326. Get Noticed: Powerful Strategies for Pitching Your Business (refreshed episode)

Welcome to episode 326 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about how to successfully pitch your business. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is filled with my tips for how to successfully pitch your business. This episode originally aired in November of 2021 and was apparently a big hit as it was one of the top 10 most downloaded episodes of the first five years of the show, which I broke down in episode 299 and you know it's linked for you in the show notes I get asked about pitching and positioning tips all the time and I think this is the perfect time of year to think about this. So why is that? Well, we are coming into the holiday season and that means a few things. One, there are lots of predictable story angles even more than other times of the year. Holiday sales, relationships, sports budgets, goal setting, travel, you name it. As you're going to hear me talk about in the episode, one of the biggest things you want to do when thinking about pitching the media is to be ahead of of those stories. By the time you're reading about it, it's way too late. You need to pitch weeks or sometimes months in advance to be included in those stories, which is why this is a great time to start thinking of holiday pr. And whenever you're listening to this, know that there's always something that you can be pitching. There's something coming up that's important to look at. This is also a great time to think about what your pitches might look like for a year end sale if you're going to do one, or a promotion that may not have a discount. Also, your clients and customers are likely working on their budgets for next year, so this is a good time to pitch you as someone for them to work with next year. You also may have clients with a budget surplus they need to use before the end of the year, so it's a good time to think about what you might pitch to those people when the time comes. And all across the board. Pretty much no matter what, being ahead of the curve is better than being behind, so you always want to be thinking of what's next when it comes to pitching. Keep all that in mind as you listen to the episode today. There are so many options for you. Whenever you're listening to this, I'm sure you're going to find something that will work for your business. And don't forget, there are links for everything, including past episodes, books and articles, all waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 326 all right, let's talk about how to successfully pitch your business. First off, let me just say I know that pitching yourself is the worst. It is uncomfortable. It feels super awkward. I can pitch other people all day long and talk about how awesome they are, but the idea of pitching myself and saying, let me tell you why I'm amazing is less than appealing. And why is that? Partially because we're not a bunch of narcissists. But there are also lots of brain biases that get in the way and make you not want to send that pitch. You may get some version of imposter syndrome and ask things like why would anyone listen to me? Or say I'm not really an expert on this? You know, so and so knows more and your brain may start to throw out a lot of pre factual thinking. Those are the what ifs that can really hold you back. You might say, what if they laugh at me? What if they say no? What if it goes well and I'm asked to be on tv and then I get tons of clients? You know, I'm. I'm busy as it is. I wouldn't be able to handle all that. And I might have to give up more time with a family to accommodate for all that work. I can't ask my significant other to give up that much more time. For me, fear of success and fear of failure are tied very, very closely together, as you might have heard there. And anytime you start to step back out onto the periphery of your comfort zone, they can really start to rear their ugly judgmental heads. This is also a time where the focusing illusion becomes really prominent. All you can see are the reasons you aren't ready to pitch yet instead of those that would show why it could be valuable. And this can lead to bike shedding, feeling like you can't possibly send that pitch until you read 10 more articles, get one more certification or one more client, or read another book, or spend five hours watching Influence on whatever social media channel to try and see what they're doing that you can learn from and copy. Or you may feel like you need to hire a PR agency. But you can't do that until you have enough credibility for them to take you seriously, which you can't get until you get some coverage. So it's a vicious cycle you can't break free from. And because of optimism bias, it may feel like it's all just luck. And eventually your moment will come. Someone will spontaneously notice how great you are, and Oprah will call you up to feature you on a show or in her magazine if you just patiently wait and keep doing what you're doing. I mean, you know it doesn't work like that for most people, but you are different. So I have some good and bad news for you. The bad news is there isn't a fairy godmother who's going to wave their wand and you'll magically be featured on your dream outlets. The good news is it doesn't have to be that hard to pitch the media and if you use my tips and just try, you will likely get some success. As they say, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, but once you start swinging, you might just hit something. Pretty sure I mixed metaphors there, but I'm going to go with it. Obviously you know sports isn't my super strong suit there. My husband would be appalled. Anyway, I really just glossed over a lot of those biases that are holding you back. Like I said, they all have past episodes on the podcast. They're linked for you in the show notes so you can learn more about any particular one if you want to know how it might be impacting you. But I don't want to dig in too much because while it is important to know what they are and that it's normal to feel this way, you also need to stop letting those biases get in your way. Instead of letting the focusing effect be narrowed in on all the bad things that could happen or the credentials you don't have yet, focus on something else. What could happen where you can add value? Look at the positive side and focus on that. You can prime your brain so that you're surrounded