Effective thought leadership content combined with the right audience can mean more sales and leads for your business. But what happens when your target audience is just out of reach? In order to grow your multi-channel traffic using digital content, you may need to move beyond the traditional blog posts and newsletters and expand your efforts to focus on meeting your audience where they are. One initiative in particular has proven to be fool-proof at doing just that: pitching bylined articles to trade publications.
Create a Compelling Media Pitch
Pitches have to tell an intriguing story and still be incredibly concise. The average journalist or editor receives hundreds of pitches each week, on top of the normal flow of email traffic and junk mail. For Light Polymers, one of our tech-industry clients focused on innovating digital displays in mobile phones, we timed our media pitch around the release of the iPhone X, the first Apple device employing OLED.
To grab an editor’s attention and get them to read a pitch, much less accept one, you need to focus on capturing their attention and keeping them engaged until the very end. No matter how compelling your story may be, it is absolutely useless if the pitch is never read. The subject of the email is often the first and only part of the email consumed. If the subject does not compel the editor to open the email, the pitch inside will never be considered.
For our client, we started with this subject line:
The subject my have been engaging, but the work isn’t over yet. Once you get the editor to open your email, 500 words of content and explanation will likely never get read. After the introduction, the first sentence of the email is crucial. It should describe why the story is important to the industry and interesting to the publication’s readers. Even with the best media pitch, only a fraction of editors will read it, like it, and need it. Without all three, even the world’s most compelling pitch won’t land.
Developing a list of a publication’s editors and journalists that have published work in or about your sector gives you a repository of contacts to pitch. You may have to shop a piece to dozens of editors before getting the ‘bite’ you are looking for.
Maintain Your Position
Once a piece lands and publishes, you have cause to celebrate! Landing a byline is a great achievement. Good byline content reaches a wide audience and can generate leads, brand recognition and drive site and social traffic. After choosing the most appropriate media contacts and sharing our media pitch, Light Polymers’ story was picked up by popular UK-based publication V3 — Check out the full article and learn more about crafting the perfect pitch!
The work isn’t over though. To deliver a steady stream of published thought leadership content you must be continually developing and pitching stories. As more internal developments become newsworthy, supplementing bylines with press releases and internal content delivers the key exposure every company needs.