Evan Carmichael and a PR expert explain how to pitch media without putting them to sleep. Tie your story to a timely hook like National Customer Service Week, include videos and data, and make it bold enough to stand out. Evan's early win: a guide featuring Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy that got him instant credibility.
Much writes in, doing a typical pitch to a journalist or media channel seems boring. Have you ever done something unusual or creative to get coverage from the media?
So I agree that sometimes it can get boring. And if you think about it, I think from the perspective of the reporters that you're reaching out to, right, they are probably receiving hundreds, if not thousands, of media pitches, emails a day. With story ideas that quite honestly, if you talk to reporters, they say the majority of them are junk. So why not, you know, to your point, make it a little bit more creative, something that will grab their attention. So one example that I have is last week was National Customer Service Week. I don't know if you guys are familiar with it, but here at AWeber, we are a leader, or we're the leader in the ESP space for our customer solutions department, right? We're known for having outstanding customer solutions. So we basically, we took National Customer Service Week and the fact that we are a leader for customer service in our space, and we turned that into basically a media idea, things that we can share on our blogs and things like that. But to bring some life to the story, what we did was create a video, and we created a video that showed our CEO and our COO talking about why we're a leader in customers, in customer service. What we do here, what customer service means here at AWeber. And then we also showed our CEO and our COO in the customer solutions department taking calls, assisting customers, and things like that. And so what I did was I used that for my media pitching. So it wasn't just, hey, National Customer Service Week is this week, we're a leader in customer service, so consider an article from us. No, it's those things plus here, let me show you, let me bring it to life for you, you know? And so that's another way to just kind of mix things up for them and get a little bit creative. Another thing that I would also recommend, speaking to the point of not just a basic couple-sentence email, create some visuals, create infographics, create videos like we said. Also, if you have data to back up what you're saying or to support what you are saying, journalists love data. So, you know, get creative with what— with how you go about things and what you send to them to bring a story to life for them. Because it's helping them do their job. So I totally agree that getting creative is something that you should consider.
Yeah. When looking at that question, I think of P.T. Barnum, who used to have a circus and he used an elephant to plow his fields just because—
Are you a PR? Because what do you know about P.T. Barnum? That's like a PR thing.
I love P.T. Barnum. Hey, I study up.
I study up. I remember learning about that in school. Okay.
Well, for those who don't know the story, there used to be this train ride that would go in and people would look out the train and they see this elephant plowing a field and it just caused— he was a big— he was all about the curiosity and people would then want to know like, what's happening here? And he would always milk as much as he could from publicity, but never the typical like boring pitches. There's always something different. I think the modern day is like Richard Branson who drives to New York City on a tank and like, jet skis in and rappels down buildings, uh, and he makes big events out of things. I haven't done anything anywhere close to that. I'm, I'm, I think, and most people I think are super boring and tame, uh, in comparison. But there's, there's, I guess, room to improve there. Uh, the closest thing that I've done that was different was when I was just getting started in this business, uh, I was what, 22 years old, uh, and I felt like I was a no-name, I didn't have a lot of credibility, I was young, people would look at me like, "Well, what am I gonna learn from this guy? He's too young." So I put together what I called the Guide to Professional Success, and I contacted a whole bunch of really well-known thought leaders like Anthony Robbins and Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar and kind of the leaders at the time, and it got— I said, "Here, I wanna create this Guide to Professional Success. I'm gonna have it as a free download off my website. Can I use this article, and it was an article they had written from their newsletter or online somewhere, and I got permission from them to be able to use that article, and I combined all of their articles together, and then I added mine in there as well. So there's like Evan with all of these big names, and so it started adding kind of more instant credibility, and people, um, in the media picked up on it, um, because it was kind of different. So they're interested in reading it, sharing it, and it got me my first kind of like hint of excitement from the media. I think overall I'm pretty boring, and maybe it's a good challenge. It's a good challenge, Much, to do something. Maybe you need to ride a tank through Toronto or something, something bigger. Bungee jump from the CN Tower to support entrepreneurs or something.
