How To Get Your Press Release Noticed

  📍 As long as it’s good news, there isn’t a business owner in the world who wouldn’t want their company or product to be featured in the press. But with journalists receiving scores of cold pitches every day and responding to only a tiny fraction of them, it’s often an aspiration that remains unfulfilled, which is why I’m so pleased to be joined by Natalie Sutton, a freelance PR and fractional communications leader to discuss how businesses can achieve cutthroat with the press.

Natalie, welcome to the podcast. Great to see you again. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Natalie, just to kick things off, could you give a bit of an introduction to who you are, what you do, who your clients are and how you ended up working freelance? Indeed. I’ve been in communications for about 30 years.

I, I started my career in radio, but quickly moved to working in PR, and I have worked in house and agency side for a number of years and held sort of comms director level roles for global technology firms. I started in consumer, but I’ve been in tech PR now for about 25 years.

I have, grown an agency and sold an agency and, talking on the freelance topic.

I started working freelance when my kids were very young, a very long time ago. And, quickly got asked by people to take on projects that were too big for one person to do alone from a bandwidth point of view and started then hiring in other freelancers to work alongside me. And, I think it’s been a compelling model ever since.

I think it’s particularly relevant in today’s economy when budgets are very taxing, yet people need high level consultancy. Particularly in the tech sector, we have a lot of scale ups and start ups, and they need that heavyweight consultancy, but don’t always have the budget to hire the big global agencies to support them.

And they probably don’t need that person to be a full time hire either. Exactly that. Very right indeed. And if they did hire that person as a full time hire, that person doesn’t want to be down in the trenches doing the nitty gritty, sending out newsletter emails and stuff like that. Absolutely. I did notice on your LinkedIn profile, one of the roles that you’ve held previously, you were the director of global comms for IFS.

So that’s, that’s a serious role in a serious organisation. Absolutely. And, and I think the principles of great communications are the same, whether your agency or in house. it is often about making sure that resources are well aligned, that they are supported and nurtured. I have served as an interim or fractional communications leader, and I’ve worked, as a full time PAYE employee as well.

It’s, just great fun either way you do it. I think it’s a really interesting point to highlight because I think a lot of business leaders, a lot of recruiters, a lot of people maybe running marketing functions in their organization operate on the mindset of a freelancer is somebody that you can get on Fiverr.

And you pay them a few dollars an hour and they’ll produce something that’s probably passable as something that they’ve designed on Canva or something like that. But in reality, it is also possible to hire really senior, very accomplished, high caliber people on a freelance basis as well. Absolutely, and there’s a new trend, there’s a new phrase, called fractional.

it’s not the same as contracting, it is like hiring someone, but they’re not necessarily, like you say, full time. But sometimes you need someone to go in, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into an organisation and got things set up, but don’t necessarily stay there, like you say, to roll out the nitty gritty of it.

yeah. Is there anything in your previous role, you mentioned that you had started and scaled an agency and then subsequently sold it. Is there anything you miss from agency life? I still get it. Doing what I’m doing now, I’m still effectively enjoying all that side of it. I think sometimes you miss, physical interaction, face to face interaction with people, especially for people like me who are, very people orientated.

So I think you just have to manage yourself well, in terms of making sure you still go out and about to, meet people. I’m doing that all the time. After this, I’m going to meet another freelancer, today and I go and work offsite in, in workspaces and sit down with other former colleagues and other freelancers, to share ideas.

And, I think it’s great to connect with people like you. and have a network of freelancers that aren’t necessarily PR people, but are in related fields. that way you can collaborate and brainstorm and, still do great work and get that variety. Energetic connections as well. I’m, I am less inclined to, the social aspect of work, and I have to force myself to do it.

And when I do. I actually really enjoy it. I do find it energizing, but at the same time, it’s, for me, it’s in small doses. And I think that for me being freelance, that’s one of the benefits is I can pick and choose. I’m not being forced into an office for five days a week. Yeah. I think it has to be in small doses, because generally we’re very busy

Yeah. There’s that as well. There’s that as well. Yeah, absolutely. look, thank you for that introduction. The, theme for the episode is about achieving cut through for your press activity, to, set the scene. Why is it you think that, it’s so challenging for organizations to achieve in the first place?

