Developing a great pitch is key to earning media exposure for a client. After pitching for the last three terms, the Keap Athletics team has developed a strategy for creating successful pitches.
Writing customized pitches leads to more success in a cold outreach. While conducting sourcing, you need to try to gain as much information as possible to make it seem personalized. What angles of the specific topic does the journalist usually write? What was the recent article they wrote? Getting to know the journalist and their work makes a huge difference because it shows you’ve done your research in a meaningful way so that the topic you’re pitching is relevant and interesting to them. Muckrack is a tool we often utilize while conducting research, which curates journalists’ contact information, published articles, and outlets they contribute to.
Our email pitches for Keap Athletics use the following structure: a few paragraphs including the reason you’re writing the email, the product information you want to pitch and the editor’s guide. Starting with the reason you’re writing the email should be an interesting hook for journalists to continue reading the pitch. The product information will be a few paragraphs to introduce the product, specifically focusing on the unique features of the product. We also include a quote from the past press to add actual product reviews in the email pitch. Lastly, we mention the editor’s guide and let them know that they can claim a sample to try our product.
We mentioned that our account uses editor’s guides to enhance email pitches but what is an editor’s guide? An editor’s guide is a personalized guide that highlights the key aspects of the company you are representing. Information on the editor’s guide typically includes the company’s values, past media coverage, product information, reviews, photos, and videos. It is important to customize each editor’s guide to the reporter and media outlet you are pitching. You can do this by including their company logo and mentioning the company in the header.
Our Keap Athletics account has found great success in response rate by embedding interactive elements to a standard email pitch. Try it out for yourself!