You’d expect CNBC and Forbes to care when a high-profile company fills a top position. But what about everyday hires at everyday companies?

That’s the topic of our recent essay at PR Week. We featured several small businesses and corporations that generated tremendous marketing and branding outcomes from just doing their work, such as:

• Following the rules
• Being polite
• Hiring staff
• Getting a patent
• Opening a new location

From local headlines and radio shows to trade outlets and even the title of a book, everyday work created new value for these companies. And it can do the same for you.

Read more at PR Week.

Embarrassing, sure. And you probably forgot about it by lunch.

But I bet you’ve never sent a pitch seven years too late to four journalists, including two you just met.

Nope, that rare honor belongs to me. And in the era of gatekeepers getting fed up with bad pitches, it could have resulted in my being put in the bad PR pro corner – and the loss of potential media coverage which could have cost my company client trust and money.

Thankfully, I was able to use humor and humility to save the relationships. Two of the journalists laughed at the mistake along with me, and two of them were working with me on new stories within days.

Here’s how I made it happen.

Quickly own up to your mistakes 

It’s natural to want to duck and run after a big mistake, or to hope that everyone forgets that it happened. But the better way to handle mistakes is to acknowledge them quickly and forthrightly. After all, while media gatekeepers have little time to waste in the era of strained news budgets and fast-moving media cycles, they are also human.

Acknowledging your mistake, especially if you’re doing it proactively, bolsters your credibility. And it helps journalists know that you are not an AI bot – but instead a real person who makes mistakes, corrects them, and laughs along with them at your mistake.

This is especially important in the era of copy-and-paste pitches and platform-based media lists. Being seen as human will build real relationships with the real gatekeepers whose trust is key to securing quality media coverage.

Again, it’s easy to want to hole up and hide from a botched pitch, or to just wait a while before pitching again. But journalists get a LOT of bad pitches, so being proactive can repair a damaged bridge – and perhaps even make the relationship better because you saved the gatekeepers time they intended to spend looking at your pitch.

Have fun with it

I’m generally the most outgoing person in any zip code. Or county. Or state. It means that I’ve made a lot of mistakes that were out for the public to see.

I’ve also learned that most people understand that we all make mistakes. And if you can throw humor into the mix, they’ll probably laugh – not at you, but right along with you.

That’s what I did when I owned up to my mistake. I was also succinct, so as to not further waste anyone’s time. Here’s the email I sent:

I’m an idiot. I somehow missed that the Reuters story is seven years old. I’m going to put myself in the “bad PR pro” corner. I’m sorry for wasting your time with this pitch and follow-up.

It’s not a groveling e-mail, and it doesn’t exaggerate the offense. It’s just a humorous version of Chris Voss’ famous accusation audit – and it takes all the wind out of the offended person’s sails.

Improve 

Everyone knows what makes up a great pitch. Prior to this mistake, our process had four steps:

• Confirm the Three Ts (the right TOPIC at the right TIME from someone with the right TITLE),.

• Determine the outlets that work best for the client/employer narrative and preferred PR style.
• Dig up the gatekeepers at the outlets which are most likely to find value in what you’re  sending.
• Check each gatekeeper’s beat and style to ensure the pitch is as tailored as necessary.

Now, we have a fifth step – review the fine details of the hook. My mistake was trusting that the perfect hook Google showed me was current, because it was near the top of the search’s Page 1. It’s never been a problem before – but it was once, it may become one again, and so we need to get ahead of it so it doesn’t become the gatekeeper’s problem and my clients’ problems.

Your PR advantage – being human

The best PR pitches are those that go to the right person at the right time. But nobody’s perfect, and sometimes you will botch it. I still get pitches despite not having been a regular journalist since 2016.

But nobody is perfect, and we’ve all taken shortcuts when jammed on deadlines. We’ve missed important typos and put the wrong journalist’s name in the pitch.

By being human, you can not just save the relationship – but even improve it.

This piece was originally published by Dustin Siggins at PR Daily.

Dustin showed:

• How overloaded journalists are, with hundreds of e-mails a day.
• The importance of a subject line.
• Why eight words is all you get.
• Why the 3 Ts – the right topic at the right time from someone with the right title – is more important than relationships.
• Different types of subject lines for various media pitches.

Watch Dustin’s full presentation at the video below and read the four-slide PowerPoint here.

“A big media placement is nice. But it’s not going to move the needle on its own,” says James Davis, who puts clients in everything from local radio to USA TODAY. He used to manage crisis communications for the Secretary of Defense; now, he runs a company that specializes in creating valuable connections across industries and in the press.

As Davis puts it, you can’t squeeze all the juice out of your media lemon without having a great marketing strategy.

A single Washington Post article, CNBC appearance or NPR hit is like getting a big contract — it looks and feels good, and it will help. However, it’s just a blip in the life cycle of your business without a supporting strategy and marketing infrastructure.

