Media Outreach Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide for PR Teams

Media outreach is the process of contacting journalists and other media contacts to get press coverage for a brand, product, or client.

This guide walks through the four-step process we use ourselves at Prezly, from building a contact list to writing pitches that get replies. There's a free template at the end, plus two real pitch examples: one that flops, one that works.

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We've broken down the strategy into four fundamental steps, and we'll walk you through how to create a badass, effective media outreach strategy that will help your brand get superb coverage. This is not a shortcut or way to "hack" the system, because hacks and BS growth tactics are just ways to bypass doing strategy the right way, and that kind of shortcutting got us into this problem in the first place.

These are our best recommendations for creating an effective, evergreen outreach technique to help you do the most important thing: build quality relationships with the media.

The four-step process to a great media outreach strategy:

1. Have a killer contact management system
2. Do your research
3. Reach out like a human being
4. Be ready for follow-up

Let's dive into how to implement this strategy! 🤿

As mentioned earlier, the concept of getting media coverage should not be difficult. You, as a brand or individual, have a story to tell. Reporters and journalists want to tell stories. It seems like a match made in heaven! So, if the recipe for success is there, why is media outlet reach often so difficult? Here are the top reasons media outreach often doesn't land:

We recently asked 200 journalists and comms people what the biggest mistakes tend to be in PR outreach, and one of the biggest mistakes consistently mentioned is not providing value. Thinking of earned media as just free and credible marketing opportunities for your brand is a really good way to pitch a really boring story. Maybe your company or brand doesn't think it's boring, but will the average person?

Say, for example, that you're into table tennis. Like, really into it. You have a special table tennis racket. You watch hours of content. You spend evenings each week dedicated to honing your table tennis craft. Table tennis is not just your hobby, but your passion. You. Love. Table Tennis.

Does your endless love for the hobby make it interesting for others? Maybe.

But no. Absolutely not. You specifically caring about table tennis does not make it a compelling story to anyone else. Wanting to get featured in a publication for your table tennis prowess will be a hard sell because it just isn't that interesting.

This can happen with brands, too. You get so caught up in the ecosystem of your brand that you forget that the average person doesn't care about whatever it is that you do. This is why it's important to think like a journalist and turn your news into a story that other people will give a flying crap about.

Shockingly, some people are riveted by table tennis. They treat it like a real sport and give it the same fervor and attention as something interesting. These people would be the perfect audience for your table tennis story. Should you be featured in Forbes? No, of course not. Never. But Table Tennis Weekly? Absolutely!

This is where the research part of our strategy comes in. It’s not just about finding the right journalist or media outlet, it’s also about making sure you find the right email address so your pitch gets noticed.

How you pitch is almost as important as who you pitch. Making your story captivating is crucial to getting that sweet media coverage. Even if your brand doesn't necessarily have a universal appeal, you can frame it as a compelling human interest piece with the right razzle-dazzle.

So, now we know how to do everything the wrong way. But what about doing media outreach the right way?

You can start the harrowing media outreach process without a contact management system, but you'll really be doing yourself a disservice. Good media outreach is about building relationships. Lacking a cohesive system means you are more likely to spam, send double emails, mix up your contacts, or otherwise make goober mistakes.

This is one of the reasons we have a contact manager built into Prezly. Sure, our users could just manually copy and paste their emails from some gross Excel sheet every time, but we know that a good, robust contact manager is essential to a non-sucky media strategy.

It's a real "measure twice, cut once" situation: doing some legwork and curating your perfect media contact list will save you time, energy, effort, and lost sleep wondering why some random journo who no longer works at Wired isn't messaging you back about your table tennis story.

Don't let the lack of contacts in this image fool you. I have friends.

Bonus points for following your media contacts on social and engaging with their content. It's much easier to send a pitch email when they've seen your name around. Just don't do that weird thing where you go back through their Instagram and accidentally "heart" their picture from 2009. That would be a memorable (but horribly awkward) pitch email to send.

Learn everything you need to know about building and managing a media list.

Alright, now, the fun part: social media stalking. Just kidding, don't do that!

Start creating a list in your contact management system of journos whose niche aligns with yours. They could be folks you've collaborated with previously or simply journalists who have audiences you want to reach. If you think they can help your brand get awareness, get them in that contact management system.

Most good contact management systems will have a way to leave notes, and in this note section, you can include things like articles they've written that you've enjoyed or any pitch ideas that pop up. Another good thing to include is how they want to be contacted according to their social media profiles and any strong preferences or dislikes they have regarding pitching.

Timing matters just as much as who you're pitching. Avoid sending pitches the same week as a major news event in your industry, build in extra lead time around holidays and conference season, and if you're working with an embargo, say so clearly in the subject line and give the journalist enough runway to plan the piece properly.

Read more about the fine art of crafting a quality media list:

• How to build a better PR media list (+ the best tools & template)
• The Pros and Cons of Buying Media Lists

This is the part that many people hate. So buckle in.

