How to do PR outreach: Examples, tools, tips & more

Successful PR thrives on building strong relationships. And while nurturing your current connections is essential, growing that network requires some skills in forging new ones. This is where having a solid PR outreach plan, also known as media outreach, becomes a game-changer.

We asked some really smart people in the industry what they would consider to be some of the biggest PR pitching and outreach mistakes, and, more importantly, how to avoid them.

PR outreach is contacting the media with whatever story you want them to pick up and distribute to their audiences. It's not a complicated concept, but it can be remarkably difficult to do well.

Why does PR outreach get so complicated?

Simply put, everyone wants media coverage. In an attention economy, getting eyes (or, because podcasts, ears) on your brand, event, or product is incredibly important.

And since media coverage is so coveted, getting it is incredibly competitive and time-consuming. This leads to many people taking shortcuts or resorting to nefarious means when attempting to grab a journalist's attention.

But it doesn't have to be this way. You can get media coverage and not sell your soul.

There are many different PR outreach strategies to help you run successful campaigns. Let’s explore some of the main options:

Media relations focuses on building strong relationships with journalists and media professionals to earn free media coverage. By becoming an industry expert, you can be a trusted source for insights or quotes, leading to positive news stories about you and your brand.

These days, media relations can include pitching for blog posts and guest posts.

Community relations is about building a positive reputation in your area, whether that's your literal local geographical location, or a place online where your audience spends time.

Businesses that show they care about their community and make an effort to be a positive force are seen in a better light. It's also a great way to demonstrate your character as a business, get feedback from real people, and find opportunities to provide greater value.

Social media is one of the most powerful tools in PR. It helps you gauge sentiment around your brand, show your (brand) personality, and actually engage directly with consumers as well as influencers. Platforms like Xitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok fall into this category.

Public affairs involves building connections with people in formal institutions, like government bodies, civil services, or trade associations. These relationships can help you share your business’s views on important issues and even influence changes that matter to you.

This is one that gets frequently overlooked – after all, employee stuff is HR, not PR. Right? (Not right!)

Think of this as internal PR for your employees. Employee relations aims to keep your team feeling positive about their work. Happy and motivated employees are more productive and stay with the company longer. This can include planning team events, helping managers connect with their teams, promoting work-life balance, or resolving conflicts.

This type of PR also links closely to…

When something goes wrong, clear and direct communication is essential to manage the fallout. Using well-crafted statements, press releases, and social media updates can help control the situation and protect your business’s reputation. But more than that, crisis communications is about setting up processes, tools, and documentation so that you can react quickly when disaster strikes.

As you might have already guessed, there are a million ways (or, well, at least eleven) to do it wrong. But how can you do PR outreach right?

Let's go through the four simple tips that will help to maximize your coverage and not irritate the hell out of a bunch of journalists. Combining all of these will result in better media relations, more frequent story coverage, and way fewer margaritas needed on Medicinal Margarita Mondays.

Strategic thinking is important. Anyone can just send a bunch of cold emails, do a tweet, throw a few paid adverts up on Google and call it a day. That's technically a PR outreach campaign, but it's not a very good one.

No, a media outreach strategy requires forethought and planning. It requires meetings and decisions and comically oversized corkboards covered in bits of paper and red string.

When creating a strategy for your PR outreach, ask the following questions:

• What is the goal of this campaign?
• Who is responsible for what?
• How much time and how many resources will be dedicated to this PR outreach campaign?
• Did we write a good press release that will knock their socks off?
• What analytics will we track, and are there infrastructures in place to track the data?
• How will we know when the campaign is successful/finished?
• What value will we be able to demonstrate to justify the cost of the campaign?

Here's Laura Sutherland talking about the importance of strategy in PR (watch the full interview).

Have you ever received an email that completely, utterly, and entirely has nothing to do with you? Maybe it's an ad for sports equipment and you don't play sports, or it's a promo for baby clothes and you've never even met a child before. You know, just an entirely off-base email. Well, journalists get approximately one billion of those every single day.

