How to Pitch an Influencer, Blogger, or Journalist
In the past, I’ve written about how to NOT pitch a blogger. The saga continues as I get an endless stream of unprepared public relations professions who don’t have the information I need to promote their client’s products or services.
It took a while to actually get a pitch that was worth showing. I received an email from a social media strategist with Supercool Creative. Supercool is a creative agency specializing in online video creative and production, viral marketing, video seeding, integrated social media campaigns, viral videos, branded entertainment and webisodes. This is an incredible email!
Features of a Great Blog Pitch
- The pitch was personalized. I typically receive a blanket cut and paste. I delete those pitches immediately. If you can’t learn who I am, why should I listen to you?
- The pitch succinctly tells me the information. Most PR folks simply cut and paste a ridiculous press release into the body of the email.
- The pitch provides me with a quote to enter directly into my blog post!
- The pitch includes a link to the actual story (and where I can reference and point my visitors to).
- The pitch tells me different ways I could utilize the information! This is when I welled up in tears… sniff. Imagine that… to save me time, Darci had already thought about how I could act on the information… and adds a note to contact her if I have any questions.
- The pitch provides background on the expert and why he’s important enough to listen to.
- The pitch closes with Darci’s actual name, title, and company (which I even looked up!)
- The pitch has an opt-out! PR folks often send cut and paste emails out of Outlook – a direct violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
This is a near-perfect email… I’d rate it a solid B+. The only tiny piece of information missing is a leap that I don’t think too many PR folks would care to take – but it would have been great to hear why it would have been relevant to my audiences. A simple few words in the email like
I noticed Martech Zone has spoken about video and social media in the past, so I thought this would be of interest to you…