Done right, press and marketing create far more value together than they can separately. You and your competition likely share many of the same marketing and branding tactics — personal and company LinkedIn accounts, quality websites, and e-mail lists. However, many companies don’t see value in media coverage, so they don’t invest in it. This gives you an opportunity to stand out with prospects and create more leads.

While the competition uses hashtags in short social media posts, you can share deep insights in trusted media. Their social media content will be about them — a clear sales pitch. Yours will lead to your media coverage — a lighter touch that pays long-term trust dividends and may earn more engagement.

For most complex sales, press coverage won’t be the deciding factor for a prospect becoming a client. But it’s one of the many touchpoints that can earn trust before, during and after negotiations.

This piece was originally published by Dustin Siggins at Sales & Marketing Magazine.

Key points included:

• Create your own unique voice. Know what you want to say and how you want to say it.
• Producers want to see that you can handle yourself. Practice, practice, practice – including with small press or your own videos.
• Producers, hosts, and other gatekeepers get hundreds of e-mails a day. Develop a strong pitch that will break through the noise.
• Don’t get distracted during an interview. Stick to three strong points.
• Be kind to yourself. Everyone makes mistakes.
• Have fun. The best moments often come spontaneously.

Watch the full interview immediately below, and a spontaneous clip below that.

That was the thesis of Proven Media Solutions Director of Accounts Robert Kuykendall’s recent essay on entering a new management role. From rising through the ranks to parachuting in from elsewhere, and from team lead to CEO, Robert laid out three principles of effective leadership:

• Get in the trenches.
• Develop well-articulated vision and direction.
• Everything is sales.

Robert’s essay was just one of several pieces our team has published on topics ranging from start-up strategies to right-sizing your life. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed writing them!

Make sure your business is an inch wide & a mile deep, and other leadership lessons I’ve learned — by Dustin Siggins

Team-building principles:

Find people with the right personalities, attitudes, and stages of life to fit the roles we’re filling.

Sometimes, I want someone with a high skill level, but as often, a modest level of skill is offset by everything else.

Our company philosophy surrounding motivation is more organic than anything else.

We pay well, we encourage people to live their lives: the entire team is remote.

We are focused on outcomes instead of punching the clock.

I also try to motivate through a genuine appreciation for the hard work and creativity people bring to the team.

Pay it forward, and other life lessons — by Kelly Ferguson

How one lifestyle change can improve everything:

We as a society have had the “lean in” conversation, the “lean out” conversation, the hustle culture and quiet quitting conversations.

But maybe it’s not about a binary “in or out”; sometimes it just helps to adjust one part of our life to make room for the others.

For example, I recently took a fully remote job that is still fairly fast-paced but gives me more flexibility in my schedule.

I am using that time to exercise and volunteer more at my kids’ school, and rediscover parts of my identity beyond my career.

It’s still hard but for the first time in years, I feel like I am choosing my hard.

Six foundational strategies for start-up entrepreneurs — by Dennis Siggins

Limit the owner’s financial demand on the startup:

One key contributor to new business failure is a high financial demand on the company by the ownership….

A new owner with the discipline to keep his salary low will have a higher percentage of revenue to reinvest in his company.

And an owner who sets legitimate metrics of success before taking a salary increase creates incentives to hit those points, thus driving sales.

Andy and I do not take salaries that reflect our value to the company. Rather, we take salaries that reflect our commitment to the company.

Right-size your life without losing your self-identity — by Kelly Ferguson

You can have it all, but maybe not all at once:

Recently, a working mother, whom I respect deeply, said to me: “Changing jobs is just a choice. If that choice doesn’t work out, you can make a different one.”

When your career is intense and all-consuming, the idea of stepping back may feel as though you’re jumping out of a moving car: once it’s gone, it’s gone, and you have the injuries to remind you what you’re missing.

But I dispute that. Think of these decisions more like an exit ramp to the rest stop: stretch your legs, fill your tank and get back on the road when you’re ready.

Or take a surprise stop to show the kids one of your bucket list mountain views.

5 ways to leverage media coverage to grow your business — by Dustin Siggins

Generate and protect profits:

National brands do have to be very conscious of risk mitigation in the social media era, so I encourage building a trust reservoir before the sharks attack.

This generates trust and business in the short term and reduces business loss during times of crisis.

How to repurpose your content to make a bigger impact — by Dustin Siggins

Same message, different delivery:

Successful 21st century marketing and branding campaigns repurpose high-quality content as often as possible.

Target audiences may miss the initial media article or the ad, but they’ll see your social media post and open your newsletter.

Or they may miss your newsletter but catch your thought leadership at a trusted media outlet.

This requires extra thinking, planning and execution for your content, but it may not require as much effort as it seems to secure multiples on the value of your original content.

