Preparing for a PR Campaign

Congrats and thank you for hiring The Media Whisperer to help get you in the news.

Here’s what you need to know to make the PR campaign experience as seamless as possible:

We write our pitch emails in the voice/from the POV of the client. In other words, we serve as your ghostwriter. We do this for one simple reason: It works better. Multiple a/b test expierments we conducted a few years ago definiteively showed much higher interview request rates and article placement rates for pitches written in the voice of the client than in our voice. We will also create email accounts in your name and with your profile picture. (But if you insist on having us write in our voice, we will do it.)
As stated on our pricing page, we automatically forward all journalist responses to your inbox. You are thus responsible for replying to journalists and setting up interviews (if they request an interview). We do this because it saves you money, and it’s a straightforward task that requires no special training. If you’d like us to arrange interviews, we will charge our hourly rate. Of course, no matter what, you are required to actually do the interview.
When a journalist replies to our pitch with an interview request (or written questions) we reccomend you reply as soon as possible (within seconds or minutes ideally). Otherwise, the journalist might get distracted with another story, and you may never recapture their attention.
The first step of the campaign involves Michael or a Senior Publicist interviewing you by phone or zoom. During this interview we will pepper you with dozens of questions about your business, organization, cause and your life story. With that said, our clients typically do the vast majority of the talking on these calls. We want you to feel confortable sharing as much information and detail as possible, because that gives us enough material to write a compelling PR pitch email. Of course, you will get to read the pitch and make any edits you’d like before it gets seen by a single journalist.
Our goal when we write the PR pitch email is not to tell a story that will compel people to buy from your business, use your service, donate to your cause, or vote for you on Election Day. Instead, our mission is far more narrow: To convince the typical journalist at a mainstream media outlet (like an online publication, newspaper, magazine, TV station, or podcast) to open our email, read at least a few sentences, and reply requesting to speak with you. Journalists, unlike the average consumer, are narrowly focused on one thing: A good story that hasn’t been told elswhere. It also helps if that story has a beginning, middle, and end and features a likeable protagonist who has overcome advertisity to achieve something impressive. In other words, because journalists are not fixated on promoting a business or a cause, an effective PR pitch email doesn’t blatantly promote a business or cause. Instead, it tells a great story that subtly shines a light on a business or cause’s strengths.
After we’ve written the first draft of our PR pitch, we will need to hop on a phone call with you for about 1 minute (at most 5 minutes) to explain why we wrote it the way we did. This is critical, so that you aren’t taken by surprise by the pitch and then request edits that make the pitch substantially less compelling.
In addition, after we’ve given you the first draft of our PR pitch, you will be able to request edits or edit yourself. With that said, we charge by the hour, and we need as much time as possible to build your media list. So if you are fixated on what should be included in the PR pitch, and how it should be written, please tell us before we begin writing.
After we’ve written the pitch email and built the media list, but before we begin pitching journalists, we need about 15 to 30 minutes to hop on a video call with you to setup email auto-forwarding and filtering. This allows you to directly receive emails from journalists in your primary inbox (not your spam folder) and to reply as soon as possible.
We typically send your pitch email to at least 1,000 journalists. We do our best in the time we have to make sure every journalist will be at least somewhat interested in your story. But occasionally we make a mistake and pitch a journalist who covers an entirely different subject area (i.e. we pitch a medical story to a sports reporter, or a story about a Michigan pet store to an Italian journalist who covers music). We also may pitch journalists who want to cover your company, but who you do not want to cover your company.
At the bottom of almost every pitch we send, there is a link to the journalist’s Muck Rack portfolio. When a journalist replies to our pitch, just scroll the bottom of the email thread and click on that Muck Rack link to see their writing portfolio. Alternatively, if you can google the journalist’s name you should be able to find their previous reporting.
Other journalists who aren’t interested in covering your story may take the time to share an email or name of a colleague who you can contact. It is your responsibility, not ours, to contact that journalist. All you have to do is copy and paste the pitch we have written (which will be at the bottom of the email thread the journalist is replying to) into a new email draft and send it to the email address the journalist shared. IF the journalist simply gives you the name of their colleague (without sharing their email address) you can ask them for the email address. Alternartively, we are happy to find the email address for you, if it’s in our database.
There is a certain portion of journalists, arund 5% to 10%, who have their “Out of Office” messages on when we pitch them. You do not need to forward these messages to us. We have AI technology that marks these “Out of Office” replies down, and automatically schedules a follow-up email to go out 15 days later, in addition to a 2nd follow-up that will go out approximately 3 days after the first follow-up. With that said, many journalists who have set “Out of Office” message will still see your email even if they are not working.