What I have learned about pitching

⌛ By Isabella Mershon ⌛

Since the release of Kaylin’s book Healing Your Heart: A Prompted Journal for Pregnancy Loss, I have been working on outreaching to media outlets on behalf of Kaylin. This was my first time pitching anything to media outlets, so it was all very new to me. From Kaylin’s tips, researching, and my own experience, I have learned a lot about the process of pitching. 

STEP ONE

The first step to pitching is finding out who to pitch to. Depending on what you are pitching will affect who you pitch to. For example, I wouldn’t pitch Healing Your Heart to a sports reporter. For Healing Your Heart, we are outreaching to local, regional, parenting podcasts/websites/magazines, and general mental health outlets. To help make the pitching process seamless, I use a master directory of all of the local news outlets that Hourglass Media has to find reporters and their contact information. Once you find the right contacts for your pitch, it is time to craft your pitch. When you are writing pitches, you want to get the reporters’ attention. For a project as specific as Kaylin’s book, you don’t want the email to sound generic — like you sent it to a lot of reporters at once. You want the pitch to be specific and include what your end goal in mind is in terms of the reporter. Also, before writing the pitches for Healing Your Heart, I would research the reporter and their past work first. This way, when I wrote each pitch, I included personalized information so they knew it was not a spam message. 

STEP TWO

Once I am ready to start writing the pitch, I start by writing a general template that I will later alter for each individual. This way, I can stay on target with each pitch while also personalizing them. For the pitch, I make sure to start with a hook statement. That way, the reader will be intrigued and want to continue reading. Then, I write the pitch in a storytelling way. This is another approach I use to keep the reader engaged. In the conclusion of the pitch, I include a “call to action” — in other words, what I want the reporter to do. This could be an interview, a story, etc. Lastly, I conclude the pitch with my contact information and a salutation. For pitches, I like them to be short — approximately four paragraphs long — and not include flowery language. I do this because I do not want the media outlet to have to read a long pitch with lots of “fluff”, but instead read a short and concise pitch. This improves your chances of them reading the entirety of your pitch. Lastly, for the Healing Your Heart pitches, I include a Google Drive link to the assets or have a couple of attachments. I do this to give the media outlet the information they need, but not include too many attachments to where it is too cumbersome for the person’s inbox.

STEP THREE

After I send the pitch, I wait around a week to see if I hear a response. If I do not hear a response, then I will send a follow-up email to ensure that my email did not go to a spam box or that my message did not get overlooked. If I do not hear back in another week, I will try to reach out again either by a phone call if I have their number or by emailing them one last time. If I do not hear back from them after that, then I look for another media outlet to pitch to. At this stage, a lack of response usually means that the reporter is likely not interested in running a feature centered on my pitch. This is valuable feedback that could allow us to fine tune the pitch a little more. 

IN CONCLUSION

Since I started pitching for Healing Your Heart, I learned I really enjoy this process. When I first began pitching, it was intimidating to me, because I had never done it previously. Now, I have learned a lot about the process. To start, I like to research and organize information which is super helpful when pitching. I researched many media outlets and organized my findings into documents and spreadsheets. This is an important aspect of pitching, because you don’t want to accidentally send the wrong information to an outlet that was meant for someone else, you don’t want to forget to send information to an outlet, etc. Also, something that I learned was crucial in this process is to not get discouraged. You might send ten pitches and only hear back from one person, and that is okay. Your project won’t be a good fit for every media outlet, so if you do not hear back or receive a denial do not take it personally. Eventually, you will find an outlet that is a great fit for you and your project.

Isabella Mershon is a senior at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. She hopes that her drive along with her passion for leadership and advocacy will help promote success in her career and make a difference in the lives of those around her. Connect with her on LinkedIn!