by words and images that support your goal. When you start to have pre factual thinking, what if you into submission? Shut it off, make it stop. Just don't. And whenever you feel the need to procrastinate and do whatever else before you get to pitching, stop. If getting featured in the media is a goal for you this year, it has to be a priority and you need to just do it. That can mean blocking out time on your calendar, a certain day of the week or a certain time of day. I'm going to talk later about help a reporter out and they send out daily emails. But making sure you have the time set up to look for those right pitches. To invest in this if it is a goal for you, is more important. And make sure you do whatever that goal is each day or week or however you break it down to make this the priority it deserves to be. And now I'm guessing you might be asking why? Why do you need this sort of coverage? And why does pitching matter? There are three main areas I'm going to focus on when it comes to pitching the media availability bias, familiarity bias, and social proof. We're going to start with social proof because it's the easiest of these concepts. Because we're a herding species, we look to others to determine our best course of action. Robert Cialdini references multiple kinds of social proof in his books and in the episode where he was here a guest on the podcast. Of course I'll linked for you in the show notes including the wisdom of the crowd and the wisdom of an expert. He also talks about authority bias. When someone credible like a certain reporter, news outlet or celebrity is saying good things about your brand, other people are more likely to believe that you're a great option for them because of the social proof. You get wisdom of the crowd with reviews and ratings, and getting the credibility of a source that's perceived to be something you can't buy makes people believe in that even more. Now, technically some of these things can be bought, but it doesn't always feel that way to the brain. And we're really just talking about earned media here and the value that comes with that. We like to believe that something wouldn't be featured on the news or in a particular media outlet if it weren't true and fully vetted before going live. Ideally that is the case, though I'll tell you it isn't always. But that's not the point of today's show. What you need to gather from this piece is that social proof matters, specifically wisdom of an expert, because it helps people feel comfortable trying out your brand. In this case, the expert is the podcast host or the social media influencer or the news outlet. You are wanting to get the halo effect of them endorsing you to others that are within their sphere to give you that credibility that will make it so more people want to learn from you, buy from you, things like that. The next benefit of being featured in the media comes with familiarity bias. We humans like things we've heard about before and tend to believe things to be more truthful once we've become familiar with them. If you always hear the name of a certain brand of tires, let's say they're the sponsor of various shows and are featured positively in stories on your local and national news. When it comes time to choose a brand of tires, you're going to feel that the one you've heard about a lot is the better and more reliable one. You're familiar with it, so you like it more. That means it isn't just enough to have stories about the need for snow tires in winter, you need your brand of tires to be the feature of that piece and have someone from your brand quoted as an expert so that people are familiar with you in association with that thing they're going to need down the line. And this ties into the final brain bias that's working to your advantage when pitching the media. It's called availability bias and was the focus of episode 15 of the podcast. As I've said, this and many other episodes are linked for you in the show notes, but I want to bring particular focus to this one as it's the bias I most closely tie with pitching the media and helping you to do so with the highest success rate. While it's quite similar to familiarity bias, they are different and deserve to be discussed separately. To introduce this concept, I have a question for you. When do you think people are most likely to get flood insurance? If you said right after a flood, you would be right, and this is exactly when you don't need it. But you see so much coverage in the news, or maybe saw a friend or family member or a friend of a friend on Facebook, or a celebrity who lost their home in a flood. And that makes it feel real and tangible for you. It feels much more likely to happen to you when you're seeing so many stories about floods. So you decide to get flood insurance to protect yourself so you won't end up like whomever you heard about in that story. And once it's been a while and no floods have come, you maybe feel like you are being silly and you're paying for something you don't need. So you remove the flood insurance just before the next flood. Why? When we hear about something a lot, we have a hard time understanding the true risk probability or importance of that thing. As with many cognitive biases, there was a test run where you asked people a question and their answers were very strange. In this case, people were asked how many violent crimes they thought took place in Detroit last year. Apologies for anyone from Detroit. I didn't come up with the test. People were then asked how many violent crimes they thought happened in the state of Michigan, and often people thought there were more total violent crimes in Detroit than in the entire state of Michigan. This of course makes no sense because Detroit is just one city in Michigan and it can only be a part of all the crimes there. But we hear more about crime in the city of Detroit than in the rest of the city, and so our brains are biased in this way. Another of my favorite examples is going to have you guessing again. Travel to Norway increased by over 50% in 2014 because of a movie. Can you guess which one it was? Don't worry, I'll wait. Make a guess. Pause the show if you have to, but don't Google all right, now that you're back again, we're asking Travel to Norway increased by over 50% in 2014 because of a movie, and it was Frozen, an animated Disney movie that took place in a magical fictitious kingdom that was merely inspired by