I think let’s just look at the scale of the problem when I was first working in public relations and I was, if I was pitching for a piece of business, I was first having to convince people to do PR because it was such a relatively new, discipline, but when I first started doing PR, there was no such thing as a PR degree.

now everybody’s doing it. Not everybody’s doing it very well. Journalists. journalists are, overwhelmed. the number of, staffers on certain publications is, down, they are receiving 20 to 30 cold pitches per day, some upwards of 50. average statistics and journalists respond to about 3%.

In some ways that’s good for my industry because it really sorts the wheat from the chaff. you have to be, skilled at what you do in order to be successful. Yeah. Okay. So that’s really useful to understand the scale of the problem. And I would assume, not that I’ve worked in PR, but I would assume if we were to wind the clock back 20 30 years, it’s probably got more and more challenging as time’s gone on because there’s just more technology available to automate bad press activity.

So just, it’s possible for me, if I wanted to, send out a thousand press releases today, and it wouldn’t take me very long. I probably wouldn’t get very much out of it. Believe me, some companies are. I think we’re also Seeing the rise of SEO agencies posing as PR companies and blurring that line.

And I, in conversations I have with journalists and I’m admin of a, few kind of networking groups with tech journalists, this is a common complaint that the, that people, are doing all sorts of naughty things with, trying to guarantee paid coverage, but actually these people are SEO agencies, not PR companies.

Oh, interesting. Interesting. let’s imagine you’ve started working with a brand new client. they’ve given you the brief and that they want to achieve, some press coverage. Where, is it that you would start with them? I think the first thing to do is about setting very clear objectives because, after all, this is how we’re going to measure the cut through that we’re here to talk about.

I know this sounds like a such an obvious kind of place to start, but you’d be surprised at the number of organizations that either don’t do this or think they have and actually haven’t. and that’s because not everybody, understands how to connect, public relations or communications activity with their commercial imperatives.

So this needs to be really specific, 20 percent of growth year on year in a particular geography, that sort of thing. really, we need to, as PR people, be asking all the right questions. What are your hurdles? What is it you need to achieve? Is it lacking credibility or brand equity?

Is it, that you need to, if you need to sell more, how? Do you need a bigger ecosystem? Do you need more business from your existing ecosystem? et cetera, et cetera. So understanding this. really helps us target the communications really effective. If your business objective is to go to IPO in the next two or three years, if it is to, support organic sales growth, reposition a new offering, rebrand, try to get acquired then the PR tools that we would implement.

would be very different. And, we need to be effective at achieving those objectives. and that’s what we mean by getting the cut through as well. I think, in my experience, and again, I want to carry out this with, I’ve not ever worked in PR, but I have, employed people to do PR for companies that I’ve worked with.

there, my feeling is there needs to be a bit of give and take. And I suppose that’s where setting the objectives and agreeing the objectives from the outcome. starts off. So the example that springs to mind with that give and take is, I used to work in house for a software company targeting HR professionals.

There’s loads of publications, some of them online, some of them were still in print at the time. They probably all have very similar audiences. When you look at their media pack, you go, okay, fine, they’re all comparable. The reality is the perception of It’s very, different because they, are a chartered body.

all qualified HR professionals will be members of the CIPD and they produce a magazine called People Management every single month. Getting coverage in that magazine Even though the audience might be very similar was worth substantially more than getting it in one of their competitor magazines as well.

and some of the people that we worked with struggled to wrap their head around that, to some extent. I think when it comes to the commercial imperatives as well, there needs to be a bit of give and take from the client side too. because. I am of the belief, you by all means challenge me on this, I’m of the belief it’s really tough, in fact probably impossible for a business of any complexity to be able to tie down the results of anything in marketing very much to one particular activity.

