How Winning an Award Helped Us Refine Our Outreach

It was 6:30 p.m. on a Friday and I was getting ready to unwind from a long workweek. I traded my email for a Spotify playlist and cracked my first beer of the night. All was right with the world.

Then I received an unexpected call from our company owner.

Me: Hey, what’s up?

Owner: Sorry to bother you on a Friday, but do you remember that Google award we nominated ourselves for a month ago?

Me: The one for the Google Virtual Tours? Yeah, why?

Owner: I just got off the phone with a Google representative. We just won the 2014 PR/Marketing award. In January, we’re flying out to the Googleplex to accept.

The background

For the past two years, our company has been involved with the Google Business View program. Essentially, it’s an extension of Google Street View that makes 360-degree virtual tours of brick-and-mortar businesses available. We send a photographer to take panoramic photos of a business location, piece the photography together, and then upload the tour to Google. The tour then loads next to their business listing in Google search results. Searchers can use the tour to virtually walk into the business and take a look around.

Here’s a screenshot of the one we did for a local restaurant:

(If you’re interested in learning more about Google Virtual Tours, you can read about the program on Google’s site.)

It’s important to note that the program is still in its infancy. While business owners familiar with the program are super enthusiastic about it, there’s still a large lack of awareness regarding the service.

To raise awareness and position ourselves as virtual tour experts, we launched a full-scale PR campaign in July of 2014. We pitched our story of taking Google Street View inside businesses to all the major newspapers, magazines, and blogs in our city, Pittsburgh (go Steelers!).

The results were wildly successful. The majority of local news outlets picked up our story, and one of the city’s largest newspapers even gave it it a front page spot.

After we wrapped up the campaign, we were offered a chance to nominate ourselves for the 2014 Google Virtual Tour PR/Marketing award… the rest is history.

The pitch

In hindsight, what I think the success of the campaign really boiled down to was the strength of our pitch. We already knew that our story was newsworthy and it was our job to make sure it got in front of the right eyes. This meant perfecting our outreach. It took some trial and error, but here are our five biggest takeaways from going through the entire process.

1. 'Journalists are inherently lazy'

Our campaign wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without the help of a journalism consultant. During our meetings, the concept she kept drilling into our heads was that “journalists are inherently lazy”.

To clarify, this doesn’t mean they’re lazy people. It simply meant it’s our job to make things as easy as possible for them. Every single day of their lives, they’re tasked to come up with new content that’s going to draw readers to keep them one step above their competitors.

The key here is to frame your pitch as you doing the work for them. Ask them to do as little work as possible.

You can do this in the following ways:

• Bring the story to them
• Provide answers to all their questions
• Offer to get quotes and interviews from your customers for the human-interest side
• Find a quote from another topic expert (universities can be great for this)
• Be as responsive as possible throughout your engagement

The less work journalists have to do to cover your story, the more likely your story will be picked up. I believe this mantra sets the framework for the steps that follow.

2. Keep media pitches short and simple

And I mean short. According to PR expert Michael Smart, media pitches should be no longer than 150 words.

Why keep pitches so short?

This ties back into making their jobs easier. Journalists, especially at major publications, are used to pouring through around 100 email pitches a day. To put it simply, they don’t have the time to read through your entire 1,000-word email pitch. It’s best to keep your outreach as clear and concise as possible. Here’s an example of how short and simple we kept the pitches we sent out:

Hello,

My name is Chris Long and I work for ProFromGo Internet Marketing. Recently, we have been a part of the Google Business View initiative that allows local small business owners to have 360-degree virtual tours of their business uploaded to Google Street View.

For more information about the program and an example tour, you can read our blog post at ...

It’s a little longer than recommended, but you get the point. More isn’t necessarily better.

3. Attack both general and individual inboxes

When digging around a media outlet's website for contact information, you’re often going to find two different types of email addresses:

1. A general inbox for all news pitches. (For major news outlets, these are often called “Assignment Desks”.)
2. Inboxes for individual journalists

It’s crucial to send your pitches to both the general and individual inboxes to increase your chances of publishers finding your story. To find the best individual reporters, you may have to do a little searching, but it’s well worth the 30-minute investment of your time. You’ll need to figure out which topics they are predisposed to cover.

To do this, we used this search query to figure out which journalists have written about our topic area:

site:domain.com “content keyword”

Often, the topic expert might pass up your story. Sending it to the general inbox as well gives all reporters at that particular publication to take a look at your pitch. In fact, we received some of our best coverage from publishers who picked our story up from the general inbox.

Also, make sure you’re monitoring your outreach in a Google Doc or—even better—using an outreach management tool like BuzzStream. You don’t want to forget whom you’ve contacted, and end up reaching out to the same people twice without changing up your message.

4. Find your subject line’s spin

Even though we knew we had an interesting story to tell, we understood it would be wasted without a proper spin. As mentioned above, journalists are used to getting bombarded with pitches every single day so a subject line that took you one minute to think up isn’t going to cut it.

The headline must count.

Much like creating a great blog headline, your subject line needs to be something that’s going to immediately draw the journalist’s attention.

While it was technically our company who was intended to be the focal point of the story, we knew that our brand name wasn’t recognizable enough to entice reporters. Instead, we decided to leverage Google’s brand equity.

Our subject line ended up looking something like this:

We swallowed our pride and championed Google as the hero of the story because we understood that would generate reader interest. This came at the expense of leaving our brand name out of the headline entirely. It’s absolutely imperative to take a step back and reframe the story in a way that’s going to make someone want to click.

5. Persistence, persistence, persistence (pays off)

It was easy to get discouraged when no one responded to our first round of outreach. However, we didn’t give up after pitching each publisher once. It took multiple attempts until most got wind of what we were doing.

Once again, many publishers see a lot of pitches per day. It’s entirely possible that your message may be a perfectly good story, but just gets lost in translation.

Don’t give up.

Try sending your outreach at a different day and time the next week. If that doesn’t work, consider cutting down the message length, giving your title a different spin, or reaching out to different reporters.

Still not getting a response? Sometimes the phone can be your best outreach tool.

As long as you’re not bombarding them numerous times a week, it's okay to send multiple iterations of your message to your outreach contacts.

The wrap-up

Good outreach doesn’t have to be difficult. In a lot of ways, good outreach is very similar to good content marketing. A good pitch provides reporters with content that’s going to answer this question for them: “Which stories should I cover today?” By making their jobs as easy as possible, you’re going to have a leg up on competitors who don’t share the same philosophy.

Good luck with your outreach, and happy pitching!