As much as it’s important to create relevant content that the press will be interested in, it’s also very important to identify the right publications to reach out to – and the right person.

And here comes research, again.

It can be very frustrating when you create a content piece or run a campaign that you love, but the coverage and links are just not appearing.

There might be many reasons why this is happening, but let’s focus on one at a time. It’s very easy to lose the direction of your outreach. And that’s why it’s so important to invest time in building your media list.

We are all guilty of creating media list by putting in publications and journalists that we contacted before and they published our content – or we only include those that our journalists’ database generated for us.

Here are a few steps to help us target the right publications and journalists making our success rate (when it comes to coverage and links) go higher.
  1. Research the topic or similar topics that your campaign is focusing on and see who’s covered this before
  2. Write a list of these publications
  3. And names of each journalist who wrote the article
  4. Now, an important step, make sure the journalist is still relevant  – journalists, as anyone else, change their jobs, they move between publications or change topics they focus on. So, look them up. Search their name, look at their Twitter page, find out if it’s still relevant contacting them with your content.
  5. Get in touch, – now that doesn’t mean press enter and send hundreds of emails. Call them, write a personalised email, or Tweet them.

If you send out your content piece to the wrong journalist, as much as your press release/visual/interactive piece can be unique and amazing, it won’t get published if the wrong people are looking at it.