Norway, made it so. Searches for flights to Norway were up over 150%, and there was a huge jump in tourism because kids were so excited about going to see Olaf and Sven, who sadly would not be there when they arrived. But the popularity of Frozen made it so people were excited and starting to look to travel or do anything that related to that movie. In another example, sales of Mars bars went through the roof when the Mars rover launched. Our brains really are that silly and literal a lot of the time. Thankfully you don't need a Disney or NASA sized budget to benefit from availability bias. Though I will say if the Star Trek franchise hasn't been taking advantage of William Shatner going into space, they are absolutely missing out. The Big Bang theory probably got some residual benefits here as well. What you do need to do to take advantage of availability bias is to think about what people are going to be thinking and talking about and see how you can offer a unique perspective on that topic. Here's an example. A friend of a friend is a handwriting expert and we all might think, what the heck is newsworthy about that? And because most handwriting experts would think that it allowed this person to carve out a niche for herself. When Prince William and Kate Middleton were getting married, it was all anyone seemed to want to talk about. The media and magazines and shows were all full of stories about the couple, and that means reporters were looking for content to help show new angles on the royal wedding. This handwriting expert had put content out into the world about what the signatures of William and Kate said about them as people and their personalities. And the media went crazy. She was featured on the Huffington Post and Dr. Oz and Good Morning America and so many other shows, talking about the signatures and showcasing her expertise and because of familiarity bias, who do you think everyone called when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were getting married? Or when anyone wants to make a claim about the personality of a celebrity? When you search for handwriting expert, she's likely to come up again and again and again. Now it's important to note that she isn't necessarily the greatest handwriting expert in the world. I'm sure she's fantastic, but this point really matters. People believe she's the best because she got to the media first. She's constantly quoted and searched for and used over and over again because she found a unique angle to be able to talk about her work in relation to something reporters were wanted stories about. And now she's the go to person whenever this comes up again. And so that is your sweet spot. You want to find your unique perspective on things reporters are looking to create content about so you can pitch them something that's helpful for them instead of feeling unrelated and annoying. And when you think about that, I know it can feel a little bit stressful. But remember, reporters are people too. When I first started working at the advertising and PR agency just out of college, I was really nervous about pitching reporters. It felt super scary and I hated the idea of sending a pitch, email or worse, picking up the phone to call the newsroom. A senior member of the team who'd been doing PR for years told me something I'll never forget. She said reporters put on their pants one leg at a time, just like everyone else. Reporters and journalists and podcasters and whomever else are all people doing a job. They're having to come up with a lot of content that helps them to be showcased as an expert with interesting perspectives on a lot of topics. No one person can possibly come up with all of that on their own. And so good media pitches can make a huge difference for them and their success. And you can be their solution. Your task is to look out at what's coming up in the next, let's say, month, what's happening in sports or what holidays are coming up, what's going on in the economy or in international relations, what new innovations are coming out or recently launched, what company's about to go public, what about the weather, what's trending on Twitter today or other social channels, what's the newest TikTok challenge. What unique perspective could you offer about each of those totally random but particular topics? Remember, even if it seems like a bit of a stretch, it doesn't mean someone wouldn't want that perspective or that it's not valuable. It just means there might be a niche you can carve out for yourself that doesn't exist yet. Remember, change that focusing illusion on the positive side. Be priming your brain in those good ways so that you can be the solution of something no one has thought about yet. You know who would have thought that a handwriting expert would be featured for the royal weddings and sought after. You can't be first and have that comfort that comes from kind of following the herd. You need to be looking for something that's different that no one else is doing that you can be providing some value on. So definitely go for those topics that's seem like they have absolutely nothing to do with your work. Start with some of those, make sure to work those in, make it a little bit more difficult to help find those unique perspectives. To practice this and start getting your brain working, I recommend you go each morning or whenever makes sense in your day and look at the headlines, pick three main topics and think to yourself, you know, what could you do or say? How could you write a blog post or article about your expertise and that topic? As you get more practice, this gets easier, I promise. And you're going to start finding some perspectives that have some legs when you really start testing there. And that is going to give you some background that you have a baseline for when it's time to start pitching those writers. So the next thing I want you to do is to make note of the writers you like and want to pitch. I can't tell you how many generic spam blasting pitches I get here at the Brainy Business. Anyone who would spend more than about five minutes can see I have a very specific audience and that when I choose to have guests, they have a very specific background. Someone could have a massive audience, but if they aren't the right fit for what we do here in behavioral economics, behavioral science, neuroscience, neuromarketing, I'm not going to compromise that just for numbers. It's really, really