Tees for Change tees in Shape Magazine - Image courtesy of Tees for Change
If your PR strategy is to write a press release and send it out to the media in hopes of gaining new customers for your product or service, it’s time to stop that right now! Press releases no longer work.
I know this because when I started my eco-friendly t-shirt company, Tees for Change, four years ago, I spent almost $500 to hire an online service to write a press release and distribute it to “tens of thousands of journalists.” And then I sat and waited for the media to call me and for customers to start buying.
When that didn’t happen, I assumed it was because the press release was sent out on a Friday and who really works on Fridays anyway? So I waited another month and this time I hired someone to write a press release for me and decided to distribute it through a very popular PR service (on a Tuesday), at a cost of almost $500 again. I got one response – a journalist who wanted a free sample. I sent her the sample and never heard from her again despite my attempts to follow up numerous times.
Has this happened to you, too?
And then I tried something different. I purchased access to a media list and made a list of targeted reporters and editors who were working on holiday gift guides for their respective magazines. I then looked through some past magazines and realized that each magazine had a different angle to their holiday gift guides:
- gifts that give back
- gifts under $50
- eco-friendly gifts
- gifts for parents
- last-minute gifts
- inspirational gifts, etc.
I created a story (also known as a pitch in the media world) around my t-shirts and contacted the editors, this time individually, pitching two of my t-shirts as “gifts that give back.” And, to my surprise, over 20 editors wrote back and said that they were interested in covering my t-shirts in their holiday gift guides. Not all of them actually ended up featuring the t-shirts (some dropped them last minute, some featured them in a later issue and some changed their mind), but I made over $20,o00 in sales from being mentioned in their holiday gift guides that year!
I repeated the same pitch the following year and got my shirts mentioned in even more magazines. And then I realized that I could do this throughout the year: great gift for Mother’s or Father’s Day or gift guides, perfect gift for Valentine’s Day, eco-friendly products for their April issue (when many magazines celebrate Earth Day), products that make a difference, tees that plant trees (I planted a tree for each tee I sold and the media loved this).
So if you want more press for your products, stop spending your money on press releases. There’s definitely a time and a place for having a press release (usually after the media is interested in your story), but the press release no longer works as the main way to get press for your products. The media wants specific story ideas and launching a Spring line for your clothing or adding 10 more types of soaps to your health and beauty line is not a story.
To get specific story ideas, look through the last few issues of the magazine that you want to get your products featured in and make a list of the topics they cover. Then see if your products would fit in any of those stories and craft your next pitch around that.
Also, check out the magazine’s Editorial Calendar (which is usually found in the Advertising section of the magazine’s website or you can Google Glamour Magazine + Editorial Calendar, for example) and see if your products will make a good fit for any of their upcoming stories. Keep in mind that magazines work 4-6 months in advance, so if you are pitching a story for their holiday gift guides, for example, you’ll need to pitch it in June, July or August.
So here’s what I want you to do right now:
- Make a list of 10-15 magazines/blogs/TV shows, etc. that you want your products to be featured in in the next 6-12 months
- Check out the current issue of each magazine (you can do so at Barnes & Noble for free) and make a list of topics that each magazine covers that could be a great fit for your products
- Find and download each magazine’s editorial calendar
- Make a list of the contact information for the appropriate editor that you’re going to contact at each magazine
- Come up with a story idea for each magazine
- Email each editor with your story idea and don’t forget to follow up a week later (and then two weeks later)
If you follow the steps above, you’ll be on your way to getting more press coverage for your products!
If you’ve had a similar experience with press releases, I’d love to hear about it. Leave your comments below.
{ 13 comments }
This is brilliant Andrea. Thank you so much! I rarely have luck with press releases either and newspapers will sometimes print my press release and I do not hear about it till weeks later ( and not through sales!). Pitching a relevant story about your product is ideal – more of interest, I would think, to both the reporter and reader.
The test, Heather, is whether every employee in your organization would be inspired by the release BEFORE you take time to send it to your regular list.
The test works for every other product out of the organization. If it doesn’t pass employee value, it won’t pass for anyone else. And I don’t need to echo Andrea that sending anything generic will fail whereas personalization always matters.
Andrea this was a great article. I will definitely take your advice and let you know about my results.
Thanks for sharing!
Audrey
This is great advice! Thank you for this.
Andrea,
Thanks for the great article. It is really hard to get the press to write about your product or company. I haven’t had much success in getting the editors to write back or even read my pitches. I will let you know if I have more success following your advice.
I love this advice because it is so specific in the ideas for pitching. My pitches have clearly been to general. I found mastheads.org to be useful.
Thank you.
This article demonstrates how thoughtful you are of others. Thank you for sharing your story. I love it. Where there is a will there is a way.
This is great!!!! Cant wait to start my new press action plan. Thanks for posting.
What online companies did you use? I took journalism and PR in school, and we are taught to do targeted releases rather than a mass mail. There are some times that a mass mail out is effective if it is hard news but for a product like yours I would think that most would do a targeted release.
Either way, it is wonderful that you have found a way to pitch your product to the press! Congrats on your success and thank you for sharing.
I loved you post. You’ve made some great points. I’m going to work on implementing someone of them for my business. Great post!
Thank you so much for sharing! This definitely gives me a place to start when promoting my business. Very excited about a new angle!
Great idea on standing out in a clear and succinct way!
Hi Andreea! I love this idea! We always hear that stories sell, so I can imagine how this method could be more successful. Thanks for caring enough to share these steps. I plan to put them into action!
Roz
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