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 experiments we conducted a few years ago definitively 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 recommend 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 another 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. 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.
This is not a press release service (though we can publish a press release if you’re interested). All of the PR pitch emails that we distribute to journalists are private and not published online. If a journalist ends up publishing a story about you, they will almost always setup an interview with you beforehand. Therefore we do not need to tell your life story in the PR pitch email. Rather, we need to whet journalists’ appetite juuust enough to compel them to arrange an interview with you; if we overwhelm journalists with information, they may get confused and/or bored and not request an interview. Consequently, if it is not particuarly newsworthy, it is best to withhold details from the pitch regardless of how much you want to share them - because you can still share those details after the journalist schedules an interview, which will take place on a phone or zoom call and typically lasts at least 15 minutes, if not 30 minutes or more. (But journalists occasionally quote directly from our pitch emails when they write their stories, so it’s important not to make anything up in the pitch emails).
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. It’s important to note that we charge by the hour, and will need as much time as possible to build your media list after we’ve finished writing the pitch. 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.
Like many, many other PR agencies, we run mass cold email campaigns to contact journalists. Anytime you contact hundreds or thousands of people who you do not have a relationship with, it is highly likely a certain percentage of your emails will end up in spam folders. We make every effort to reduce the likelihood of our pitch emails going to spam (efforts we are happy to elaborate on if you ask) but many of our pitch emails still go to spam (we have no way of knowing how many).
Due to limitations with our mass-email tool, we cannot easily or quickly pause emails by media outlet. Here’s what this means for you: If a journalist from a media outlet replies to our pitch email with a request to interview you, we cannot easily or quickly pause the outgoing pitch emails to the other journalists at that media outlet (We typically contact a dozen or more journalists at one outlet; for larger outlets we may pitch 100+ journalists). Consequently, before, during, or after the journalist interviews you, another journalist from the same media outlet may also express interest in interviewing you. This could cause confusion among the two (or more) journalists; in one instance, it resulted in two major media outlets backing out of running a story about our client. There are 3 solutions to this problem: Option 1: Do nothing, since it’s rare for this to cause problems. Option 2: We can manually pause outreach journalist-by-journalist for a given outlet. For example, if a New York Times journalist requests an interview, and there are 100 other New York Times journalists in our media list, we can pause all outgoing emails to those 100 journalists (and re-start them if necessary). We would bill you at our $150/hour rate. It typically takes us just a few seconds to pause emails to a single journalist; but if there are 100 journalists we need to pause (an extreme example) it could take us 5 to 15 minutes. Most likely, we would only need to do this a handful of times during a campaign, so at most you’d maybe pay $300. Option 3: We can use a different sending tool that allows us to quickly and easily pause emails by media outlet. The fee for this varies, but would likely be between $240 and $360.
If you want to learn more about a journalist who replies to our PR pitch with an interview request, you can google their name (which will be in the original pitch email in the thread the journalist is replying to) and the media outlet they work for (which is also typically in the original pitch email the journalist is replying to). You can also email us and we will send you the journalist’s Muck Rack profile page, which has information about their past journalism work.
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, around 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. Still, many journalists who have set “Out of Office” message will still see your email even if they are not working.
If one of our campaigns leads to a media placement, we cannot gurantee the article/podcast notes/video notes will include a backlink to your company/organization/cause’s website. If one of our campaigns leads to a media placement, you have two options to boost the chances of getting a backlink: Ask the journalist for the backlink before the media placement is published/broadcast, or ask for the backlink after the media placement is published/broadcast.