Imagine you've written the perfect press release (or had Annie put it together). Take, for example, the press release from Woolsocks and Vitesse: beautifully at the intersection of financial and sports news. Moreover, it has a strong marketing angle. And not to be underestimated: local news from Gelderland.
When compiling the press list, you combine all the aforementioned 'media groups'. That goes well too. But what do you put in the accompanying email? A standard text? Is it immediately clear to the journalist why they have received the press release? Maybe, but it could just as easily be that the journalist doesn't immediately grasp the reason and decides to pass.
Last year, we emphasized writing a good accompanying email, but in a time when it's easier than ever to send messages indiscriminately, aligning your story with your audience has become all the more important. A pitch can truly determine whether a journalist wants to read your message (further) or not. Writing a high-quality pitch is therefore crucial, and that is exactly what the brand new Pressclouds Personalised Pitches™ does.
The pitch
Let's take a step back: what exactly is a pitch? Generally, a pitch is a short, compelling story with which you want to convey your message in real life. A well-known concept is the elevator pitch, like what Pockies did 9 years ago on RTL Z in Zaken.
More common in the world of PR is a phone call. This can either be done by the person sending the press release, who calls their media contacts, or by an external PR agency. In the latter case, a PR consultant proactively calls relevant journalists on behalf of the client to excite them about the press release, hoping for publications.
However, Presscloud has so many users that it is difficult for us to call journalists for every user. As an alternative, we offer the possibility to add a cover message to the email, which appears above the press release. To help our users with this, we have a strong message ready by default, but we also published this and this blog last year.
But now personalised
Such a cover message is, of course, very efficient: you don't have to call or email each journalist individually. You send your pitch directly along with the press release. Speaking of the press release: you want only one version of it, as you have likely chosen the wording and quotes very carefully. You want to maintain control over this, as this is the information the media will reproduce.
This is a big difference with the pitch, whose words will never be published. To prevent dropouts, you do want to tailor the pitch per journalist, making it clear to each journalist why you have addressed them. As a result, the journalist must become enthusiastic about reading further and subsequently publish the press release.
Pressclouds Personalised Pitches™
To facilitate this efficiently as well, we have launched Personalised Pitches™ per today, as the first PR platform in the Netherlands. As a user, you can enable this new feature with the click of a button, after which our tool swiftly makes connections between the interests of all individual journalists and your personal press release.
As a result, you have a personalised pitch for each journalist within a minute. Going back to the example of Woolsocks and Vitesse: local media read why the message below is great for the Gelderland region, sports media are enthused to be the first to publish this sports news. This emphasizes the aspects that are interesting for each journalist. They’re happy, you're happy, we’re happy!