Usually it’s the sum of the parts. now there are business leaders who don’t operate that way or think that the world is entirely measurable in every single factor and it’s challenging. And I don’t know what the solution is other than sometimes you just as the client need to accept, we’re just doing the right thing.

And we would expect this to help us to achieve our wider goals. You’re so right. it’s one of those, PR, I think of everything in the marketing mix is possibly the thing that’s hardest to measure. And that’s why having very clear objectives, and therefore activities sitting under, those of those pillars is really important because we can measure.

What we set out to do and the activity we targeted, whilst we like clients to come to us and say, this is my challenge rather than go do this task. Yeah. let’s co create the solution. you’re right in terms of, of media targeting, but actually if you really consult with a PR person, they’re going to look at the entire media landscape, not just, from geography to geography, but different channels.

It’s not just about printed or online publications, not anymore. sometimes in the communications mix, you’ve got everything from social media to video channels to podcasts, and so on and so forth and different tiers of media. So you would have HR media, But, for example, you might have, a CEO who’s new in role.

And, part of the objective is to give him or her the credibility they need in their role. And so we’re going to be targeting business media. tier one, broadcast media and, I’ve had, this recently where we were on BBC click and TV coverage, et cetera, et cetera.

The value of that is like you say, outweighs a lot of the, trade publication placements that we’re doing day in and day out and, the bylines and so on. And whilst PR is a very top of funnel activity to back to your point about, measurability, it can be linked back sometimes, it happened literally a couple of weeks ago.

I had a conversation where some of the sort of tier one coverage we got around a, a project at the end of the year actually resulted in somebody picking up the phone and placing order. that’s anecdotal feedback. That’s so incredibly difficult for us to actually track. But what we can do increasingly is track digital channels.

So if we are creating high value content, whether that’s, reports, surveys, extended white papers, working with economists to, come up with sexy data that’s gated content, or, we can measure web traffic and, use that in our feedback systems to refine what we’re doing.

All makes sense. So you’ve touched on this already, but a bit about knowing your audience and how you might tweak things depending on, I suppose the objectives, but also who it is that you’re trying to influence and reach. Yeah, that’s, that’s the second great point to make is. Get really clear on who it is you’re targeting because that way we can measure the effectiveness of what we’re doing.

I think the point here is that tailoring makes you compelling. I think if you are creating quite generic pitches and blasting them out to, different types of media, I work in tech a lot, so there’s IT press, but there’s also industry press because there might be tech for manufacturing tech for retail, et cetera, et cetera.

So You know, tailor your content, take the time to do your research, do your prep incredibly well, and, you will be much more effective in your outputs. And so for someone from my perspective that really doesn’t, have any experience in PR, when you’re talking about tailoring the pitch, what sort of things might you be tailoring it towards?

For example, if you are pitching for, to a particular journalist, it’s about, Researching them, what have they been writing about, what’s their, what sort of lens do they tend to look through, which publications are they writing for, they might be freelance, they might be, an on staff pub, journalist, what, who is the audience of that, publication, what are they motivated by, so I think one of the, One of my very early experiences in, tech PR was I went to a sort of, Institute of Public Relations event in London when I was a bit of a junior and I saw the editor of Computer Weekly speaking and he posed the audience a question, all these young PR people, what is the editor’s job?

And all sorts of things will come up, to edit, to write a thing, to, to put stories together, to commission, commission writers, et cetera, et cetera. Actually his job, as articulated by him, is to deliver an audience. And, The way he delivers an audience is by the quality and the relevance of his content.

And, so you as a PR person need to feed into his motivations. It’s how can I add value everywhere, right through the supply chain? How can I add value to the person that I’m pitching to? Yeah, I think that’s, a great approach and a great point to remember and in our prep for this conversation, Natalie, one of the points that you made was around the value of storytelling in the pictures as well.

