6 ways to freshen up your media relations efforts

Spring is a time of rebirth: Animals come out of hibernation, and plants start to blossom.

Maybe it’s time for us to bring our media relations approach out of the winter doldrums, too.

Let’s take a fresh look at how well our approaches work for us—and think about incorporating new perspectives into our work with reporters:

1. Let’s do more research.

It’s not enough to quickly bang out a media pitch and shoot it over to a reporter. We must do more research to understand the topic and find data to back up the angle. Instead of seeing how many pitches we can send out, the focus should be on sending fewer pitches of higher quality.

2. Let’s spend more time writing and perfecting the pitch.

In a sea of bad pitches, your pitch will stand out if you take time to carefully craft it. That means reviewing and editing it, too.

Have someone else look it over; you might be too close to it to catch every error. You can use an app like Grammarly or Hemingway to help refine it.

3. Let’s get to know whom we’re pitching.