How to get media coverage for your business [including email screenshots]

By: Arik Marmorstein, Spectroomz founder

Spectroomz lets you and your team hire an online researcher so you can both focus on where your skills are most impactful AND get data-driven decisions.

In this post I’ll share how to get media coverage for your business or startup in 4 steps.

I’ll share the email screenshots that got me on TechCrunch, FastCompany and more and will teach you how to do public relations.

While I used this process to get media coverage for my startup and projects (see Bits on FastCompany, RefreshBox on TechCrunch, SonyaBot on VentureBeat, BlingChat on EliteDaily), you can follow it to get media coverage for your events too.

Skip to the email screenshots

Tip for startups

PR takes time. From my experience, these days it’s harder to get significant media coverage. If five years ago an investment round of $1M was significant, today it is far less appealing (think more > $4M). If getting backed by Y Combinator was a reason to cover your startup, today it’s not enough.

Consider this when you decide to do your own PR. If you have the capital and a strong recommendation of a PR freelancer or agency (effective ones are hard to find), you should consider outsourcing your PR. If you don’t have one of those, do it yourself.

1) Find the relevant media outlets

Choose the outlets you pitch to in accordance with your goal.

If you have an epilepsy seizure alert product and you want customers, you should approach outlets parents to kids with epilepsy read.

If you want to hire new developers, pitch to a tech magazine.

When you pitch to big outlets (for example TechCrunch), there is a chance the article will be syndicated to other outlets as well so you can expand your reach.

You probably know your market so at least you have some idea about the relevant outlets. You can expand the list by using SimilarWeb or tools like Sparktoro.

SimilarWeb can also help you understand to some extent how much traffic the outlet have and where does the traffic come from geographically.

You should also Google the relevant keywords for your company and see what publications you find.

Finally, if you are looking to gain users, and you already have early adopters, talk to them. Ask them where they read news about your domain.

When we pitched Bits, an app for short comedy videos (RIP), our goal was to get more actors and comedians to create content on the app.

We talked with some of our early adopters (who were actors and comedians) and they suggested FastCompany, Complex magazine and Vulture.

We pitched to additional outlets, but these three were our main focus.

2) Find the relevant reporters

Once you find the outlets, make a list of relevant writers in each one and prioritize them.

Start by searching for relevant keywords on the outlet itself (with Bits I searched the for Comedy, Vine, New App, and more).

See who wrote related articles, and check out all the articles written by such writer. You don’t have to read them, just understand how relevant are they to you.

The writer's relevance isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum. Make a spreadsheet and score the writers’ relevance.

For example, when pitching RefreshBox (content curation platform) to Sarah Perez of TechCrunch, I noticed she had written about content curation and that she writes a lot about consumer products.

When pitching Bits to KC Ifeanyi of FastCompany I noticed he tends to write about entertainment and pop culture, but sometimes about tech as well. That intersection was my way in.

When you research the different reporters, check out their Twitter as well, it would give you a good sense of what they care about NOW (Again, SparkToro can help here as well), and sometimes they might even write that they are looking to talk to someone like you (that requires luck though).

Don’t check just the tweets but also the tweets & replies.

3) How to find the journalist’s email 

You have several ways to do that:

1. It might be available on the writer's page in the media outlet (click on their name).

2. Their Twitter bio.

3. Use EmailHunter (free)

4. Install Clearbit’s chrome extension.

5. Use your common sense (firstName@CompanyDomain and other common options).

Tip 1: If you type an email address in Gmail, hover it and check out if you see 4 blue icons below (near the “ add to contacts”). If you don’t, it’s not likely the email (but it could be).

Tip 2: In some cases, the Twitter handle is also the prefix of the email.

This is the most time-consuming phase because you need to adjust the email to the angle that would most likely appeal to the writer.

This requires research, and Twitter becomes handy here.

However, there are some rules which are applicable to most writers:

They get tons of emails! So try to be concise.

Lose the marketing talk, especially in the subject line. I mean, it needs to be interesting, different.

But it doesn’t need to be something in the nature of “the most innovative app you’ll see this year” or “the next billion-dollar company”. They get plenty of those.

