In today’s video, I’m going to be talking about five effective ways to nurture those all-important media relationships and they’re actually quite simple.
The first one is straightforward. If a journalist has written about your story or included you in a story that they’re working on, send them a thank you email. You can even stand out even more and actually send them a physical card shock horror I know, we hardly use the mail anymore. Our WordStorm PR we’ve actually gone so far as to create a few cheeky and fun cards that you know when they feature our client, we send it to them. You know this one says ‘Thanks to you my client thinks I’m great’. Another one is just a little heart. And then we’ve got ‘Thank you from WordStorm. So really simple but you know it’s really effective when we send them to journalists they usually send us some email saying thank you for saying thank you, I feel really appreciated. Everyone loves to feel appreciated.
Okay number two when you’ve got another story angle pitch it to them first and tell them that you’re giving them an exclusive. All journalists like to get an exclusive and be the first ones to report on something. So you’re doing them a favor if you can do this.
Number three, connect with them on LinkedIn and then once you’re connected with them, every now and then send them information that might be useful to them. And when I say useful to them it’ll probably help them with the story idea of some sort. But don’t go banging on about how good your business is. That will not get you very far at all.
And linking in with the LinkedIn idea. Find out when their birthday is. You can also do some stalking on Facebook or whatever and you know what, send them a birthday card on their birthday and with Christmas coming up send them a Christmas card or even a little gift just a small little token gift to say I appreciate your support this year, thank you very much.
And once you’ve started to build a bit of a relationship because they’ve interviewed you and you’ve sent them a birthday card and you’ve got a few things going, you’re a LinkedIn connection and you might have had a few messages back and forth. Now’s the time to ask them out for coffee and do it on the premises of you know I want to know what you’re working on. I want to be able to feed you content or pitching stories that I know will add value to your audience.
So there are my five tips, I hope you enjoy them. As always feel free to ask me any questions and I look forward to seeing you next week.
