Welcome back! Last week we shared the first five of our top ten editorial tactics for enhancing newsworthiness. And here with are with a next instalment.
Remember that not all stories or media concepts start with ground-breaking news value. However there are some simple tricks of the trade that can help you boost the media appeal and newsworthiness of your stories and media pitches.
With that said, here’s another five tried and tested PR tactics that you could consider. But before you get started, remember that not all of them will be relevant to your business or story. Consider what’s best suited to you story, what will best suit that angle that you’re taking and what will ultimately help you achieve your goals.
Leverage Pop Culture: What is popular culture? Think celebrities, actors, musicians and sports people – sometimes even reality TV stars. Monitor what’s happening in this space and consider if and how it could be relevant to your business. For example, are you a beauty expert who can comment on the latest celebrity beauty trend? Are you a divorce or family lawyer who can provide insight into the latest celebrity break up or prenuptial agreement. Perhaps you’re even a fashion expert who can demonstrate how to create the hottest celebrity looks on a budget.
Celeb Appeal: Engaging a high-profile ambassador with media appeal will often garner great results and media exposure. However, it also comes with a cost. Before you go down this route, do your sums and consider return on investment to determine if this is a viable approach for your business.
Owned Data: The media loves numbers as they’re a great way to demonstrate consumer behaviour and to help tell a business story. Consider your business and whether your owned insights or customer purchase behaviour can help shape an interesting news angle. Is it sales trends? Is it a newfound interest or significant spike in a new product or service? Is it how people are using a particular product or service? If you can demonstrate a trend that different or unique, and widespread enough, it might just pique the media’s interest!
News You Can Use: As the name suggests, this is providing expertise and information which educates and empowers the audience or reader to be able to do something themselves. To execute, it can be effective to leverage current news or trends and offer expert tips and tricks which help to further inform the audience. For example, you might be a chef or restaurant owner who can share recipes and cooking tips. You might be a fitness expert that can share simple at-home workouts. Whatever your expertise, consider how you can package this up to be relevant and interesting to the media outlet and useful to its audience.
News Generation: Another tactic employed by many PR agencies, often those representing major brands, is to literally generate news when it otherwise doesn’t exist. They do this by commissioning consumer research to unearth insights that reflect consumer behaviours and attitudes. This can be a costly approach which is why it’s usually employed by major brands – but it absolutely does work. For more information on how to execute a News Generation campaign, click here.
Understanding your target media is essential to developing an effective media and editorial strategy. Before you do anything, familiarise yourself with the outlet, the stories and the content they feature and then consider how your business can support their editorial strategy. From there, you’ll be able to determine which editorial tactics can best bring your story to life. For best results, incorporate multiple tactics.
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