If that sounds like a bit of cheeky hyperbole, check out this quote from Cision's 2021 Global State of the Media:

Fifty-three percent of journalists receive more than 50 pitches a week, and 28% receive more than 100 per week. Yet the vast majority of journalists (69%) say only a quarter (or less) of the pitches they receive are relevant to their audiences.
​​
​– Cision, 2021 Global State of the Media

Journalists, including the ones we've spoken with, are practically begging people to stop sending them unrelated crap. And since journalists and top-tier publications are essentially the gatekeepers of the media, and they decide which stories they'll run, we would do best to listen to what they have to say.

Basically, a good media list starts with good research. It's more time-consuming than, say, buying a media list, but it's infinitely better for building good media relations and getting quality results.

Use a comprehensive PR tool like Prezly to keep your contacts and outreach organized.

Now that you've created the perfect media list, it's time for the pitch. Really though, if you're pitching the right people, this is the easiest part. You have a compelling story that provides value to the readership, and you know this because of all the legwork you put into researching the journo and their publication. The email is easy peasy.

Your pitch email should include:

• A killer subject line
• A non-spammy, thoughtful, and specific pitch that provides value
• A link to your press kit or a newsroom with all of the necessary digital assets
• Contact information for follow-up

It also doesn't matter too much when you send the pitch; there is no ultimate best time to send a press release. It's what's inside it that matters.

Boom, done. Review the email and hit send after doing a once-over for errors.

Your strategy is implemented and the right people have been contacted with the best pitch. Now, you wait.

And while you can't decide if the media will be interested in your pitch, you can be ready to jump into action when they get back to you.

There is a right way and the wrong way to follow up. The right way is helpful and breezy. The wrong way is manipulative and annoying. Think about:

• How long has it been since you emailed?
• Has the person been active on social media? (Could they be on holiday?)
• Have they expressed any interest in your story?

If you do send a follow-up email, keep it short and respectful. And if they still don't reply, give it a rest and re-evaluate whether this is the right person for your story.

PR outreach software can take a lot of the pain out of targeting your emails to the right people, and give you data-driven insights into how key media contacts are engaging with your content. More than that, it can save your team heaps of time by collecting all your media lists and outreach into a single cohesive tool.

Here are our top 3 tools for doing PR outreach.

G2 rating: 4.3/5

Starting price: $90/month (with a 14-day free trial) 

Prezly is a robust PR outreach tool with multiple subscription tiers to fit any PR team, from small in-house operations to huge agencies and global brands. It combines pitching and personalized PR campaigns with a press release builder, newsroom publishing, contact management, analytics, and coverage and media monitoring, all at an incredibly competitive price.

More than 500 PR teams are actively using our platform to send out their news, pitch journalists, and earn real coverage and ROI from their PR.

This is all done by using our:

• PR CRM to manage and grow journalist relationships
• Online newsroom and press release creation tools to publish multimedia press releases
• Email outreach tool to send those press releases to journalists
• Coverage and analytics tools to track and report on results
• Real-time media monitoring so you can link those results to your outreach work

Interested in trying it yourself? Start with our 14-day free trial (no credit card required on sign-up) to give it a shot. If you like it, you can sign up for a monthly plan. If not, you can always try out one of the more traditional platforms below once your trial is up. 

How much does Prezly cost? 

G2 Rating: 3.9/5

Starting price: $350 to distribute one release

Cision is an outreach tool offering access to a database of 1.6 million journalists, bloggers, and social influencers, making it easier to connect with the right people to share your message. Beyond providing contact details, Cision includes monitoring and analytics features to optimize your outreach efforts.

What you need to be aware of here is that Cision doesn't offer all these tools in one – you'll be paying for them separately.

We've included the pricing information for Cision's distribution service below, as it's closest to PR outreach, but if you're looking to use Cision to also buy a media database, that cost is going to set you back $5,700+ per year.

To sum up, Cision comes with a hefty price tag and leans slightly toward traditional media outlets.

How much does Cision's PR Newswire cost?

Note: PR Newswire’s pricing varies widely depending on your needs. To keep things simple, we’ve only included pricing details for national distribution in the US. For more details, check out our complete breakdown on PR Newswire’s pricing. 

G2 Rating: 4.9/5

Starting price: $198/month

Respona is a journalist outreach tool designed to help personalize pitches using AI. It offers real-time contact data mining, which aims to provide more up-to-date information compared to traditional media databases, along with analytics to track the performance of email campaigns.

