10 seats remain for Secrets of Media Relations Masters in Chicago in 3 weeks
If you’re afraid to follow up, you’ll miss out on getting results like Chris Cline does.
Chris is a former reporter himself, so he had some baggage to deal with when it came to follow-up. But he got over it. Here are some of the techniques he used to connect his employer, a mortgage lender, with a Washington Post writer for a story that helped a lot of readers.
Important preface – only apply these follow-up approaches when you are offering a solid story that you know is relevant to the individual journalist you’re reaching out to. It should be obvious that these will backfire if you apply them to a generic blast or a weak angle.
Don’t assume they saw your initial email and then give up. Chris’ initial cold outreach didn’t get a response, so he wrote again two days later. The Post reporter replied: “Thanks for resending. I never saw your original email. You contacted me at a good time. Perhaps we can chat sometime next week?”
Patiently provide little nuggets of value. Sometimes reporters, especially at top tier outlets, won’t turn down a story, but they won’t move forward either. They’re just busy. After their phone conversation, Chris continued to email her every few weeks with new information he thought she’d find valuable about the type of loan he was pitching. Chris says, “Sometimes I would get a response like ‘thanks for sending’ or ‘thanks for the nudge,’ but most of the time I wouldn’t get a response.”
Find a date to pin your story to. The story hinged on Veterans Affairs loans, so he pushed his internal team to expedite getting annual data in time to support a story that could run on Veteran’s Day, hoping this would provide a deadline for the reporter to move forward. He sent her the data, then emailed a second time when he got no reply.
It worked.
“Within a couple days, the story dropped,” Chris wrote to me. “It was awesome. The [customer in the photo] was even wearing one of our T-shirts, which we had no idea about. I definitely put to use several of the tips you gave me regarding how and when to follow up with reporters. Thanks for your guidance and your help with this.”
Chris attended my media relations workshop in Atlanta last March. Since then he not only reeled in this Post story, but scored coverage in 11 out of 13 cities that his company targeted for their annual charitable campaign. He wrote me:
I put the lessons you taught me in Atlanta to practice each week during our Week of Giving of campaign in a different city and have had a lot of success. Everything from re-thinking of my email subject line to shortening my pitch has paid dividends. I actually was telling my boss yesterday how much I put into practice of what I learned from you.
We have ten seats left for Secrets of Media Relations Masters in Chicago later this month.
If they continue to sell at their current pace, the event will be sold out by Mar. 12.
Whether I see you in Chicago or not, don’t be afraid to follow up 🙂