How to Get Your Business Covered by Local Media Outlets

Hey guys, Matt Paulson here. In this video, I want to talk about how to get local media to cover your business. How do you get the local TV station, the local radio station, local newspaper? How do you get them to talk about you? In my Entrepreneurs of Sioux Falls Facebook group, I have had a handful of people complain that when they call one of local media outlets to cover their business, the media outlets will respond saying that maybe they should buy their advertising. And what really is being said is that maybe your business isn't that interesting and then you don't have any news to share. So if you want to reach your audience, give us some money and then you can run some ads on our media outlet. So, yeah, obviously that's a problem, but I've been featured in the local paper, local business journal, local online news sites, local TV stations several times over. I don't pay any of them for advertising. Honestly, I don't think getting the local media to cover your business, it really isn't that hard. Because they need content for their readers. The local news has to have 30 minutes of content every night. They can repeat the weather three times and whatever else, but they still do need stories to tell. And there's no reason that you can't be one of those stories. You just have to use the right approach. First, you really have to be interesting and have a story to tell or some news to break. For example, I wanted to get one million cups in the local media because we're having our five year anniversary and I wanted to see if we could drum up some renewed interest in the event. I didn't say, hey Argus Leader, hey Kello TV, can you write a story about 1 million cups? Instead, what I did was I asked the mayor's office if they would declare March 6 to be entrepreneurship Day in Sioux Falls. And then we could have a whole day about entrepreneurship that promoted both one million cups in the morning, but also the Zio center for Entrepreneurship and some other stuff that I'm working on. And also my name's in all these articles, so it's only helpful for my personal brand. So I get to. By doing this, my pitch to local media became, hey, did you know that March 6th is going to be the first ever citywide entrepreneurship day in Sioux Falls? It's just that much more of an interesting story. And honestly, John Meyer and I just kind of made up the idea and it gave us an excuse to one, get the media to write about us, but two, also to throw a big party. So we got our event covered by both local Business publications. So Sioux Falls Business Journal, and then Jody Schwann and Sioux Falls Business. And it also gave us something to talk about on social media for weeks. So one, it helped our personal brands. Two, it helped the One Million Cups event that we helped promote. And three, it helped Zio, which is an organization I serve on a board of. So it's kind of a triple whammy in terms of promotion. And I thought it was a huge success, at least in terms of the local media. So what lesson can you pull out of that? Is that you can engineer news into existence that makes your business more exciting to cover. You could throw a big citywide event. You could have a celebrity come visit your business. You could do what we did and ask the city to declare a citywide day for you, which is really just the mayor signing a sheet of paper for you that you probably wrote for them. You could win a business award. And it's really easy to win business awards because honestly, a lot of them are pay to play. So if you write a check to the right person, you can win a business award. There's one called this is the American Small Business Award that I got one time, and I thought it was a legit award when I applied to it. But then I saw all the other people that won the award too, and I realized they were just taking my $250 or whatever I paid, and that's how they make their money. And they tried to sell me an $8,000 seat at their banquet. So really, this award, it sounds fantastic, but really it's just a pay for play thing. And then you can say, oh, I won this award. Why don't you include this in your next I don't know what the artist costs. Like the movers and shakers thing. That's the type of thing that can get you into paper really easy. And honestly, this is probably not a real award, but there's some other things you could do. You could show that your business is the largest of its kind in a region, which makes your business looks good and your city look good. We used to go to Central Baptist Church. And Central Baptist Church has the largest preschool in the state. So it's like, hey, did you know that the largest preschool in the state is right here in Sioux Falls? And it does all these interesting things. You know, that could be a very good story. We just did this with Sioux Falls Seminary. It operates the largest not for profit counseling clinic in Sioux Falls. It takes Medicaid patients, takes children. And then we kind of told that story of like, hey, this nonprofit clinic operated by a seminary is probably the largest outpatient clinic in the state. And then we got some local coverage from that. Whatever news you kind of generate or engineer, it doesn't really even have to be that interesting. It could just be opening a second location of your business, maybe not like a new product line, because honestly, nobody's going to care about that. It's just something that's visible, something that kind of would sound like it would be a good news story. The key is just to pitch your business in such a way that's part of a larger story that their audience would like to consume. There are probably two other kind of big things to be aware of when working with local media. First, you have to understand that they are hugely overworked and definitely underpaid. So if you can be the person that makes the job of a reporter or a journalist easier, you're just much more likely to get covered by them. So if you can send them all the images they need so they don't have to send a photographer to you, you can send them quotes to use in their story. If you can kind of give them highlights of the story you want them to share in some bullet points. Sometimes they're just write questions for you and you answer them and they do it in a Q and A style and that way they don't have to do any work at all. Or you could even just write a press release and send it to them and then include it with kind of a personal note saying, hey, I'd love to get some coverage of this in this. Sometimes they might just take your press release, tweak it a bit, and publish it as a story on their website. Our local newspaper at the Argus Leader used to have 75 people that worked there maybe 10, 20 years ago, and now they're down to about 20. Because of the changing economics in the newspaper industry, you just don't have the time or the resources to track down that many stories. So you really have to bring the meat of the story to them. Otherwise your story might just get lost in a mix. Maybe it gets to the bottom of their inbox and they just don't see it. And then by the time they get around to it, your event or your thing has come and passed. So do whatever you can to make your story just the easiest story in the world to cover. The other thing to be aware of is that relationships really do matter when it comes to media coverage. I've worked really hard to develop relationships with a local business press, so I'LL send them information about stories that I hear about that maybe haven't made the paper yet or when there's kind of a peace several years. And this isn't to say that like the Argus leader who falls that business or whoever else always covers the stories that I ask them to cover. More often than not, at least a short story will get written and you don't even have to go that far. It could be as simple as following specific journalists on Facebook and liking and commenting their stories honestly. Like Sioux Falls, it's a small town. Yes, there's a quarter million people that live in our metro area, but there's still no reason you can't just track some people that work for Kellaland or KDLT or KSFY down and just add them as Facebook friends. Because the reality is they're working stiff like everybody else, making who knows how much money. But people are pretty friendly around here. So if you send somebody a Facebook request and you've got 20 mutual friends, they're probably going to accept that and then you can like and comment on your stuff and then they may have some familiarity with you. The key really is just to have them know who you are before you ask them to cover your story, because they're going to give credence to a story that a friend sent them over, the story that somebody they never heard of has. So if you can be that name that they at least recognize or somebody they know, you know, that's going to be more likely for them to cover you. So kind of summarize this a little bit. One, make sure that you are approaching the local media when you have news to share and if you don't have any news to share, make some up or wait until you do have some news to share. Second, make it easy for the local media to do their jobs. They are overworked, underpaid, and you need to make your story the easiest story possible for them to report on. Finally, build some relationships with local reporters and journalists so that you are not a total stranger when you ask for something. Hopefully this will help you get covered by the local media. Hopefully you've enjoyed this video. So if you like videos like this that I do in my home office here, I try to post them at least once a week. They'll make it on my Facebook page. So if you search for Matthew Paulson on Facebook, they're there. They're also on my YouTube channel, which is Business Talk with Matthew Paulson. And now I'm posting them on my LinkedIn account as well, so hopefully you enjoy these kind of 10 minute videos. I'm trying to do one a week and stay tuned for the next one, probably next Monday.