How to Write a PR Pitch That Gets Noticed – Not Ignored

Imagine walking up to someone on the street, telling them your life story, and then asking them for $50. Do you think they’d respond by pulling out their wallets? Or is it more likely they’d back away slowly, trying not to make eye contact?

It’s a pretty obvious answer, but most people don’t realize that the PR pitches they’re sending essentially do the same thing. They share a lot of crap that nobody cares about – and then they have the audacity to ask the recipient to do them a favor.

To make matters worse, thousands of other companies are doing the same thing, day in, day out. While there are no definitive statistics on the sheer number of press releases being dispatched every day, PR Daily estimated that the three largest distributors – PR Newswire, BusinessWire and Marketwire – sent about 642,000 in 2013. That’s almost 1,800 a day.

Trust me, it’s bad out there. 

On a personal level, I get sent about 100 PR pitches a day. They all really suck, and they’re all freaking annoying. So no wonder that more than 90% of outreach emails never receive a response. 

That’s bad news for most people, but it’s good news for those of you who are motivated. If you’re willing to do things a little differently, there’s a lot you can do to write a PR release that actually gets you social mentions and gets your story told.

By the way, most people use email for all their work communication. They might hop on LinkedIn or Twitter from time to time, but the inbox is their HQ. So before any of the tips below are going to work, you need to do a few things:

• Make a List – Define all the contacts you’re going to reach out to. And include as much information about them as possible such as their company, role, and of course email address. Speaking of which:
• Use Tools to Get Their Email Address – Searching for emails the manual way is inefficient. You’ll save yourself a ton of time by using an email finder to do the job for you, like Voila Norbert.

Without further ado, here’s how to create a great PR pitch.

#1. Keep it short

Repeat after me: no one needs more than 3-4 sentences to explain what they do – which is why it’s so frustrating when messages like this fill up my inbox:

A press release isn’t an epic saga, charting everything from the origins of your company to the last person you hired. Treat it instead as an elevator pitch for your latest product, service, or campaign.

If you’re currently sending 1,500-word pitches (which nobody is reading, by the way), cutting back to just 3-4 sentences can sound impossible. But if you can’t boil your message down to 100 or so words, it’s probably too complex (or vague, or just plain unnewsworthy). 

Think of it this way: you don’t need to propose marriage on the first date. All you need to do – on the date and in your email – is get someone interested in taking the next step with you.

Go back and look at your current pitch. Print it out, if it’s easier to hack apart that way. Now, cross out any words or sentences that aren’t explicitly necessary to getting someone to move forward with you. You probably need fewer sentences to do that than you think.

#2. Improve your subject lines

So you’ve already worked at distilling the core message of your press release down to a few (short) sentences.

Now, how about challenging yourself to tell the story in your subject line?

It might sound difficult. If you’re treating press releases as glorified advertorials rather than newsworthy statements, you’ll probably find it all but impossible. But trust me, it works.

This approach is supported by data. Longer subject lines generate significantly higher response rates than shorter ones. In fact, subject lines of 36-50 characters – the optimum length – perform 33% better than those with just 1-15 characters.

Why do longer subject lines perform better? 

It’s likely because they give the sender the opportunity to more fully describe the content of their email. The recipient knows what to expect, so there’s a much better chance of them responding if they do choose to open it.

#3. Send from the right address

I know you paid big bucks for your PR Newswire subscription or to hire a PR consultant. But guess what? If they send me pitches instead of you, that’s an immediate sign that I should ignore your email.

It’s simple, really. When I get an email that’s obviously a PR pitch, I know that the only intent is to get me to do something. It’s an unsolicited attempt to sell me something – nothing more, nothing less. But when the message comes from you, personally – and it’s clear you’ve done your homework about who I am and what I’m into – that’s when I’m most likely to want to learn more.

(Oh, and to make matters worse, over 50% of journalists rarely or never use newswires. There’s almost always a better way to spend your marketing dollars.)

#4. Make it topical and relevant to the recipient

Don’t take this blog post to mean you should email me about a press release. I probably don’t care. 

Maybe I’d pay attention if you emailed me about marketing, but most of the pitches I get are about the companies entrepreneurs have launched or how much they’ve raised. All you need to do is take a quick look at my blog and my social profiles to see that I don’t cover content like that.

Case in point:

If you did even the barest bones of research, you’d see from my Facebook profile that I’m into racing motorcycles. Or you’d see on Twitter or my website that I like to go skydiving. If you emailed me and said anything about skydiving or motorcycles, you’ve at least got my attention, and you’ve got 2-3 seconds to tell me what your pitch is about.

I’ve spoken plenty about how personalized email campaigns will help you drive sales and win more leads. But personalization works just as well from a PR perspective.

In a study of 12 million press outreach emails, Backlinko and Pitchbox discovered that simply personalizing your subject lines can deliver a 30% upturn in response rates. What’s more, personalizing the body copy of your messages increases response rate by 33%.

But personalization doesn’t necessarily mean spending hours composing each message – that’s clearly not going to deliver ROI. You don’t need to write up a full profile on the people you’re trying to reach. Just take two minutes to:

• Skim through their most recent blog posts
• See where they publish outside of their website (and what topics they cover)
• Check out their social profiles
• See who they’re connected to on LinkedIn
• Figure out their conversational style when communicating with others

Doing this shouldn’t take much time, but it’s a vital part of being able to personalize your PR pitches appropriately.

#5. Don’t BCC

If you’re doing proper personalization, you shouldn’t ever be using BCC anyways, because the same pitch shouldn’t apply to multiple people at once.

