What Should Happen After Sending Out Your Media Pitch?
After sending out your media pitch, you may not hear from the recipient. This may happen specifically when it’s one of your first attempts and you don’t have a relationship built up with your media list yet. Journalists and other writers get a lot of emails each day. It may take a few days to get to yours – or it may not even make it in front of their actual eyes because of email filters they’ve set up to weed out blanket emails!
Hopefully, you did your research really well, personalized your media pitch to each individual that you sent it out to, and followed up politely. If you did, and if your pitch is enticing and newsworthy, you will hear from that journalist or writer and they’ll want to know more about your pitch or just agree to share the story.
What if you don’t hear anything back? What can you do?
Don’t take it personally.
Okay, this is easier said than done; but don’t take it personally. The chances are high that you aren’t getting a response because the targeted contact didn’t think it was newsworthy for their audience. Another reason may be that they haven’t even seen your proposal.
Touch base to follow up, but don’t be annoying.
You never know if other news stories are getting pitched to them or something else entirely is going on. It can be effective to follow up your original pitch, after a few days to a week, with a “Did this email get buried in your inbox?” type of email. Don’t be annoying or aggressive in your follow-up. just let them know that you hadn’t received a response, but that this pitch is still available for them.
Choose good follow-up times.
Coming off of a weekend (Mondays) or going into a weekend (Fridays) aren’t great times for PR pitches. Using times during the middle of the week are much better for media pitches, as journalists and influencers tend to have more freedom in their schedules during the week (as long as there are no major stories out there that week).
Try pitching your story from a different angle.
If you believe that your story would be good for that news outlet, from that writer, and for that audience, try a different angle for the story.
Make sure you have the right contact.
Using LinkedIn or Twitter, make sure that the contact you have is the absolute right person to be pitching to for that outlet. Maybe the contact from your list has moved on to another news outlet or changed their audience slightly and they’re no longer the right person. While this should have been covered in your research, it’s common to miss something when people start switching around.
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