“I know you pitch media . . .”

The timeless (and seemingly endless) struggle continues.

You, the savvy and realistic PR pro, know it’s better to approach fewer targets with more personalized pitches. But your boss or client keeps pushing you to bombard many more contacts with generic outreach.

To them, it’s quantity over quality, like direct marketing. If 10 is good, 100 is better, right? You disagree – if you didn’t, you wouldn’t keep reading these posts, where I emphasize customization until my fingers get sore.

But until you can educate your boss or client, they sign the checks, so you feel you need to respect their requests. Here’s a decent compromise when they demand you pitch more contacts than you can properly research and customize for:

Begin your pitch with “I know you cover _____________.”

This simple step gets you closer to pre-empting the number-one complaint from media about PR pros. They say, “They don’t know what I cover and their outreach is irrelevant to me.” So the more specific your opening line, the more effective it is.

I know you cover new password managers is more convincing than I know you cover consumer technology. Be more precise than most of your competitors, who merely rely on media databases for beat information.

Another example: I know you cover struggles working moms face balancing home and work. That’s a safe assumption for any workplace/careers reporter (unless he works at Men’s Journal or somewhere obvious like that).

After this one-line intro, transition into how your pitch relates to this subject area, in one sentence. Then give them your one-paragraph story idea, then your call to action, and you’re done.

The precise phrasing isn’t the point: I know you’re into . . ., I see you cover . . ., I see you’re interested in . . ., they all fulfill the same purpose. You’re striving toward the ideal of personalization while working under the burden of a reality where you don’t have time to achieve that ideal.

Yesterday I was doing a phone-pitching training with a consumer PR firm and we found that this approach also tightened up their phone pitches and built a stronger connection with journalists right away.

Use this simple hack, and others you innovate yourself, to get results even when bosses don’t give you the license to apply your expertise. Then, after you’ve built a track record of unassailable success, good managers will give you autonomy to work how you want, where you want, because they know you’ll deliver.

That’s the goal we’re working toward in the Inner Circle. Every month I share more tips and more mindset tweaks with PR pros like you, and they in turn contribute their best practices and support for each other.

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