Press Outreach: How to Craft a Winning Strategy15 min read

Press outreach is about developing valuable relationships with media to build publicity for your company and product.

How do you craft a solid press outreach strategy to boost your link-building efforts?

That’s what we explore in our guide. Specifically, we look at

• the types of press outreach
• its benefits for link building
• the process and best practices for designing a press outreach strategy

Let’s get right to it!

TL;DR

• Press outreach involves connecting with media entities like journalists, editors, bloggers, and influencers to promote a company.
• Media relations is all about creating and maintaining relationships with the media, so you can get your brand or client some press coverage.
• Public affairs focuses on an organization’s relationship with influential individuals in government, civil service, and trade associations.
• Employee relations aims to establish and maintain a positive relationship between an organization and its employees.
• Crisis communications is about protecting an organization’s reputation during a crisis by managing it and providing timely updates.
• Media relations involves building relationships with reporters and media outlets to spread your company’s story. It’s particularly useful for link-building.
• Press outreach can help build high-quality backlinks, enhance brand visibility, and distribute content across multiple platforms. It can also increase trust and credibility, lead to partnership opportunities, and result in social media shares.
• Crafting a successful press outreach strategy involves defining your audience, researching and building a media list, creating an engaging subject line and pitch, and executing your plan.
• When crafting your strategy, adopt the mindset of a journalist or reader by asking relevant questions, focusing on key information, eliminating unnecessary details, and verifying facts.
• Utilize pre-header text in your email outreach to boost open rates, which can increase by up to 30%.
• While the open rate is significant, it should not be the sole measure of a campaign’s success.
• Incorporate small, bite-sized pieces of content or “microcontent”, like social media posts or short videos, in your outreach strategy.
• Time your outreach appropriately to ensure relevance and increase chances of engagement.
• Strive for unique pitches that offer fresh angles or new information, avoiding stories that have already received extensive media coverage
• Consider phone calls for press outreach as they offer a more personal and direct communication route, fostering stronger relationships with reporters.
• Avoid attaching files in your outreach emails as they may never be delivered to your audience and get you blacklisted for spamming.
• BacklinkManager is a link-building tool that helps you monitor the status of your links and manage link exchanges.
• If you want to see how it works, why not sign up and start using it now?

What is Press Outreach?

Press outreach is a form of PR that focuses on connecting with the media, such as journalists, editors, bloggers, and social media influencers, to spread the word about a company.

The goal of PR outreach is to get a business, product, or service more exposure by connecting with the right people and outlets. It can help boost a company’s influence, visibility, and reputation, while also raising brand awareness.

And it can help you build quality backlinks!

Types of Press Outreach

We specialize in four key areas of press outreach: media relations, public affairs, employee relations, and crisis communications.

Public Affairs

Public affairs is all about an organization’s relationship with people in influential positions, like those in government, civil service, and trade associations.

You can use it to engage with government officials to advocate for your company’s interests, lobby for legislation that benefits you, and build relationships with trade associations to promote industry-specific issues.

Employee Relations

Employee relations is all about creating and maintaining a positive relationship between an organization and its employees.

It’s important for companies to prioritize employee relations when it comes to PR outreach because it helps to foster a positive image of the organization among its employees.

This can lead to increased loyalty, engagement, and even word-of-mouth marketing, all of which can result in higher productivity.

Crisis Communications

Crisis communications is all about helping organizations protect their reputations when they’re facing a crisis.

It’s about recognizing the crisis, managing it, and keeping people up-to-date with timely updates.

Examples of crises that require crisis communications include natural disasters, product recalls, data breaches, and any scandals involving company executives.

Media Relations

Media relations is all about creating and nurturing relationships with reporters and media outlets to get the word out about your company’s story.

It involves building strong relationships with media outlets, targeting specific journalists, crafting compelling media angles, and creating successful PR outreach plans. It’s all about finding the right people to talk to and getting your message out there.

This is the kind of press outreach that you can leverage for link-building.

How can press outreach help your link-building efforts

Press outreach, when done correctly, can be a powerful tool in building high-quality backlinks to your website. Here are a few ways a media outreach campaign can help with link-building:

1. Quality Backlinks: Journalists and news outlets often have high-authority websites. When they publish a story about your business and link back to your website, it’s a high-quality backlink that can significantly improve your website’s SEO.
2. Brand Visibility: media coverage helps in getting your brand in front of new audiences. When more people become aware of your brand, there’s a higher chance that they will link to your content in their own blog posts, social media posts, and other channels.
3. Content Distribution: Press releases or news stories about your company can be syndicated across multiple platforms, leading to more backlinks. When you distribute press releases through major wire services, your release can end up on hundreds of websites, all linking back to you.
4. Trust and Credibility: Being featured in the press increases your credibility. This can lead to more organic backlinks as other sites will be more willing to link to a reputable source.
5. Partnership Opportunities: Press outreach can lead to partnerships with other businesses or influencers, who may then link back to your site in their content.
6. Social Media Shares: Press outreach often leads to social media shares. While social media links don’t have the same SEO impact as a direct backlink, they still contribute to increased visibility, which can indirectly lead to more backlinks.