Some writers will write in their Twitter bio or pinned tweet how they like to be pitched. Josh Constantine of TechCrunch is a good example. I reached out to him twice before I used his preferred template, to which he responded.

Below are some of the emails that got me media coverage. I tailored each of them based on the research I conducted

FastCompany

I used this headline because I saw KC writes a lot about TV, but he also wrote a bit about comedy, Viners and once in a while about tech.

As for the email itself, I was trying to be concise and extremely clear about what we do.

I was also trying to create some FOMO by saying that although we are under the radar, we already have a growing community.

In the end, I talked about our vision in order to make a hidden implication that “I know we’re just starting, but here’s why we’ll be huge and why you should write about us...before everyone else will”.

TechCrunch

I used this headline because I knew Sarah is being approached by companies with significantly more users than we had (that’s an understatement).

I decided to go for David (as opposed to Goliath) approach in which good things happened by surprise (they did). To emphasize the ‘magic’ of sitting in the garage at nights.

Sarah is a tech writer, so as you can see I tried to pitch in an entrepreneurial nature. In the first paragraph, I showed I mean business and that we already have traction from notable tech influencers.

In the second paragraph, I explained the value prop and in the 3rd-5th paragraphs, I was talking about the team and about the fact this is a side gig.

It worked.

EliteDaily

I remember trying to pitch this chatbot (remember those?) my friends and I built to many wedding-related outlets and writers.

Since the wedding approach didn’t work, I needed to find another angle.

Jamie Leelo is a comedian who writes for EliteDaily (among others). Elite Daily was exactly the kind of outlet we wanted (demographic wise) in order to get initial traction. I used this headline because Jamie is a comedian.

I started with a clear overview of what we do, and later I touched a bit in why this is novel and special so she’ll get the feeling she might be onto something promising.

Pro tip:

I segment my email subscribers based on their actions and get better open, click and conversion rates. I use ConvertKit to automate the process (this is my full ConvertKit review).

Fair disclosure: if you’ll sign up to ConvertKit through my review, you support Spectroomz activity (helping autistic adults get jobs).

4) What to expect after you hit send

In most cases, you won’t get a reply (unless you have strong validation. Dom Hoffman, Vine’s co-founder got so much PR when he just announced he’s launching a new Vine-like app).

Try to follow up once or twice if you think the writer is extremely relevant (it worked with KC).

I use: “In case my timing was bad, giving it another try”. Checking if someone got your email sounds bad IMO.

Some writers will respond. While this is a good sign, some will say something in the nature of ‘get 100K daily users’ and let’s talk’ or ‘I write about social apps only if I hear about them from friends and colleagues’. While it’s frustrating, be respectful. They get pitched a LOT and they have a lot of ‘demand’.

When a writer decides to write about you, try to understand when will the article get published.

Mention your needs as well (‘we intend to officially launch next week, can this be published on Monday?’).

Of course, there are exclusives, embargoes and other PR-related terms which I’m not getting into and can affect the timing of publishing (with an exclusive, you give the writer more and can ask more, including for special timing).

If you are not being interviewed (from my experience usually they will interview you in some way), make sure they are writing about your goal.

If for example, you are looking to get new employees, you should ask the writer to mention there are new open positions in your company. Also, ask them to add a link.

Final note: All the above projects/companies didn’t get to product-market-fit. While in some cases you need initial traction to test your product, if you can get PR after you have more validation to your product, this is preferable. PR is not a good go-to-market strategy if you don’t know people want what you have.

PR will not make your company successful, it’s just another tactic (among many others), so don’t give it more credit than it deserves.

Today I’d focus much more on getting organic traffic to my site. The one that doesn’t stop after a few days.

FAQs

What does PR stand for

PR stands for public relations, which is the process of getting covered by media outlets.

Why is PR important and what purposes can it serve. 

PR can get your business more credibility. If you want to hire new employees, get more (or initial) users to try your product/service, or increase your chances of getting new investments, you should consider PR (although many investors will ignore PR when deciding on a new investment).