We Receive Pitches Every Day that Say "X product/topic is trending." But Is it REALLY?
How to prove that something is a trend + why this is such a powerful pitching angle (when done correctly)
Hello subscribers and happy Thursday!
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At Top Tier Consulting, one thing we always talk about is how to take your pitches from “Hey writers, here’s a client I represent, heads up” to “Here is a client I rep with a story angle attached to it to give you an idea of how you could write about it.” This can make all the difference in your pitches landing, as writers receive sooooo many emails a day and are constantly navigating their inboxes.
In fact, we’ve done these stories in the past to give you an idea of what that process looks like:
PART 1: A Look INSIDE the Process of How Writers Handle an Inbox Full of PR Pitches
PART 2: A Look INSIDE the Process of How Writers Handle an Inbox Full of PR Pitches
And perfecting your pitches is something we’re always talking about in our sessions. In fact, our most popular 1:1 offering is the Pitch Perfecting Workshop where we go through a presentation of our best tips on how to make your pitches stand out in a writer’s inbox to gain the biggest ROI and help them land in top-tier publications — and then we workshop a few of your actual pitches to help improve them!
Check out more of our services here and shoot us an email at info@toptierconsulting.net if you’re interested in learning more!
Anyway, so often we see an email where a publicist pitches us a product or expert or service and we think, “Hey that’s super cool. But I just can’t think of how to turn that into a story right now.” So suggesting a few angles that are timely helps us tremendously to make the connection between a potential source or product and a story idea that we can then pitch to our editors. There are tons of ways to do this. Here are a few of our favs that we’ve featured in the past:
Suggest a timeliness angle:
If you pitch a writer a product or client, the first thing we’ll try to figure out is what makes this client relevant right now? How can they fit into a story that we are working on now? Some good things to tie a client to in a pitch include: An upcoming holiday, a national health awareness month, summer travel season, something that's front and center in the news (like a scandal at the Oscars or the monkeypox virus). You can also suggest your client for gift guides, which publications put out for just about everything these days — from Christmas to Teacher Appreciation Day.
Don’t get too obscure with what you’re tying a pitch to
We see people pitching products around very obscure overseas holidays that mainstream outlets won’t be aware of instead of tying a pitch to something bigger like Valentine’s Day or summer BBQ season, which could help them land more coverage. We see people pitching stories tied to holidays that they are sending one week before the event when we’re already months ahead working on things tied to holidays far out into the future. Some publications will write about all those Color Pink Days but many others won’t. In general, the wider the net you can cast, the better.
When pitching a product, tell us what’s unique about it
If you are pitching a writer a pair of leggings or a lipstick or a portable charger, we want to know EVERYTHING unique about that item that could possibly make it different from others on the market. Catch our attention with things like:
For every pair purchased, does the company plant a tree?
Is there a charitable partner that the company gives back to?
Is the product handmade by artisans in a developing nation and they are paid a fair wage?
Is the product made from anything interesting, like recycled ocean plastics or carbon-footprint-reducing bla bla bla?
Has someone fancy like a celebrity or notable person like a prominent chef endorsed the brand? Is a celeb a huge fan?
Are the shoes dressy enough to wear to work but also comfortable enough to walk miles in?
Is this olive oil specially pressed only 1x a year to be the freshest on the market?
Does this face cream come with a fancy third-party study about how well it works?
Was your brain supplement created by a super impressive scientist?
We dive into things like this and beyond in our extremely popular Pitch Perfecting Sessions.
Have a source to pitch? Give us some talking points they can talk about
If you tell us that you have a doctor who is available, we might think, “OK great” and file that away for later. But if you tell us you have a doctor who can speak about XYZ thing that is happening in the world right now, well that just might be a fit. Same thing with a realtor or a scientist, a teacher, a TikToker, a model, a hair stylist, and so on.
Another way to catch a writer’s attention is to help us identify if something is a trend.
If this is something that is happening in the world (bonus points if it’s a trend that hasn’t been widely publicized yet), that can make a nice story topic. Editors want nothing more than to unleash trends that are happening before the masses get ahold of them. They want to hop in on the current conversation as a means of getting story views AND they want to break trends before other publications do in order to start the conversation.
BUT how do you prove that something is a trend? We see a lot of people trying to position their clients as something that is trending and terribly miss the mark. Then we see others who are rock stars at pulling this off. And trust us, there’s defiinitely an art to it. Today, we’re going to dive into that in-depth, including the dos and don’ts that we see when people pitch us trends.
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