Media relations are often confused with Lakeland public relations. It’s important to distinguish the two because both are equally relevant to your public relations strategy.
The media plays a huge role in a successful public relations strategy, and it’s important that you know how to catch their attention with your press releases.
One big problem that some PR firms have with the media is that media outlets are usually bombarded with dozens of press releases and it’s difficult for them to determine with stories to run.
Because of this, PR firms have to be very careful in how they draft their press releases to the media in order to catch their attention. Here are some great ways to catch the attention of the media with your pitches.
Relevance
Of course, the number one thing that you have to look out for when pitching a story to media outlets is the relevance of your story. If you’re writing about something that happened 10 years ago, people aren’t going to care about it unless it made a significant impact on your local community and it’s the anniversary of the event.
Not many people care about past events. Make sure that you pitch a story that is highly relevant if you want to be noticed. As much as possible, it helps if you’re one of the first stories on an important event.
Impact
Your story will have more significance to the media if you show them how your story makes an impact on the readers themselves. You can talk about practically anything, but the stories that garner the most attention are the stories that tell readers how something is going to affect them.
If you’re going to be pitching a story like this, you have to make sure that you fact check everything that you write. It’s one thing to talk about something that affects the readers, but it’s a whole different story if you’re going to be creating a clickbait style story just to get attention.
Local interest
Local stories fare better than international ones, especially if you’re hoping to capture the interest of the local community. After all, people can get information about national current events through national channels. But if they need to know about something that’s happening locally, who better to tell them than a local?
It may seem tempting to pitch a national story because of the potential to a wider demographic, but unless you’re on the scene of the event or are a nationally known company, it’s best to still to a smaller demographic where you’re more likely to garner local interest.
