How to Give New Life to an Old Pitch

You wrote a killer pitch and sent it out. There's no need to start from scratch next time. There are plenty of ways to rework it and make it even more marketable than before!

Feb 16, 2023

∙ Paid

Hi Top Tier Community.

This week’s topic: Quick and easy ways to repurpose your pitches

You wrote a fabulous pitch, which you spent hours and hours on. You sent it out for a timely campaign, and now that’s done. Do you have to start completely over when it’s time to pitch your client again? Fortunately, that answer is no. Many of your pitches can be repurposed to fit new angles and only need a tiny tweaks versus a full overhaul.

As writers, our jobs are to think of services, experts, and products in terms of story ideas and angles. And as PR consultants, we help publicists rework these all the time. Soooo we have lots of thoughts on this. This week, we’re diving into our best tips on how to repurpose all those fabulous pitches you wrote to help them become even more relevant and marketable.

Just a bit of housekeeping before we hop in:

Last chance: RSVP for our group Pitch Perfecting Session next Tuesday!

Last week, we announced our latest product offering: Small Group Pitch Perfecting Workshops. We have just a few slots left available for the upcoming session on Tuesday, February 21, so please reach out by Friday if you’d like to attend: info@toptierconsulting.net.

This will give publicists more of an opportunity to check out our most popular session, Pitch Perfecting, and is a more affordable offering, especially for sololancers and smaller agencies. Plus, the group format gives you the chance to hear our feedback on other publicist pitches and you’ll definitely learn something from that portion as well!

Here are the deets:

What: Ready to take your pitches to the next level? Or are you wondering why certain pitches aren’t getting much response? Learn how to take your emails from, “Here’s a client I represent,” to “Here’s a story idea you can’t possibly turn down.” Between the two of us, we receive thousands of pitches per week (sometimes one thousand a day alone), so we have many tips — and examples — of what works and what doesn’t. From coming up with the perfect email subject line to improve your open rates to sealing the deal with your closing remarks, your word choices matter throughout the entire pitch. We’ll help you perfect them.

Format: 1.5-hour workshop via Zoom with Jill and Nicole includes:

45-minute formal presentation of our best pitch-perfecting tips
- subject line best practices
- body of email best practices
- tips to help your pitches stand out in busy writers’ inboxes
- follow-up best practices (yes, we encourage you to follow up!)
45 minutes of providing feedback
- we’ll dissect one pitch per participant, so come prepared with yours and don’t be shy … we haven’t made anyone cry yet, promise!
- you’ll walk away with a pitch that’s ready to distribute, advice on how to tailor it to a specific target market, and all our best pitching knowledge in the palm of your hand
Q&A throughout the session
Opportunity to network with and learn from your colleagues

Date: Tuesday, Feb 21 at 10 am PST/1pm EST

Group size: Capped at 10 participants; first come, first served (prepayment is required to hold your slot).

Pricing: $299 per person for annual Top Tier Paid Subscribers; $359 per person for Free Subscribers

(Note to free subscribers: The TTC annual subscription fee is $99 — so, upgrading would save you $60 on this workshop, PLUS you’d get access to ALL our paid content and monthly Top Tier Talks for just $39 more for the year!!)

Questions? Ready to sign up? Reach out to us at info@toptierconsulting.net today!

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As a reminder, a perk of being a Top Tier Subscriber is that you get access to our monthly Top Tier Talks where we both Zoom with members for an hour each month to dive into industry topics and answer all the questions that come up from our community during the month.

Our next one is February 28 at 10 am PT/1 pm EST. Go ahead and save the date on your calendar now and then be on the lookout for the Google doc we’ll send shortly to start submitting your questions (we’ll also answer questions that come up live in the session).

Can’t make it? No worries. We send out the Zoom recording link to all of our paid subscribers afterwards to watch at their convenience.

V-Day Sale: If you’ve been wanting to upgrade to a paid membership, now’s the time

Our annual subscription, which is typically $99, is 20% off through 2/17. Don’t forget to take advantage. As a reminder, paid members have access to:

-WEEKLY newsletter deep dives into topics on how to continue to land top-tier media coverage, right to your inbox

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For a taste of what our content is like, check out this free post we wrote to kick off 2023: Our TOP Tips from 2022 (spoiler: they ALL still apply in the new year!)

Here are a few more past topics our audience has loved:

Now onto this week’s topic

So how do you rework your pitches to make them shiny, new, and more appealing than ever? Here are a few of our top suggestions:

1. Find a new angle/audience

One of the best ways to repurpose a pitch is to tweak it for a new audience.

Did you pitch your client’s latest tech product to writers who cover the tech world letting them know about this cool new innovation? Great, now see if it could benefit another type of audience. Maybe it’s a wearable device that busy moms can use to help them to better organize their life? Or is it something that busy office professionals could use to find more worklife/balance? Something that can make grandma’s errand running easier? These are all adjacent angles to pitch to a whole new audience!
If you pitched a service that allows you to ship luggage versus check a bag to frequent travelers, that certainly sounds like something new parents trying to travel with baby strollers and diaper bags and little ones could benefit from.
Yes a band or musician can be pitched to a publication like Billboard or Rolling Stone. But do they have an interesting hobby that could warrant its own story, like storm chasing? Well that’s how this Red Bull Feature with the Shiny Toy Guns came about. https://www.redbull.com/us-en/shiny-toy-guns-interview
A product you positioned as the best Mother’s Day Gift for a foodie mom could probably be repurposed to be the quintessential item you shouldn’t have a 4th of July BBQ without!
Have a client who has a cool personal story? Keep your eye out for calls for sources on “real people” stories, like stories of women who performed amazing health transformations or business owners who had a unique way to launch their company. These are great ways to subtly work your clients into new types of stories and get mentions of their brands.
For hotel clients, think beyond property reviews, roundups and first-person features. Pitch the hotel’s F&B manager or chef for a food story, their sommelier for a wine story, their head bartender for a piece on mimosas, their event planner for bridal stories, and their cleaning staff for cleaning stories.
And don’t forget to pitch B2B publications, too. These industry pubs can be a great way to get client coverage, tell some unexpected business stories, and showcase their expertise with a whole new audience.

Once you find your new audience, many of the same great features you highlighted in previous pitches will likely still apply. A few tweaks and you’re good to go.

We’re just getting started here! Keep reading for 4 more tips!

Top Tier Consulting