Notable features include an email health monitor that assesses how your email is perceived by recipients, helping you avoid being spammy. Additionally, it includes an AI-powered pitch personalizer that adapts your cold outreach emails based on a journalist’s recent work, adding a tailored touch to your outreach efforts.

While pitching is part of what Respona offers, it is largely used for SEO purposes, meaning that it isn't purpose-built for the PR use-case.

How much does Respona cost? 

Planning PR outreach involves many details and can be tricky, especially when reaching out to reputable publications or contacting journalists and editors for the first time. But it’s definitely doable.

Here's a basic outreach template to get you drafting:

The tone and length of your outreach email will vary depending on topic and audience, but in general, follow these golden rules and won't go far wrong:

• No spam, no clickbait – be upfront about what you want and what you're offering
• Respect their time – try to keep the wordcount to a minimum
• Do the research – look for ways you can go the extra mile to show this person you understand their work and their audience

Here are two examples of what to do, and what not to do.

So, what differentiates these two?

Pitch #1 is all about the writer. It's vague, requires follow-up to even understand what the pitch is about, misspells the recipient's name, and overall has a sassy and unpleasant tone. 0/10.

Pitch #2 is well-researched, includes assets, has a targeted tone, and is written like a normal human is behind the screen. The emphasis isn't on the brand or their laudable CSR initiatives (though that is mentioned and important). The pitch makes it clear that the piece is environmental and about humans being bros.

Ok, so this is the juicy part of the article.

We wanted to know what's not going right in the world of PR outreach. And boy, did we get some strong opinions.

So here are the biggest PR outreach mistakes from the perspectives of communications professionals – and journalists.

In this video, we compile the 6 biggest complaints that two journalists we interviewed had about receiving PR outreach. And boy, were these mistakes doozies. Just take a look.

And because we're gluttons for punishment, we also asked 200 communications professionals what they think the biggest pitching mistakes are. These professionals include journalists, authors, publicists, digital marketers, business owners, and everything in between.

They replied with a variety of impassioned answers.

Reporters often tell me that one of the biggest mistakes PR people make is sending a pitch to the wrong reporter. PR people need to do research to determine who the right reporter(s) is. Is their beat a fit for your pitch? If it's local/regional news, does the reporter cover that city or region? 

Another related mistake is doing NO research and sending a pitch out to MANY reporters at once. This is spam and should NEVER be done, although media databases are set up to allow this to happen.

Michelle Garrett, Writer/Public Relations Consultant, Garrett Public Relations

The biggest mistake was not researching the person you're emailing. 65 of the 200 participants, or a whopping 32.5%, said that this is the most common mistake people make when pitching.

This was by far the biggest gripe we came across because it speaks to the overall culture of careless, obnoxious, mass-spamming tactics. To put it nicely, not researching the relevant journalist or publication is a huge, annoying waste of time, and nobody likes it.

How to avoid making this mistake: Do your research! Take the extra time out and contact the right person, at the right email, at a relevant publication, with their name spelled properly. Everyone wins! And it's the biggest, more sure-fire way to differentiate yourself from the competition.

50 participants, or an entire 25% of all respondents, said that not providing value was a huge, common PR pitching mistake.

Of course, your brand wants to be in the news. Everyone's brand wants to be in the news. But does that mean your story is newsworthy?

If you can't succinctly explain why your story is interesting to the journo's audience within a sentence or two, your pitch needs work.

How to avoid making this mistake: Learn how to pitch our news as a story. In fact, we spent a whole PR Roundtable with a former journalist Melanie Deziel learning how to do exactly that.

👉 Watch that discussion here.

Similar to the problem of not creating a relevant story around your news, sending out a generic, boring mass pitch to anyone and everyone is a good way to get chucked into the spam folder. 21% of participants indicated that impersonal pitches are a huge industry problem.

This is why PR newswires are on their way out.

You certainly don't need to write a heartfelt poem for each contact, but some individualization and personalization will go a long way.

How to avoid making this mistake: Individualize your pitches. Discuss how the journalists' previous body of work compliments the story you want to tell in some tangible way. Get as invested in them as you want them to be in you.