It’d be great to hear a bit more about that. Absolutely. Incredibly powerful and I think has brought probably become more relevant than ever because the landscape in, in media relations is so incredibly noisy about, about 80 percent of our conversations fall into this category as human beings and stories can make your content up to 22 times more memorable and increased product value more than two and a half thousands, So this is incredibly powerful because we’re engaging with people’s emotions and really helping to make connections with our readers and the people we’re interacting with.

I think it’s a great opportunity to, operate beyond our product. And I think this is often the place where. Vendors, I’m thinking of tech PR most of the time here, they fall into this trap, of becoming too subjective in what they’re doing, but also becoming quite product and solution orientated to tell the story that wraps around that.

Yeah, and then, when I’m talking about storytelling, I’m not talking about success stories, i. e. case studies, where we talk about, Oh, my problem, my, my client, needed some blast software. So they bought some from us. And, then it was all good. It’s, we need to tell bigger, stories that, the really well structured stories follow one of the seven you.

basic plot kinds, plot lines, whether it’s overcoming the monster, tragedy, comedy, rags to riches, there are three acts, it really must resonate with the audience, that we’re talking about. Who’s the villain? Who are all the characters here? Who’s the villain? Who’s the hero?

and the biggest spoiler alert of all, particularly in the tech sector, the way I describe it is, if you and I were going to make a 007 movie together, You are not James Bond. Get over yourself, Mr. Vendor. we need to have like less ego, more value, please. in a James Bond movie, you are Q at best.

Do you know what I mean? we need to make the great movie, tell the great story. Yeah. It’s about equipping the hero, the customer with the tools that they need to succeed. Yeah, absolutely. have you read a book called Storybrand? I don’t think I have. Ah, it’s no, I’m gonna get some book recommendations from you later on as well.

But it, it talks in a very similar way, and why wouldn’t it? Because it’s all very closely related, but talking about the hero’s journey and that that’s a classic, plot line of just, stories that have just gone throughout history from, biblical stories all the way through to Star Wars and Harry Potter.

All tend to follow that type of curve in how they’re, telling the story and, also the journey that the hero goes on and how the guide and in, in pr, the guide being. The company, your, client, as opposed to the, the end user, we’ve got such, great platforms to tell stories these days with the digital sort of technology and various channels that we have at our disposal.

there’s, no excuse for not getting good at this. Yeah, and that’s great. So you’ve got your, your, your pitch sorted, who you’re targeting, what the objectives are. I suppose the question for you is whether the. These campaigns could ever be supported by other channels as well.

So I’m thinking like paid media to make sure that you’re getting that message, even if it’s your brand or something related in front of those journalists. consistently so that they start taking your brand seriously? Or does that sort of start blurring and muddying the lines a bit? It does blur the lines, but I think we should be blurring.

So I’m a big fan of orchestration because I, in terms of cut through, I think if we are creating peaks through the year, Where we have done some very, long range planning and really thought things through in terms of what content we’re going to do about what, on what channel, and we can orchestrate all of these things together.

We’re much more likely to get penetration than if we’re just repeating content all through the year. So it’s, Where PR integrates with marketing and marketing communications and product marketing, but also right across all the channels from social media to traditional media, blogs, social podcasts, interviews, et cetera.

I think when, we have this absolute consistency, it really underscores the messaging and really helps with cut through. Where do you stand or what’s your view on purposefully investing in relationships with people in the media? Is it something that’s valuable or is this maybe a sort of bygone era?

It’s definitely, I think, I always say to people it’s public relations, it’s media relations, it’s analyst relations for a reason. It’s a bit of a double edged sword because no journalist writes about you just because they’re your friend. You must, make room for educating so, it’s interesting when our executives are doing interviews to discover how much journalists do or don’t know about a topic and it’s not their job to be subject matter expert.

it’s your client’s job to be the subject matter expert. but also, try and, position yourself as that’s that source of credible comment. I think we need to be responsive, as sources of information, but definitely create relationships. Like quite often when I’m starting a PR program, we’re going to build a media list.

that might run to several hundred, particularly if it’s a, if it’s a global brief. but if we’re really selective, we know that there are top tier media within that list that are most important. And it does, it’s not necessarily, It doesn’t have to be BBC tier one media, to your point earlier, there might be one or two publications that carry more weight because of the, the targeting they’ve got or the following they’ve got or the engagement that they have with their media.

and we should be drawing up a, a most wanted list, who are those 10 to 20, either writers, they might be freelancers or publications that are most important to us. And over the year, Let’s do some deliberate activity to get in front of them and make great relationships with them. And for, when I’ve worked in house, that’s sometimes about, user conference once a year and, having your key media there.