The business journal article on your new company acquisition may not be completely the same as what that ends up in your newsletter or on your blog, but they will all be similar.

Your team is simply tweaking the original content for the appropriate mediums and message styles.

 

Thank you for joining us for this series! Before we dive in, can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I was raised in a small town in Northern New Hampshire. I intended to go into the marketing field, but the 2008 recession forced me to consider other options. Instead, I spent a decade in political policy, journalism, and PR before making the transition to the business world.

In your opinion, what separates your agency from others in the space?

We don’t overpromise, we are transparent about how the sausage is made, and we only offer a small number of services.

As a successful business leader, which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?

Three important character traits are:

1. I love helping people tell their stories. I get as excited as they do about helping them craft a message and determine where it can make the biggest impact.
2. I seek new knowledge at all times, so I have been able to quickly accelerate key components of the business to create scalability. This also allows me to be open to constructive criticism.
3. I am very good at receiving, processing, and returning information. This helps create rapport with prospects, ideas with clients, and fast turnaround for client placements.

Wonderful. Let’s now jump into the main part of our interview. If you had a local business, what 3 media strategies would you use to grow your customer base and why?

Securing local earned media is a major challenge in today’s environment. I would use media to grow a customer base by:

1. Dripping out good news of all kinds, from new hires to new offerings to expansion. Large businesses do this very well because they know that local media gatekeepers are desperate for content about which people care. Small businesses can build trust with target audiences with minimal effort by providing these updates to the press.
2. Develop a surround-sound marketing and branding strategy that reuses media coverage for social media, website content, e-newsletters, etc. Almost everyone does this today to some degree — but many businesses do it in a disjointed fashion that creates more work for fewer results.
3. A few times a year, seek bigger press that can be repurposed for local coverage. This is most likely to happen in a regional media outlet or an industry trade outlet.

How about a national brand? What 3 media strategies are typically most effective in generating more business for a national brand?

Frankly, the same strategies apply to national brands as they do to local businesses. National brands do have to be very conscious of risk mitigation in the social media era, so I encourage building a trust reservoir before the sharks attack. This generates trust and business in the short term and reduces business loss during times of crisis.

Would your PR strategy change much if a client is selling a physical product or has a service-based solution? B2C versus B2B? If so, please share an example or two that might demonstrate any differences.

No, the principles of PR and media placements are the same. Every media gatekeeper wants the Three Ts:

1. The right Topic
2. At the right Time
3. From someone with the right Title

If a business is already investing monthly in PR, what other marketing strategies would you recommend they invest in that best complement that work to bring in the most amount of business?

Today’s media environment means that even a big media hit won’t do much for a company’s brand credibility. If you want more than simple brand exposure, invest in a surround-sound marketing & branding strategy to spread content around as widely and effectively as possible.

If someone has already been covered in the media, what are the best next steps after that? What are your “5 Ways To Leverage that Media Coverage To Dramatically Grow Your Business”?

The five ways are:

1. Repurpose your content via your other marketing and branding assets.
2. Use media coverage to secure other media coverage.
3. Show stakeholders your press coverage so they see that you’re building a stronger brand.
4. Get industry press ahead of conferences to turn cold shoulders into warm handshakes at said conferences.
5. Use drip coverage to create momentum for thought leadership. This is a great way for executives to showcase company philosophies, cultures, etc.

One more before we go: If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I would create a network of organizations to help pregnant women in desperate circumstances navigate financial, health, and other challenges during and after pregnancy so they and their children have the best path to fulfill their potential.

Roosevelt’s words came to me earlier this week, when The Messenger’s long-predicted demise became reality. A website once teeming with daily articles and op-eds is now a blank page with an e-mail address. And many of the company’s critics, who correctly predicted that its business and revenue models would fail, are now pouncing.

It’s easy to criticize failure, especially high-profile failure. And in the era of media outlets losing money, downsizing, and closing, a cottage industry has been built on such navel-gazing commentary – from the comfort of couches, with lattes in hand.

The Messenger’s business model clearly was flawed. Critics were right that revenue projections were unreachable and that the revenue model wouldn’t work. Having a large, expensive, and allegedly little-used office in New York City wasn’t a good use of company money. And staff finding out they were laid off via a New York Times article may indicate a poor company culture.

But none of these flaws was exclusive to The Messenger. And much like Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong did in 2018, when he hired hundreds of staffers, The Messenger’s leadership strove, erred, and failed in ways that indicate they genuinely used their time, money, and knowledge to save a dying industry. And, like the Times (which laid off hundreds of staff last month), they eventually had to acknowledge that it simply wasn’t working.

I don’t have any inside knowledge of what happened to The Messenger; I only interacted with two of its opinion staff. But its leadership’s efforts to do big things in a shrinking media era deserve praise, not Monday-morning quarterbacking.

