Three Reasons Your Media Relations Strategy Isn’t Working
Industry Trends & News
If you’re finding that your media relations strategy isn’t getting a response, it might be time to reassess your approach.
Journalists receive an overwhelming number of pitches every day—yet 84% say that fewer than 5 pitches make it into stories each week. This means there’s a pretty low success rate.
Before you panic and throw everything you know out the window, here are three reasons that your PR pitching approach might be falling short.
1. Journalists Are Overwhelmed
Journalists work under tight deadlines and face an onslaught of pitches. When asked how many PR pitches they recieve during an average week, 75% said at least 100, and 58% said they recieve more than 250. Let’s be real here, if your pitch isn’t relevant and timely, it’s going to be ignored.
The solution: Keep your pitch simple and concise and provide the information that the journalist actually wants. Don’t forget, they have an audience in mind for everything they write so ultimatley your story needs to be right for that audience.
2. Mass & Generic Pitching
According to Axia PR, journalists have a shockingly low response rate of less than 3% to PR pitches. You put all this effort into a campaign, creating research surveys, sending out FOI requests, just to get no response.
The solution: You have to personalsie. Reusing the same pitch for every target, will not result in journalists paying more attention to the story. Instead, a generic pitch is obvious and will usually mean that your email is deleted before it’s even been read properly.
3. Burnout
Working in PR isn’t for the fainthearted. It’s a high stress job and low response rates, rejection of ideas and high expectations all add to the cycle of frustration. The spray and pray approach of sending mass pitches followed by endless follow-ups and hoping something sticks is pretty unengaging and it’s doing nothing for your team morale.
The solution: Shift to a quality-over-quantity approach. Getting your team to really think carefully about a story and who they should pitch to, means you’ll have colleagues who are far more bought into what they’re pitching.
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