what they come up with. Most of them even state in their policies that it’s your job to receive consent first before you can start emailing them. Yes, you read that right – before you can send your pitch, they tell you to ask the journalist for permission to contact them. Can you imagine how that would work? Neither can we.

Sending a generic email to someone out of the blue is rarely a good starting point unless you’ve actually researched that person and can come up with a relevant pitch. But when you spend time researching a person and crafting your personalised pitch to fit their niche, contacting him (or finding a way to) isn’t the hard part. 

Writers will often publicly mention on their social media channels how they like to be pitched, even sharing the correct email address where pitches need to land. Next to that, it’s pretty easy to connect with someone on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram – and simply DM your pitch to the journalist.

And if you’re willing to put in the effort to make sure your pitch is a great fit for that journalist, then why are you wasting money on buying a media list in the first place? 

Getting the contact details isn’t the hard part – finding the fit is. (Though we can recommend a few cheat codes 👀 ). It’s tempting to think that buying a list of media contacts is your shortcut to greater coverage, but the truth is that there are no shortcuts. You’re going to end up putting in the hours researching whatever path you choose. Make those hours count and use them to forge relationships that last. Let us help.

Ok, so you’ve decided that you’re done buying media lists. Where does that leave you?

Answer: SparkToro.

When comparing to conventional media database sources like Cision, which is estimated to set you back $5,700–$6,000 per year, SparkToro comes in at an absolute steal, with plans starting at $50/month (and a limited free plan available).

More than that, SparkToro gives you access to all publishers and creators online, from news sites to YouTubers to podcasts.

All the people who actually influence how people see your brand.

Everyone you need for modern PR.

So why isn’t everybody using SparkToro to build their media lists?

Partly it’s an awareness issue, since SparkToro is marketed as an audience discovery platform rather than a dedicated media database, but in 2024 that’s just semantics – PR isn’t just about media relations anymore.

Secondly, because SparkToro isn’t only built for PR, it can be hard to know how to start using it.

Hence, the below guide: follow the process in each step to start using SparkToro, and decide for yourself whether it works for you. (And if afterwards you want to share your experience, get in touch and we’ll add it to this guide!)

Here’s how you can use SparkToro to build a modern media list for your PR strategy.

As you go through the below research steps, use SparkToro’s list builder to collect the outlets you find most promising. That way, once you’re done, you’ll be able to export that info into a CSV that you can import into your contact management system and start doing your PR outreach.

You can create as many lists as you want, which is great for PR agencies working with a lot of clients, and enrich every result with the details you need to do further research and pitch those people – email addresses, social links, all that good stuff. Rand Fishkin, one of the founders of SparkToro, does a great job of recapping how SparkToro lists work.

Now, let’s find out how we can populate those lists.

Getting featured in Horse & Hound magazine is pretty much pointless if your audience is made up of foodies.

In order to get meaningful, effective coverage, you need to do three things:

1. Understand your product
2. Know the audience that would love your product
3. Identify how you can get in front of that audience

SparkToro can help you find a plethora of options for #3.

The way it works is simple: SparkToro looks at the people who already love your product (for example, those who visit your page), and spits out a list of other accounts that those people follow organised by volume.

Basically, we’re working on the assumption that people who follow those same accounts would be a reasonable fit for your brand. Of course, this assumption isn’t without its problems – for example, the audience of a huge organisation like the BBC will be too broad for targeting purposes – but going through this list manually will help you pick out some more niche opportunities further down.

But I don’t have any clients (yet)

If your brand is brand new or has only just now discovered the internet, then do the above using your closest competitor. (Remember, your competitor isn’t any brand that does the same thing that you do – it’s a brand that solves the problem you solve for your audience.)

No, I don’t mean job titles like “journalist” or “editor” or, god forbid, “screamfluencer” (this might not be a real thing). Remember, SparkToro is an audience research tool, so we’re always thinking in terms of the ultimate audience that you want to reach.

For that, you’ll need to consult your brand’s customer database and fish out the job titles that belong to your best customers – people who love what you do, your biggest fans. That might be a different to the most common job title among your customer base; that’s fine, you can try this with both.

Switch the SparkToro filter to “uses these words in their bio” and use the job titles there.

What you’ll get is a list of outlets and social accounts that people with those job titles frequent – i.e. places where you can get your brand seen by people just like your best customers.

You can do the same thing for interests or other labels the people you’re looking for are likely to have in their bio.

This is what the “searches for the keyword” search option is for. Use it to find the people and outlets that had a hot take on an industry issue and use that as an angle to follow up.

This is also a great way of identifying trendsetters in the public narrative, who can help you stay updated in the industry – especially useful when working with a new client – and who you can approach for content collaborations, product trials, interview opportunities, and so on.

The outlets you pitch don’t care about what your news means to you; they care about what it means to their audience.

For your pitch to land, you need to be able to convince the person you’re pitching to that your story is going to resonate with their readers/watchers/listeners. Here’s a way to do that.

Take the URL of the outlet you’re researching and copy-paste it into SparkToro’s “visits the website” search.

This will give you a list of sites, podcasts, social channels that the audience of your ideal outlet loves. Why is that useful?

Because you now have an angle.

If it turns out that a lot of the people reading Spin Sucks also listen to the Social Media Marketing podcast, then you can see how your news connects to social media marketing. When you pitch a writer at Spin Sucks, share your research – say look, I’m not just guessing here, I’ve done the legwork and here’s how my story is going to resonate with your audience on a whole new level.

It’s also great for content creation ideas, since you’ll be able to see what topics this audience searches for and work on addressing those queries, either as part of your pitch angle, or for creating owned content.

Remember to note down details like this in your CRM using contact notes or tags and segments, so that your whole team can benefit and use that information to target your pitches in future.

We already mentioned above that any search results you get in SparkToro can be added to an internal list and exported as a CSV file. That’s incredibly useful, since all you have to do then is take that CSV and upload it into your PR CRM software.

You could do that straightaway, but I would recommend reviewing your CSV at this stage for any additional information you want to include, such as contact tags.

If you aren’t already using a PR CRM to manage your contacts, you can test drive Prezly absolutely free for two weeks and see what a difference it makes to your pitching.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: PR is more than media relations. So many businesses don’t understand that, and it can be massively frustrating for PR agencies to have to spend half their time convincing c-suite otherwise.

These contacts touch everything:

• Media pitches
• Influencer sponsorship
• Guest posts and contributions
• Subreddits to engage with
• SEO backlinks
• Interview opportunities (videos, podcasts)
• Advertising and advertorial

It all depends on your PR strategy and how the responsibilities in your workplace are divvied up – but that’s a topic for another article.

Instead of buying off the rack, curate your media lists and invest your time into building relationships

That’s literally what we designed Prezly to help you do. Our system helps you manage the contacts you’ve already invested time in researching. Our CRM then makes the job of keeping them up to date so, so much easier. 

Get a complete overview of your team’s comms with each contact, figures around their engagement with your content, how often they visit your newsroom. Find out immediately if an email bounces, or if there are duplicates in your address book. Send campaigns, deliver pitches, track and report on coverage, with branded multimedia centres that will never overload anyone’s inbox. We can help you do all that and more with virtually no input from your tech team.

Your time is valuable; make it count.