But no matter what the circumstances, don’t BCC people. It’s pure, utter laziness, and it’s immediately clear what you’re doing. Recipients are able to see that their name is in the BCC field, and they’re going to automatically know that you’ve emailed your pitch to a bunch of other people at the same time.

Here’s what it looks like on my end:

That’s the opposite of making me feel special. It’s like walking into a busy bar and yelling that you want someone to buy you a drink. Chances are I wouldn’t just buy a random person a drink anyway – but I definitely wouldn’t if you haven’t even taken the time to ask me personally. 

Really, you should be using Mailshake or a similar tool when sending PR pitches. But even if you’re not, do yourself a favor and send separate emails to different individuals so that the BCC field is unnecessary.

#6. Get their attention on social media first

We’ve known for a while that cold selling doesn’t work, whether you’re talking about cold calling sales prospects or reaching out to possible PR leads. 

In fact, research out of the Keller Research Center at Baylor University found that cold calling can have a success rate as low as 0.3%. Cold emails get an average response rate of just 1% – not that much higher than the 0.1% average success rate of phishing attacks

Those two stats make pretty depressing reading. But the solution isn’t to give up. In the context of PR, it’s to make sure you’re never reaching out to a cold prospect in the first place.

The way you do that is by getting the attention of the people you plan to send pitches to on social media first. Maybe you:

• Share content they’ve created with your audience
• Email a “thanks” when you enjoy something they’ve created
• Comment on their blog posts
• Add your insights to their work via comment or standalone post
• Interact with them on social media
• Send them a compliment

I get a lot fewer tweets than I do emails. So if you tweet me something like, “Hey, I just emailed you about a crazy idea,” you might just catch me in a conversational mood.

But it’s not about me. It’s about the person you’re reaching out to. Pay attention to the channels where they’re most active. If they’re most active on LinkedIn, reach out on LinkedIn. Just remember the rules above. Sending them a compliment doesn’t mean you get to send them a 1,500-word pitch at the same time. It’s still too big of an ask.

#7. Focus on building a relationship

If you follow the tips I shared above, you’ll already be light-years ahead of the people out there spamming junk PR pitches. But take it one step further. Don’t just try to warm up your leads with a little basic research. Actually try to build relationships with the people you’re reaching out to.

If a decent PR pitch from someone I don’t know comes my way, I might pay attention to it. But if a request comes through from someone that’s in my network, I’m going to drop everything and see how I can help.

You don’t get there by liking a few of someone’s tweets or sharing a few of their blog posts (although that’s how a lot of my relationships have started out). Finding mutual common ground – maybe you’re into the same hobbies or grew up in the same area – isn’t enough either.

The best way I know of to build relationships is to find something you can do to help that person, and start there. Don’t ask for something first, and don’t make a surface-level offer (or worse, suggest something that benefits you more than the person you’re trying to connect with). Find something you can offer that’s genuinely valuable, and take it from there.

This won’t work in all circumstances. Not everyone is looking to expand their network, and some people won’t be interested in the value you provide. But the more you invest in building genuine, mutually-beneficial relationships, the less you’ll have to worry about getting your PR pitch noticed in the future.

8. Follow Up Without Being a Menace

The harsh reality is that even if you do everything right on your initial outreach, they still might not accept your PR pitch. According to Salesforce, it takes about 7 touches to convert a marketing lead.

I know, I know…a PR pitch is not a “sale” in the typical sense. We’re asking them to buy our product. But it is a sale in terms of them buying in on our idea. Now, I’m not suggesting you send the contact 7 emails.

But set an amount in advance that you’re willing to follow up before moving on. Whether it’s 2 or 5 or 7…get a system in place beforehand so that you don’t procrastinate.

And as far as not being a menace goes, make sure that your followup messages are different. Many reputable writing companies, such as the Essay Writing Service, claim that you should be changing up your pitch each time. Find a new angle, a new lead, a new reason they should write a press release about you. Which leads us to the next tip:

9. Find the Fresh

You have to stand out, pure and simple. When your prospect is receiving an ungodly amount of pitches, they’re already trained to dismiss almost all of them right off the bat.

So how do you cut through the noise? By finding the fresh. This means communicating the most interesting angle of your pitch and leading with it. Here are some ways to find the fresh angle:

• New – Just launched your product, or even your company? Even a recently added feature is a good start, as long as it’s new.
• Romantic – Have a really cool origin story? Do you source your product components from a remote island? Use it in your pitch.
• Shocking – If you made 20 of the top CEOs in your industry’s jaws drop…that’s headline material.
• First – If you have the first ever software, food, or any other product, journalists will want the scoop.

People want to publish press releases about interesting businesses and topics. That’s what drives engagement, clicks, and revenue. Always keep that in mind.

10. The Don’ts

The final tip is actually two tips — and they involve what not to do. More specifically, here are two ways you should not reach out to a reporter.

• Don’t Call – It’s not 2001 anymore. You don’t like cold calling. I don’t like cold calling. And reporters don’t like getting cold calls. And at least 66% of journalists don’t like it when you call them either.

• Don’t Use Twitter – Again, Twitter is simply not a “professional” or official business communication tool for most people. Sure, they might post content…but nobody wants to be stuck with 30 back-and-forth Twitter DMs that they have to switch out of their email to check. An exception is if the reporter explicitly states that they prefer pitches via Twitter.

In short, leave your outreach pitch to email whenever possible. It goes hand in hand with relationship building and not being annoying. And it will improve your success rate.

Got another tip to add to this list? Leave me a note below with your best suggestions, then check out these other great resources on PR pitches: