How to Craft the Perfect PR Pitch: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let me walk you through how to write a PR pitch.

Should you call or email the journalist? 

Calling or email­ing is a hot potato that most journ­al­ists and many pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sion­als will recom­mend — email­ing. Still, this doesn’t mean that mak­ing a phone call won’t some­times work bet­ter. ¹Among digit­al PR pro­fes­sion­als sur­veyed, 94% said indi­vidu­al emails are still the most effect­ive pitch­ing to journ­al­ists. Among journ­al­ists sur­veyed, 93% said 1:1 emails are the best way to pitch.

Put it like this: If you know that the journ­al­ist is a “phone per­son,” that the tim­ing is good, and that your pitch is urgent enough, by all means, go ahead and make a call instead.

In any case, you should write your pitch down.
Aim for no more than half a page in length.

Let’s get to writ­ing that PR pitch, shall we?

How to Compose a PR Pitch

Start simple: Always intro­duce your­self, cla­ri­fy your affil­i­ation, and ask per­mis­sion to state your business.

My name is Jerry Silfwer, I work at Spin Factory, and I’m [calling/​writing] on behalf of ACME Chemicals. I have a news story about chem­ic­al plants fail­ing to meet envir­on­ment­al- and safety reg­u­la­tions. Would this be a good time to hear me out?

Already at the get-go, I’m clearly stat­ing that I will pitch a news story.

My object­ive is to bring atten­tion to the fact that my cli­ent has gone to great lengths to com­ply with gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions. This is, how­ever, not news.

However, what does this imply if my cli­ent is the only chem­ic­al com­pany to com­ply with the new reg­u­la­tions? It means that all of their com­pet­it­ors are non-com­pli­ant. And that is news.

If the journ­al­ists agree to hear you out, go ahead and frame the conflict:

Two hun­dred forty-one chem­ic­al plants are oper­at­ing in Sweden. According to an unpub­lished paper here in my hand, only 62 are liv­ing up to the government’s new envir­on­ment­al reg­u­la­tions last year. In oth­er words: 3 of 4 of all chem­ic­al plants in Sweden might be haz­ard­ous to the people liv­ing or work­ing near them.

At this point, the journ­al­ist might be ready to jump in. How haz­ard­ous are these plants? Why are they dan­ger­ous? What kind of evid­ence do I have to back my claim up?

In any case, it’s time to pos­i­tion your spokes­per­son:

In light of these dis­turb­ing fig­ures, would you be inter­ested in get­ting your hands on these doc­u­ments and talk­ing exclus­ively with Dr Mary Samsonite at ACME Chemicals about:

— How haz­ard­ous are these plants?
— Where are these poten­tially haz­ard­ous plants situ­ated?
— Why is there no gov­ern­ment­al over­sight to force them to comply?

Once again, the focus is 100% on the news story still. 

Sometimes you can offer exclus­iv­ity; some­times, you can’t. Even though I could come up with 20 rel­ev­ant ques­tions to sug­gest, I kept it to three to cla­ri­fy the pitch.

If you get a straight no, then that’s fine. It hap­pens. If you get a yes or a maybe, you move on with the final part of your writ­ten pitch:

If you’re inter­ested, Dr Mary Samsonite has agreed to meet with you and a pho­to­graph­er on Wednesday at 2 pm or Thursday at 10 am this week. Would any of those slots work for you?

I’m aggress­ively sug­gest­ing a phys­ic­al meet­ing in this fic­ti­tious example, but it depends on the pitch and the con­text. In times of Covid-19, for instance, I’m more likely to pro­pose a Zoom interview.

Now, let’s look at the writ­ten PR pitch as a whole:

My name is Jerry Silfwer, I work at Spin Factory, and I’m [calling/​writing] on behalf of ACME Chemicals. I have a news story about chem­ic­al plants fail­ing to meet envir­on­ment­al- and safety reg­u­la­tions. Would this be a good time to hear me out?

Two hun­dred forty-one chem­ic­al plants are oper­at­ing in Sweden. According to an unpub­lished paper here in my hand, only 62 are liv­ing up to the government’s new envir­on­ment­al reg­u­la­tions last year. In oth­er words: 3 of 4 of all chem­ic­al plants in Sweden might be haz­ard­ous to the people liv­ing or work­ing near them.

In light of these dis­turb­ing fig­ures, would you be inter­ested in get­ting your hands on these doc­u­ments and talk­ing exclus­ively with Dr Mary Samsonite at ACME Chemicals about:

— How haz­ard­ous are these plants?
— Where are these poten­tially haz­ard­ous plants situ­ated?
— Why is there no gov­ern­ment­al over­sight to force them to com­ply?

If you’re inter­ested, Dr Mary Samsonite has agreed to meet with you and a pho­to­graph­er on Wednesday at 2 pm or Thursday at 10 am this week. Would any of those slots work for you?

At this point, allow me to take us a step back and appre­ci­ate what’s going on here from the per­spect­ive of the PR client:

Preparing Your PR Pitch

No, ACME Chemicals prob­ably nev­er asked me to pitch a story about poten­tially dan­ger­ous chem­ic­al plants in Sweden: 

This whole thing prob­ably star­ted in a con­fer­ence room where the CEO was brag­ging to me about how they “ran the only chem­ic­al plants in the coun­try in com­pli­ance with the government’s new stricter regulations.”

So, before pitch­ing the report­er, here’s some of the work that I had to do to get the PR pitch into usable shape:

Step 1. When I signed an NDA (non-dis­clos­ure agree­ment), I had to explain to the CEO that ACME Chemical’s reg­u­lat­ory excel­lence is excel­lent but not news.

Step 2. I had to run a study for data or find a way to extract fac­tu­al evid­ence to sup­port and con­firm the claim that zero oth­er chem­ic­al plants in Sweden com­ply with the regulations.

Step 3. With con­firm­a­tion, I had to talk to an expert to learn what non-com­pli­ance in this con­text means in terms of real risks.

Step 4. I had to vet and pre­pare an in-house expert spokes­per­son — the CEO is cred­ible when it comes to busi­ness mat­ters but not mat­ters of advanced chemistry.

Step 5. I wrote the PR pitch (and often also a press release) and got cli­ent approv­al. And yes, cli­ent approv­al can some­times take weeks!

In media rela­tions, pitch­ing the story to a journ­al­ist is not a cru­cial part of the job. The essen­tial part of the job is to identi­fy rel­ev­ant cor­por­ate stor­ies and turn them into the news. That’s where most of my effort is spent.

As for writ­ing the pitch, per­son­al­isa­tion is vital. Your pit should nev­er sound like a tem­plate. ²The most cited reas­on among journ­al­ists for reject­ing a pitch was the lack of per­son­al­isa­tion (Muck Rack, 2020).

Some organ­isa­tions find the concept of news­wor­thi­ness uncom­fort­able. If they’re adam­ant about only brag­ging about how great they are, politely sug­gest they take out an ad. In an ad, they’ll get to say whatever they want.

Or — and this is often an excel­lent option for cor­por­ate suc­cess stor­ies — con­vince the organ­isa­tion to tar­get a trade- or busi­ness ver­tic­al instead.