easy to see when someone has done no research and is sending out blanket pitches. There are a lot of very obvious form letters, emails, LinkedIn pitches, and thankfully, because of the official name of my podcast being so long, it's incredibly easy for me to see when someone didn't do their homework. I get emails all the time that Say something like hi Melina, I've done a lot of research and I can tell that I would be a great fit for the brainy business pipe Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Pipe Behavioral Economics no you didn't and no you won't. Delete I have heard a lot of people say that it's their goal to send out crazy numbers of pitches or praising that they got a hundred rejection letters because it feels like you need a bunch of people to say no before the right one will find you and say yes. I'm going to tell you I think this is total bull. Sure there are some examples out there of great actors or authors or entrepreneurs who were rejected a bunch before someone took a chance on them. But don't let survivorship bias make you think that is the norm and what has to happen for everyone. It's better to do 10 really great thoughtful pitches to outlets you know will be a fit for you and where you can add value to that audience and host or author or journalist or whatever than it is to blanket send out a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand pitches hoping someone will give you a chance to somewhere. This is why I told you to know where you're a fit so you can start checking out reporters who are in line with your business. Get to know their audience, what they care about, what they're interested in, what angles they haven't covered yet. How can you help them by filling that gap? And this is where we work in some reciprocity. The best pitchers give long before they ask. Make your list of the top five or 10 outlets where you want to be featured and find a few writers at that you know are a fit for your brand. Follow them on social media and read as much of their stuff as you can. I recommend Twitter for connecting with reporters as it's a common platform for them, at least right now. Read their content, yes, but also retweet it, comment on it, send them messages saying how awesome that last article was with thoughtful details and do not ask for anything. Just be kind and give for a while. As you're doing your research, they might just start to check out your profile and see what you're about or at the very least remember your name. Familiarity bias with a positive association. They know you're someone who understands them and reads their content. And as you continue to read and share their content, you can learn something about their audience and what they've already talked about. Then when the moment is right, when you know something they're going to want to feature and talk about and you have a unique perspective. Send the pitch say something like hey Sally, I've really loved your coverage of X. Yesterday's article insert title was particularly fascinating to me. I really loved when you said why? In case you're looking for a new angle on this topic, my expertise is Z and I believe your audience would love to hear the perspective about how these two things coincide. For example, 1, 2, 3. If you're interested in more information, let me know and I would be happy to write up some quotable lines for you. This isn't verbatim, of course, and if you have had some more positive interactions with someone already and gotten to know them, you don't have to be quite as formal in that introduction. You know, you could say, hey Sally, you know I love everything that you write and I read as much as possible. I was thinking about how my business could relate or how your audience might be interested in this. This happens to be where I'm an expert. If you were looking for a source, I would be happy to be that for you. In essence, your formula is basically once they ideally already know who you are and they like to read any posts or emails or things that you are sending to them because they've been conditioned to know that it's nice stuff about their content. You want to show them that you have a topic that will be of interest to their readers and make it as easy as possible to take what you've said and turn it into a story. One quick note here. You want to make sure that you are showcasing this in what is of interest to them and their readers. Don't talk about why it's a value to you, and don't go into a long diatribe about your background and why it may seem off topic, but let me explain. Give them quotable sentences they can grab and repurpose. If they aren't instantly excited or intrigued by what you wrote, why would their audience care? They don't want to do a lot of work, and so you need to inspire them to want to write up a story about what you're pitching, and making it exciting and easy will make it much more likely that it's going to happen. Now that I've anchored you to this somewhat more difficult process, you don't have to pitch all reporters cold like this. I can appreciate it's more of an advanced tactic and might be a little scary to start with. So in that case I recommend you sign up for HARO or help a reporter out. It's linked for you in the Show Notes and it's a free service. You can be on a list for and when reporters are looking for sources while they're working on stories, they put them into haro. The service sends out three emails a day and you can skim through the topics to see if any apply to you and then you can respond with your insights. And if you've done your homework as I assigned a few minutes ago and have been testing with headlines that seem totally unrelated, it can make it so much more of the content being requested in Haro applies to you. And this is also a place where you can be testing, seeing what people are searching for and saying what might I say about that? What would I think? In this request you can really get into the mindset of the person that's doing the work to see how they think about the guests and sources that they're looking for as they're shaping articles to help you be better at pitching. Even if you don't send any for a while, reading what's in there can make a real difference. And as I said, you can find things that seem unrelated. For myself, I was featured as an expert by ww, formerly Weight Watchers, and in Canada in an article about whether or not FOMO is real. They weren't asking for a behavioral