It’s about giving them access to your senior level executives and building direct relationship, not just with the PR people, but with the executives themselves. whilst, whilst great relationships are really important. We must always remember that there’s not a lot that beats a well put together story or pitch or piece of content.

We must remember that the quality of the story and the quality of the pitch is probably the most important thing. Yeah, ultimately, if you could become a trusted, valuable source of information for them that just makes their job easier. Then why wouldn’t they why wouldn’t they come to you? Yeah, absolutely.

and also it’s about trying not to let them down. Because there are some very subtle things that happen in between the proactively trying to build that relationship and actually making that relationship really stick. You know if you have. If you pitch something and then don’t get back to a journalist, you’re likely to go on a bit of a blacklist.

If if you’ve got executives constantly moving things, letting people down, not meeting deadlines, etc. the converse is that it can have a negative effect as well, right? Yeah. Absolutely. when we were speaking before, you made a really interesting point about, shareable content and how you can leverage that to make sure that when you’ve got that cut through, you actually get as much value as possible out of it.

It would be great to hear a bit more about that. Absolutely. I think it’s about, when you create particularly valuable content. Let’s make sure we leverage it as, as much as we can, but also make it possible for people to share it onwards. So if you are doing things like, producing data, surveys, information, research, et cetera, et cetera, industry indexes, maybe you’ve used third parties like economists or, you’ve done, jointly funded research with partners, get it out there, make it the industry standard.

Make, I, I often look at, in a new client situation, how can I get them to own this space? What haven’t, what hasn’t anybody done yet, that, that can become the benchmark data when people are putting presentations together to talk about our sector. I really love that idea.

I also like the idea of repurposing content. So I’m doing an exercise for a client at the moment that is, we’ve produced lots of, case studies, across lots of different sectors. So they might cover, education or manufacturing or hospitality. And, actually by putting them all into a bit of a schedule, And then look, and then dicing them up by, by industry, by product or solution, by whatever.

we can actually start to story tell, by bringing lots of stories together and then go away and do a little bit of research. What’s hospitality being really challenged by right now? And actually look at some industry data and actually start to build a story through that. The lens of our customers and, end users, that’s very specific to the hospitality sector back to our tailoring point.

and so that way, and then building a whole comms plan around it. So not only, repitching to, the hospitality or facilities management type media, but looking at the additional content that we can put together based on our existing content. So is that short videos for social, et cetera, et cetera.

And building, Another content plan based on, what we understand are their, key vertical targets in, terms of where they expect most of their business to come from, over the next year or so. Love it. Thank you. Natalie, I’m going to start bringing things to a close, but before I do let you go, I am asking everybody for a book recommendation.

it’d be great to hear yours. Great. there’s a few really by, my friend, Giles Edwards, who has the, jewel distinction of, being my friend, but also, a very sort of creative, fearless, creative person. He’s done, a few now delusions of brande how, brands blow and, Adele writes an ad.

What great titles love them. So much fun. and look, Natalie, thank you so much. You’ve been a wonderful guest. You’ve provided a really useful, valuable framework for anyone who’s just trying to think about how they can start achieving better cut through for their press activity. What you’ve spoken about has been full of tons and tons of tips and advice.

So thank you so much for your time. How can people reach you after the episode? Probably best to look me up on LinkedIn. Okay. I’ll include links on the show Thanks very much. Great to meet you. All right. Thanks a lot, Natalie. Thanks everyone.