First, they actually tried to do something big. The founder is a former owner of The Hill, and when he made $130 million upon that publication’s sale, it appears that he didn’t retire to an island. Instead, he tried to make a workable model that could break the media norm of layoffs and shutdowns.

One way they broke the norm was by not scrimping on talent. In an era when staff-level work goes to interns (at intern-level pay) and experienced journalists are forced to take smaller and smaller paychecks, The Messenger reportedly paid above-average salaries to very experienced staff, enticing them to work hard and smart for the outlet and its audience.

Lastly, they were genuinely nonpartisan. In the era of media that is increasingly speaking to exclusive audiences – political and otherwise – The Messenger published my clients’ political op-eds, my personal apolitical pieces, and hundreds or thousands of other thoughtful pieces across the political and apolitical spectra.

Look, The Messenger failed. According to some reports, it failed pretty badly. But that shouldn’t be a green light for all the onlookers to pile onto its leadership. They look like the early 20th-century people Roosevelt criticized a century ago, keyboard warriors who jump on MMA fighters who brave the ring, and the navel-gazing media commentariat criticizing Soon-Shiong.

On the contrary, let’s remember the sort of guts it takes to do – or even to try to do – big things in a fearful, shrinking industry like modern media. Not every big endeavor is going to succeed. That was Roosevelt’s point. The Messenger was a “doer of deeds” even as the critical commentariat is cashing out. That calls for respect … or at least a viable alternative from the people so eager to kick a man while he’s down instead of work towards the changes they all say they want to see.

These interactions are accepted across the business world as part of bringing the right people through your sales funnel. They also replicate the same engagement strategy used by your communications team to build trust through positive media coverage. Media gatekeepers such as reporters, editors and producers are the industry’s decision-makers, influencers and blockers. They hold many of the keys to putting your message in front of your target audiences.

“Sales and profits don’t happen by themselves, and neither does good PR,” says Tien Wong, a technology investor and founder of CONNECTpreneur, the world’s largest monthly pitch event. “The right media sources are high-leverage relationships which can help garner a lot of eyeballs for your company.”

But just as you don’t expect to get a sale with your first meeting, you’re not likely to get your message in the press with your first email or phone call. Here’s how to replicate the process that created your sales and marketing success to build a successful, long-term media strategy.

What’s Your Plan?

Most sales happen because of a dedicated business development, cold calling, or marketing and branding plan. Goals are established, a strategy is developed, and an infrastructure is built to execute the strategy.

Your company might use an ad campaign which relies on prospects calling the office, rely on event sponsorship strategy to build relationships with sales leaders, or use digital marketing to bring prospects to your website. Each of these relies heavily on having the right people trained the right way, a long-term financial investment, and technical infrastructure.

Trust-building media coverage is secured the same way. You have to know:

• Which media outlets are most trusted by your target audiences.
• Which messaging styles are most preferred at those outlets.
• Who the most important gatekeepers are at those outlets.
• How to most effectively communicate with those gatekeepers.

Without a plan, you’re just hoping. And that’s a strategy for failure in sales and media.

Build the Right Relationships

A lot of business-to-business sales depend on finding the right entry point. Sometimes it’s the CEO; other times, it’s a department head or division leader. “Challenger Sales” and “Never Split the Difference” make clear that the best salespeople uncover all of the relevant decision-makers and tailor their message to each one.

Securing positive media coverage in the right outlets requires building similar relationships. A reporter might use your quote or cover your event, but it’s the editor who decides if your message and reputation fit the outlet’s needs for the story.

Success comes from finding the right people with whom to build the best relationships, then using your message to provide value to those gatekeepers. Just like in sales, your message must resonate or you’ll never close the deal.

Sales, Profits and Media Coverage Require Cultivation

Todd Rowley, Virginia regional president for Old Dominion National Bank, points out most salespeople have to sell by Friday so they can eat on Monday. But if you aim to close in three, six or 12 months, it changes how you present yourself to potential prospects. You focus more on building relationships and understanding your customer’s needs than negotiating a price on Day One.

It’s not the end of the world when your first pitch to a media gatekeeper falls flat. It’s an opportunity to pursue the relationship. Gatekeepers receive hundreds of emails per day, despite having limited time and space for including outside experts in stories, interviews, and programs. Your media team should take a sales-like approach to following up and maintaining a persistent presence. For example, keep tabs on the outlet or reporter’s content and reach out when you have a story that intersects with the reporter’s likely upcoming content.

Being impatient in sales can mean someone else gets the contract and the commission. Being impatient with the press means someone else is building trust with your prospective customers, partners and investors.

Or, as Wong put it in an email, “It’s important to treat the development of these media sources as if you are tending to a garden. If you nurture these relationships over time, they will bear fruit.”

A version of this piece was originally published by Dustin Siggins at Sales & Marketing Magazine.