How To Create A Winning Press Outreach Strategy

Crafting a successful media outreach plan involves a few steps:

• defining your audience and goals,
• researching your target audience,
• building your media list and collecting contact information,
• coming up with a media angle,
• understanding the difference between a press release and a pitch,
• writing an engaging subject line,
• crafting your pitch, and
• executing your plan.

Let’s check them out, one by one.

Step 1: Define Your Audience & Goals

To determine who our target audience is, we should consider the type of content we’re creating, the type of people we’re trying to reach, and our overall objectives.

We should then set meaningful goals that are clear and defined, measurable, achievable, pertinent, and with a timeline attached. This way, we can focus on what’s important and make sure that we’re achieving our desired results.

Step 2: Research Your Target Audience

Doing research on the target audience is key to a successful press outreach strategy.

It helps us figure out which media outlets to reach out to and how to craft the perfect pitch that will capture their attention.

Step 3: Build Your Media List

A media list is basically a compilation of the most important media outlets and relevant publications related to a particular business or industry, so it’s essential to think carefully about which ones you want to include.

Doing a web search with keywords related to your business’s area of expertise is the first step in creating a media list. It’s time to figure out which websites, blogs, and online channels are the go-to places for media influencers who post content similar to yours.

Once you’ve identified the publications and content creators that are relevant to your message, it’s time to make a list of the platforms and journalists you’ll be reaching out to!

You can also create an online newsroom and invite media contacts to follow it, as it can be a great way to engage with journalists and get your message out there.

Step 4: Collect Contact Information

If you’re looking for contact details for media contacts, industry associations, trade publications, social media, and company websites are great places to start.

Additionally, there are several handy tools available that can help you track down email addresses, like Hunter.io or Clearbit.

Step 5: Come Up With A Media Angle

Media angles are the key details that make a story worth reading.

It’s essential to think about how the journalist’s readership can connect with your story when crafting a media angle.

To craft an attention-grabbing media angle, try connecting your story to what’s going on in the world right now, focusing on a special part of your story, and making sure your angle is relevant to the journalist’s area of expertise.

Step 6: Understand The Difference Between Press Releases & Pitch

Press releases are official announcements put out to the media and beyond, while pitch emails are more of a personalized approach, crafted to catch the attention of specific journalists.

A pitch email, on the other hand, is a short email sent to journalists and editors to show them how your story is relevant to their past work and how it can benefit their readers.

It’s the latter that is more useful for link-building.

Step 7: Write An Engaging Subject Line

Crafting a compelling subject line for your PR outreach emails is essential because it’s the first thing people will see when your message pops up in their inbox. It could make or break whether they open it or not.

When it comes to subject lines, you want to make sure you’re grabbing the reader’s attention. Try to come up with something catchy or customize it to the recipient.

Avoid using generic two-word phrases like “Story Idea” – you want to stand out! Try asking a thought-provoking question, presenting an intriguing statistic, or even suggesting a headline for a story.

Step 8: Craft Your Pitch

Crafting a quality pitch email is essential for successful media outreach so make sure it’s top-notch.

How?

• provide all the details about your company or product they need right away,
• include the media angle,
• personalize your media pitches to build a stronger connection with journalists and bloggers, especially when using PR outreach email templates,
• keep it concise and direct, and use keywords such as media outreach plan.

Step 9: Execute Your Plan

Wrapping it all up is executing your outreach campaign – the final step to make sure your plan is a success.

To ensure your outreach campaign is successful, submit your PR pitches to relevant content producers and keep tabs on who you sent the pitch to, the status of the media pitch, when it’s due to be completed, and any extra notes or links that are relevant.

If you’re not getting any responses from journalists, it could be because they’re too busy or they don’t think the timing is right. The best thing to do is to take a long-term approach to PR and not expect immediate results.

Tips For Crafting A Winning Press Outreach Strategy

Now that we know how to design a press or PR outreach campaign, let’s look at a few pro tips that will help you achieve your goals.

Think Like A Journalist Or Reader

Thinking like a journalist or reader involves asking the right questions, starting with the most important information, cutting out unnecessary details, and double-checking facts.

In other words, it’s all about delivering a great story that readers can trust.

To do this,

• focus on telling a story,
• answer the 5 Ws and an H,
• make sure the most important info is up top (the inverted pyramid),
• cut out any unnecessary details,
• keep it concise,
• show and tell, and
• double-check your facts.

Have An Eye-Catching Text

Pre-header text is an important element of email outreach and it can boost open rates by up to 30%, making it an essential part of crafting a winning press outreach strategy.

