– Do you want to share your news but don’t have media contacts?
– Do you think you must have good contacts to get good PR?
– Are you unsure how to build good contacts?
If any or all of the above relate to you then this video will help to guide you and give you some top tips on getting you the coverage you want.
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I’m Cathy Kelly and I’m a former journalist and PR consultant with more than 20 years’ experience of writing for and working with the media. A recent campaign with a client resulted in a film on a prime-time terrestrial TV channel and in leading national and international media outlets including The Times, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Forbes, Al Jazeera and CNBC among others. We specialise in PR that works.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I’m going to be sharing with you how you get good coverage when you don’t necessarily have the media contacts that you need.
So don’t panic if you don’t have the media contacts. That’s the first thing to say, because it is helpful if you have them, but it doesn’t mean that you still can’t get the coverage that you need if you don’t have those relationships to start with.
If you are a business owner, or somebody responsible for communications and you want to share your message but you don’t know how to get it out there, then you’re watching the right video.
I’m Catherine Kelly, and I’ve got more than 20 years’ experience of either working as a journalist or as a PR consultant writing for and dealing with the media and getting coverage on prime time TV and in international and national publications including Forbes, Times, the Telegraph, and various leading trade publications.
One of the best ways that you can actually engage with the media is to hit them with the right story. So your story needs to be good, and you can tap into good tips about how to actually identify a good story and to put it together by watching my first video, “How to write a press release”. You can also access various blogs and other materials from my website www.catherinekellypr.co.uk, and I’ll be adding other videos and materials over the coming weeks and months.
The first thing you should do is to start putting together a media mailing-list and you can insert helpful details such as deadline dates for journalists because it’s no good contacting journalists on a day when they’re really busy and haven’t got the time to talk to you or read your email. So I’ll be sharing with you towards the end of the video ways that you can actually do this and also I’m going to insert links so that you can actually download free materials like the template and you can actually get cracking on that yourself.
So start working on your media contact list. You can start putting together details of publications and journalists through Googling different publications within your industry or the industry you want to target. You can also use free resources like journalisted.com, which details information about journalists and sorts of subjects they’re writing about. And then you can target them with your press release at a time of the week which is actually better for them.
You should also get professional quality photography and actually issue that with your press release because publications and news channels are always short of decent images. And you should always follow up with a phone call to make sure the journalist has got everything they need, that they received your press release. Do they need any other images? They might need a landscape-shape photograph and you’ve sent them a portrait one. Little details like that can make all the difference in getting you the coverage that you need.
Hopefully, now you’ve realised that you don’t need to have the contacts to start with to actually get your message out there. It’s just a case of putting in the time, creating your list, and giving them good stories that they need, and to keep on giving them those stories so that you’re hopefully issuing a press release about once every one to two months, but only issue them if they’re really good stories.
How to Get Media Coverage Without Contacts