Earned media is about having a story to tell. 12% of our comms respondents indicated that too many PR pitches are far too self-promotional. They don't sell the story and only focus on the product or brand.

How to avoid making this mistake: When pitching the media, keep the reader in mind.

You did it! A journalist wants to run your story and they are messaging you to follow up and, crickets. Tumbleweeds. You're MIA. Where did you go?

How to avoid making this mistake: If you pitch to the media, be available for a nearly instantaneous follow-up. Maybe they want an interview, maybe they want some more additional assets, or maybe they want to ask for clarification before running your story.

The reality is that we have to be on the journalists' timeframe because they simply do not have the flexibility to wait around forever for a response.

19 of our communications professionals (9.5% for those doing the math) said that media pitches are often way too long.

It's tempting to want to tell the complete story of your brand and not leave anything out, but you run the risk of losing the attention and focus of your already too-busy media contact.

How to avoid making this mistake: Keep your pitch short, sweet, to the point. Include all necessary links to assets but don't clog up your pitch with massive image or video files.

In fact, you know what's great to prevent this? An aesthetic press kit full of your highest-quality images and multimedia.

Your brand is great, but is it literally the best? Like, life-changing, revolutionary, unbelievably amazing? Maybe it is! But substantiate hyperbolic claims with facts and figures, or else it seems smarmy and overhyped.

Your press release headline is super important, but it has to be believable and supported by cold hard facts or you will be the communications equivalent of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

How to avoid making this mistake: Be honest when pitching, even if it's a little underwhelming. Better to sell what you have in the best way possible than over-promise and lose credibility.

We all have that "friend" who only calls when he needs a ride to the airport or help moving his big couch, but is radio silent when it's time to return the favor. Sending out a PR pitch that only addresses your needs and never theirs makes you the communications equivalent of a pariah.

How to avoid making this mistake: Building relationships with the media is critical. Not only do you get a great contact for future news stories, but you also have the possibility of making a new best friend.

Okay, best friend might be a bit much. But frankly, having a good working relationship with people in the media is always a good thing. If they know you to be a reliable industry leader and you consistently deliver them a type of content for their publications, who knows? There may be matching "best friends" necklaces in your future.

Jargon is one of those things that just happens when you get too close to a subject and you forget that not everyone knows your niche as well as you do. Sometimes details can get lost in the weeds, or a pitch can peter off (not unlike an exceptionally long article on PR outreach). I'm here all week, folks!

How to avoid making this mistake: The average reader is likely not going to be an industry insider in your field, so breaking down the pitch into digestible, understandable terminology instead of dense jargon means your story is more likely to get picked up.

Reporters are often happy to work with you! But they definitely don't work for you. Incessant follow-ups are grating and a great way to get yourself on a journalist's naughty list.

How to avoid making this mistake: If they plan to work with you, they will get back to you, so cool your jets.

And many journalists may not need your angle now, but they might remember your oh-so-relevant story later down the line – so long as you don't burn the bridge first.

You may have the perfect spin and the most interesting take on a subject, but if you are not speaking from a place of industry authority, a journalist is not going to publish you. If they are writing an article on, for example, a recent NASA launch and you provide them a detailed, well-constructed Space Thought but your credentials are Bob Windmere, Chief Balloon Officer at Clown Party Supply? Sorry, Bob, you failed to position yourself as an aeronautical industry expert and have disappointed the journalist, yourself, the clowning industry, and space.

How to avoid making this mistake: You don't need to comment on everything! Read the room, and only pipe up when you have something valuable to add from a point of expertise.

Other common PR pitching mistakes mentioned by our communications sources include:

• Poorly timing outreach (pitching too early or too late)
• Incomplete pitches (missing details and media assets)
• Lacking strategy
• Poor communication (speling erors, bad formatting, not following requested submission rubrics)
• Being inauthentic

There's no sure-fire way to bypass the hard work of getting quality media coverage. It takes research, relationship building, effort, and strategy. But the above-mentioned PR outreach tips, and outreach template, certainly aren't going to hurt.

You can make your life easier, though, by using the right tools. Prezly won't sell you media lists or do the research for you, but we can help you craft perfect pitches, host professional newsrooms, and send effortless campaigns – all from one intuitive tool. Want to try it out yourself for free? 👇