To make sure your pre-header text is as effective as possible, focus on being emotionally engaging, personalized, and delivering on what it promises.

Surprise your readers and show them how the content can help them. Tap into their pain points, have a clear call to action, and communicate your core values.

Open Rate Is Not Everything

When it comes to press outreach, relying solely on open rate isn’t the best idea, as it can be misleading and doesn’t necessarily reflect the success of the campaign.

Apart from the open rate, you should also be tracking email deliverability and gauging the impact your content has on your audience.

The content of an outreach email can have a huge impact on its success – it’s what will determine whether the recipient will actually engage with the email and take action.

Include Micro Content

Micro-content is a great way to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to press outreach.

What’s micro-content?

Microcontent refers to small, bite-sized pieces of content that can be consumed quickly and easily. It is designed to deliver a clear message or idea in a concise format.

Microcontent comes in many forms and can be used across various digital platforms. Some examples of microcontent include:

Basically, it’s bt

• social media posts,
• short videos,
• infographics,
• images, memes, and GIFs

The goal of microcontent is to capture the audience’s attention, engage them, and often encourage them to take some action, like clicking a link, sharing the content, or making a purchase.

Timing is key when it comes to press outreach.

If your pitch isn’t timely and relevant to the current climate, it’s unlikely to be given a second glance.

If you’re looking to get published in print media, the sweet spot is about a month before your desired publication date.

For digital media outlets, the lead times can vary widely. Some bloggers might only need a few days’ notice, while others might prefer a week or two. Industry-specific outlets can function as magazines or news sites, depending on their publishing frequency.

Avoid “Me Too” Pitches

A me-too pitch is a story that has already been covered by the media, and it can be a real turn-off to reporters.

Instead, keep the reporters on your radar for future opportunities or at least make your story stand out.

To make your pitch stand out, do your research and come up with a fresh angle or new information.

Phone Calls Are More Effective

Phone calls are the go-to for press outreach.

Research has revealed that they result in more successful outcomes than emails. Phone calls are more personal and direct than email or other forms of communication, and they provide the opportunity to build stronger relationships with reporters and increase your chances of getting a response.

Don’t Attach Files In The Email

Attaching files in email outreach is not recommended.

This can give off an untrustworthy vibe and can also cause issues with getting your emails delivered and maintaining a good sender reputation.

It’s much better to include key content in the email body Additionally, it’s important to make sure that you are sending emails from the same email address to ensure that your messages are reaching their intended recipients.

Best tools for press outreach

To wrap up, let’s look at a few tools that will help you design and coordinate your press outreach campaigns.

Prowly

Prowly is software for Media Relations and PR professionals that offers a variety of features to assist with press outreach efforts.

Its features include:

• Media Database to identify relevant media contacts for your outreach campaign.
• CRM Features to manage and track your interactions with journalists and other media contacts.
• Press Release Creator to create visually engaging press releases that include images, videos, and other interactive content.
• Brand Journal to give journalists easy access to your press releases, news, blog posts, and other content.
• Email Pitching to send personalized email pitches directly to your media contacts.
• PR Analytics to help you measure the effectiveness of your PR campaigns.

Here’s an example of how you could use Prowly to design and execute your press outreach strategy:

1. Identify relevant media contacts in Prowly’s database and add them to your contact list.
2. Use the CRM features to keep track of your communication with each contact.
3. Craft a compelling press release using Prowly’s press release creator and publish it in your brand journal.
4. Send personalized email pitches to your media contacts, linking back to the press release in your brand journal.
5. Monitor the open rates and click-through rates of your emails to understand which contacts are most engaged.
6. Refine your outreach strategy based on the insights you gather from Prowly’s analytics.

BacklinkManager

If the goal of your press outreach campaigns is link-building, you will need a tool for tracking and monitoring your website’s links. That’s where BacklinkManager enters.

Its link-monitoring features allow you to:

• track links and receive automated status updates,
• get notifications about link status changes (do-follow, no-follow, page not found, link removed),
• track how many links you’ve built to reach your targets.

On top of that, BacklinkManager offers functionality for managing link exchanges, so that you can:

• share link-building targets with partners via sharable partnerships,
• easily send link requests from specific pages on your partners’ domains,
• receive status updates on link exchanges,
• keep score with each link exchange partner – both in terms of link quantity and quality (average DR of linking domains),
• track the average DR of websites you get links from.

Conclusion

Press outreach is an effective strategy to generate interest in your content, help you drive traffic to your website, secure backlinks and increase your page authority.

Crafting a successful press outreach strategy involves defining your audience and goals, researching your target audience, and building a media list. Most importantly, it requires creating compelling and engaging outreach emails.

If you want to see how BacklinkManager can help you stay on top of your link-building efforts, book the demo!