How to get the media to feature your latest thought leadership campaign

You’ve spent months pulling together a great piece of thought leadership. Now it is time to persuade the media that it’s worthy of coverage. Here are some tactics that might help you get the attention it deserves.

First, let’s cover the basics. When planning a media campaign, it is critical to identify the right outlets and the journalists to whom the thought leadership is relevant. Targeting the specific media titles you want to reach is critical because most journalists receive an avalanche of pitches every day and many are irrelevant. It’s surprising how many people still think the ‘spray and pray’ approach to this task will bear fruit.

It is also important to understand the perspective of journalists before you get to work. At any one time, they’ll already be devoting considerable time and attention to what they consider to be the big story of the moment. So anything that sits outside their current focus has to compete with other stories looking to fill space in their publications or media channels.

If your organisation is already prominent, that alone might be enough to scoop press coverage. If not, it will come down to the quality of the thought leadership and the communications campaign.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

On the flip side, the media are always on the lookout for stories and insight that will interest their readership, even if they’re not the lead feature. One way to ensure yours gets noticed is to think of the communications campaign as delivering a package: a story all neatly gift wrapped and ready to go.

Your media release should have: a catchy headline (but don’t make it spammy); a good summary of the research findings (written in a journalistic style so it leads with the ‘big idea’); punchy quotes from key spokespeople; and a concise description of your company. And make it clear to the recipient that interviews with your company’s spokespeople are possible, too. This information makes it easier for journalists to a) decide whether or not your story is of interest, and b) makes it a more straightforward choice to write about than the less well presented alternatives.

Okay. So that’s the basics covered.

Going the extra mile 

Journalists are up against all kinds of deadlines in order to dispatch the latest breaking news to their readers. This is especially the case if they have to keep a website up to date. Online media is a beast that requires constant feeding with new content. Those pressures divert time away from researching and sourcing interviews – this is where you can help.

Often thought leadership involves numerous organisations possibly via collaboration, say, with academia, a trade body or an industry peer(s). In other cases, your own clients or suppliers may be very happy to secure some ‘free’ coverage for their own companies by adding to the conversation in the context of your thought leadership . But this is not about giving them a free ride.

Building credibility 

All journalists are trained, where possible, to have multiple sources quoted in their stories. It gives the article more credibility and is more interesting for the reader and this helps build gravitas around your thought leadership.

If you can offer a journalist a range of spokespeople from different organisations and your pitch is relevant, then you’re in with a higher probability of winning that coverage and getting more column inches. Use it wisely and you might even be in with a chance of turning a news story into a feature because you provided the journalist with several ready-to-go quotes for their articles. Plus you offered them a choice of interview opportunities, saving them time researching and sourcing contacts.

Each to their own

Some websites and smaller media organisations will often republish your media release with little or no editing if it is already written in the style of a journalistic article. A quality outlet is more likely to rewrite the article, though, and will probably require exclusive interviews with your subject matter experts so they can produce something more original for their readership.

Packaging up your campaign and sending it out as a media pack, with multiple interview sources and additional information, takes time and effort on your part. But it could be well worth going the extra mile for if it helps your target media to discover and cover your thought leadership. When I used to advise clients on their media communications strategies I found this approach usually produced the best results.