Find the story in your business.
Journalists do not cover businesses. They cover stories, and the first job is to find the one hiding in yours. Start with what you know that nobody else does: sales patterns, what customers ask, search behaviour on your site, operational numbers, a market you see from an unusual angle. Then look at who you have: a founder or specialist with real opinions and the willingness to be quoted.
Test each candidate with one question. Would a reader who has never heard of you care about this? "We launched a new range" fails it. "Our data shows which towns are buying the most garden furniture, and it isn't where you would guess" passes it.
If nothing passes yet, that's normal, and it is fixable. Our worked examples show three shapes that stories take, and most businesses can build at least one of them.
Build a data or expert angle.
Stories that earn press coverage usually stand on one of two legs.
Data gives a journalist a finding. It can come from your own records, from public datasets analysed with a fresh question, or from a survey you commission. Make it concrete and comparative: rankings, regional splits, year-on-year change and best-and-worst lists give a news desk a headline without any work. A regional cut is worth extra, because local titles will each cover their own patch. This is the craft of data-led PR.
Expertise gives a journalist a quote. A spokesperson with a clear view, some evidence behind it can be dropped into stories other people are already writing, which is how expert comment earns coverage no data study can reach.
Product angles work too, but they need a hook: new, seasonal, unusual or well-photographed. Rarely all four.
Write a pitch journalists open.
A journalist opens a pitch for the subject line and reads it for the first sentence. Write the subject as the headline you hope to see. Put the finding, not the company, in the first line. Then, in under 150 words, say why it matters now, who you are, and what you can provide: the full data, a spokesperson, images, an exclusive.
A few rules that hold across every desk:
- No attachments; link to the data and a folder of images instead
- One story per email, not a menu
- Write it so a paragraph could be lifted straight into the piece
- Offer a quote that says something, not a brand statement
- Never open with "I hope this finds you well"
If you have a press release, put it in the body below the pitch rather than instead of it. The release carries the detail; the pitch is what gets it read.
Find the right journalists.
Pitch people, not publications. A masthead has hundreds of staff and one of them writes about your subject. Find that one.
Work by beat. Who covers personal finance, property, consumer affairs, your trade? Search recent coverage of your topic and note the bylines. Read what each journalist wrote in the past month, and if your story would not sit naturally beside it, leave them off. Regional desks deserve their own list if your data has a local cut, and trade titles often deliver the most engaged readers of all.
Media databases help with contact details, but the judgement is manual. A list of thirty journalists, each with a sentence in the pitch that shows you have read their work, will outperform five hundred names on a blast, and it won't get your domain blacklisted from inboxes. That patience is most of what media relations means.
Timing, embargoes and the single follow-up.
Send pitches early in the week and mid-morning, once the morning conference is over and before the afternoon fills up. Avoid days when a major story will swallow everything, unless your story is a reaction to it, in which case speed is the whole game. That's the territory of reactive PR, where a prepared comment arriving within the hour beats a perfect one arriving tomorrow.
Embargoes suit bigger data stories. Agreeing a publication time with a handful of journalists lets each prepare a proper piece and lets you land several at once. An exclusive, offered to one title first, can buy a bigger story at the cost of breadth. Choose deliberately, and honour whatever you agree.
Then follow up once. Three working days later, one short reply on the same thread, adding something new: a fresh cut of the data, a sharper quote. If that draws nothing, move on. A second chase costs you the next pitch.
What to do when it lands, and when to hire help.
When a piece runs, say thank you, briefly. Share it. If it mentions you without a link, one polite request is fine; two is not. Note who ran it and what they liked, because the next pitch to that journalist starts warm. Add the coverage to the asset on your site, watch for syndication into other titles, and log every placement with its URL and link attribute so you can see what it did for the pages behind it.
Do it yourself for as long as you have the story, the time and the patience for silence. Hire help when you need volume, when your niche is crowded, or when the pitching keeps slipping behind the day job. That's what a retained programme is for. Our packages run from Starter at £2,500 a month for five placements to Scale at £8,000 for twenty, each batch targeted for completion within 30 to 45 days and billed month to month.