In the study we referenced earlier, 21% of participants indicated that mass, generic pitching was a scourge on the industry. Remember, journalists get hundreds and hundreds of pitches every week, and the majority of them are because someone copied and pasted their email from some stupid media list or another.

To differentiate yourself, you have to take the time to make personalized pitches. It would be better to send 15 to 20 highly individualized, well-researched, specific pitches to carefully selected journalists than it would be to BCC 1,000 random reporters to a blah pitch.

There's a delicate balance between "reaching out like a human, and talking in plain, non-jargon language to connect with another human" and "attempting to stalk and manipulate someone by infusing weirdly personal information into a cold-contact email." However, I trust you can navigate the subtle nuance without being a weirdo.

We've written several guides on "how to write non-sucktastic email pitches" if you're interested in learning more:

• A 'Pitching the Press with Email Guide' from a Sales Turned PR Guy
• 5 successful feature story pitch examples (that had stellar results)
• How to write the best press release email pitch

It sounds like your work is done, but it's only beginning. Now that you've enacted your strategy, you just need to wait for that sweet, sweet media coverage to roll in. But really, this is where the work starts. If a journalist happens to have the perfect publication and story for your brand, you have got to be ready to go when they're ready.

Did you promise an interview with the CEO? Make sure her calendar is clear. Did you say you'd get quotes, pictures, or other deliverables? They better be locked-and-loaded. Nothing will damage your credibility with a journalist quite like pitching with the promise of having certain assets available, only to deliver the bad news after they've already brought the idea to their editors. It makes everyone look bad.

Sending pitches isn't the goal. Getting the right coverage is. A few numbers are worth tracking as you go:

• Reply rate: how many of your pitches get any response at all, good or bad. It tells you whether your subject lines and personalization are working before you even get to placements.
• Placement rate and quality: not just how many stories ran, but whether they ran in outlets your actual audience reads, and whether your key messages made it in.
• Share of voice: how your brand's coverage compares to competitors' over the same period. Useful for showing whether outreach is closing a visibility gap or just adding noise.

We built Prezly's coverage tracking because most PR teams have no easy way to answer these questions once a campaign ends. If you're tracking outreach in a spreadsheet today, start with reply rate. It's the simplest number to get, and the fastest to tell you if something in your approach needs to change.

The annoying part of a good media outreach strategy is the fact that you shouldn't really be relying on a template. Ideally, you will individualize your pitch so much that a template is rendered essentially useless to the process. What works for one journalist will not work at all for another, which is why we spent so much time researching.

That said, when your relationship is just starting out, a template can help you get a foot in the door – we built this directory of 200+ free media pitch templates for just that.

And when you're ready to write your own, it helps to identify the key features of a good pitch email:

1. A great headline: Short, snappy, keyworded. They may not need your pitch now, but many journalists archive their pitches and search for them when needed, so keywords are a must
2. A very short pitch: If your pitch is long, you're going to lose them. So keep it short, David Foster Wallace
3. All the assets: Many stories will require some kind of digital asset: high-quality images, sound bytes, or a professional headshot. Sending these straight into the email can be annoying, even when the large file sizes don't get your correspondence immediately chucked into the spam folder.
4. A sign-off with the important bits: Let them know how to contact you along with your name and credentials. Your industry authority is important. If you pitch authoritatively about a topic, but your credentials have absolutely nothing to do with that topic, you may lose coverage

Alrighty, I'd like to introduce you to two separate email pitches loosely based on actual pitches we've received.

So, what differentiates these two? Pitch #1 is all about the writer. It's vague, requires follow-up to even understand what the pitch is about, misspells the recipient's name, and overall has a sassy and unpleasant tone.

Pitch #2 is well-researched, includes assets, has a targeted tone, and is written like a normal human is behind the screen. The emphasis isn't on the brand or their laudable CSR initiatives (though that is mentioned and important). The pitch makes it clear that the piece is environmental and about humans being bros.Conclusion

If you're sending a handful of pitches a month from a spreadsheet, you probably don't need one yet. But once you're managing more than a couple dozen media contacts, coordinating outreach across a small team, or trying to answer the measurement questions above without digging through old emails, a dedicated PR tool starts paying for itself. That's what Prezly does: one place for your media contacts, your pitches, and the coverage results that come out of them.

Take a look at Prezly's PR pitching tool

Media outreach is the act of contacting journalists about a specific story or announcement. Media relations is the broader, ongoing relationship you build with those journalists over time. Good media outreach depends on media relations already existing, or being built as you go.

Fewer than you'd think. A tightly targeted list of 15 to 30 journalists who genuinely cover your beat will outperform a blast to hundreds of generic contacts, and it won't burn the relationships you'll need for your next pitch.

It varies by industry and how targeted your list is, but if fewer than 1 in 10 relevant journalists are replying in any way, that's usually a sign to revisit your targeting or personalization before sending more pitches.

No. Embargoes are useful when you want coordinated coverage across multiple outlets on the same day, like a funding announcement or product launch. For routine news, sending it live and letting journalists cover it on their own schedule works fine, and it's one less thing to manage.

Now that we've discussed creating a stellar media outreach strategy, you're ready to crush it.