economist to weigh in, but I knew I had content that would help bring credibility to their article and round it out. So I sent them some information and it ended up being a fit. I want you to know you won't always hear back and actually most of the time you don't. And there will be a lot of pitches that don't land, but when they do, it's very exciting. If you don't already have a Google Alert set up for your name, business name and industry, you definitely should do that, because even when you do an interview with a reporter, it doesn't mean they're going to tell you when the article comes out. They're creating a huge amount of content and really it's not their job to make sure that you know when something comes out. It tends to just get lost in the shuffle. Not a priority for them. So when you pitch, keep these things in mind. Number one, keep it short and sweet. They want quotable snips to be able to pull from, and if one doesn't match what they want, they can quickly jump to the next bullet. Two, be sure you like how you wrote it and would feel good if that was how they quoted you. I've had reporters from Haro essentially copy and paste what I pitched and put it straight into the article without talking to me about it for clarification first, and not just once. This is sort of the way it works, so take your time writing it out and be sure it's something you would feel good about being quoted as saying exactly as it is, but don't wait or take too long. Reporters work on quick turnarounds and deadlines. If you aren't able to respond immediately, they likely had someone else fill the need before you got there. Try to respond within an hour of the HARO email coming out, or at least by the end of the day. Yes, this can be time consuming, which is why you need to make sure it's a main goal for your business and worth the effort before you even go down this path. And my last tip? When you're responding to HARO requests, or when you're using a form to pitch to be a columnist or whatever else, follow any directions they put into their request. Be really specific and make sure you read clearly and do exactly what they want. Some of the reporters are really vague in their asks, but others have very, very specific instructions. Do exactly what they ask when you respond to ensure your effort won't be immediately deleted for lack of attention. And really, that's all there is to it. Like I said, it's easy once you can kind of get out of your own way. So let's quickly summarize all these tips for pitching before wrapping up the episode. And do remember, while I've said media a lot throughout the episode, these tips are for pitching anything, not just traditional news media. If you want to be featured on a podcast or to pitch a new client that you would love to work with or to be a contributing writer somewhere. I even use some of these same tactics when pitching to write my column for Inc. Magazine, even though it was using their stock form. These tips can be used in pitching all sorts of things, so so when it comes to pitching, you need to first decide it's a main goal for your business right now and worth the time. If not, don't do it at all. It takes work and dedication just like anything, so make sure it's worth it for you at this point in time. Then make your list of the top outlets you want to be featured in and a few reporters who align with your style and you would like to have feature you, comment and share their content without asking for anything in return. Practice looking at headlines and trending topics or upcoming events or requests in HARO and think about what your unique perspective might be on them. Remember, you need to pitch a few weeks before that holiday or event when the reporters are doing their research, not when it's happening. And then you just gotta get out of your own biased way, take a deep breath and start pitching. So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about how to pitch your business today? For me, because I know the idea of pitching can be a bit scary, I hope that this helped pitching to feel like an achievable task for you in your business. Regardless of your role or industry. You have a story, many of them in fact. And there are countless angles where people would want to feature you, finding those dream publications where you want to be featured, or clients you would love to add to your roster. Or if you're inside a business looking for ways to pitch yourself for that promotion or to lead a project. There are so many opportunities and businesses are full of pitching constantly. All the pitching. You don't need to wait for people to call you. You can make your own opportunities. It takes some time and dedication, but it doesn't have to take up all that much time. Commit to something, make it small. If you were to do one pitch a week, what might that look like? How much time would it take you? Or perhaps a really big pitch every month? Where are you going to pitch yourself? What is your dream publication to be featured in? Come share it with me on social media. I would love to hear about it. You can find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn and the power of posting about it. For one, other people that are reading may be connected to wherever you are saying you want to be connected. And so there's a lot of power power in that social proof in social media. And you know, it's just a good opportunity to see how you can help others and really build those long relationships that are so valuable when it comes to business. Again, find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere and Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. And if you want some help creating a pitching strategy or optimizing a pitch that you have, I would love to work with you. We have options for even just a one hour call to help take that pitch to the next level. Go to the Brainy Business.com and click on Work with us to learn more and snag a session. I can't wait to work with you. And to make it easy, there's a link in the show notes of course, along with links to related past episodes, books, a timestamp summary of this episode and more it's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the Brainy Business. And just like that, episode 326 on how to successfully pitch your business is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Matt Abrahams to discuss his new book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.