Henry Stimpson’s PR and Marketing Tips
Fall 2006

Targeted Pitches or Broad Blasts?

Some PR mavens say you should send only targeted pitches to the media. Study your target and develop a pitch that’s tailored to an individual reporter, editor or broadcaster. They claim that’s the best way of ensuring that your message will rise above the deluge of emails and phone calls inundating the media.

Hard to argue with that. Targeted pitches work extraordinarily well.

The ultimate targeted pitch is when you respond to a reporter requesting an expert via ProfNet—an invaluable resource for the media and PR people. Here, you know exactly what the reporter is looking for and you can hone your pitch precisely. (Amazingly, many reporters say they get dozens of irrelevant responses to their ProfNet requests.)

But targeted pitches are only half of the equation.

Broad blasts—mass-distributed news releases and story ideas—are equally valuable. Most news releases should be distributed to a carefully selected media list and sent out via a wire service, which will give it great exposure on the Web and get your message directly to your audience without being filtered by the media.

Targeted pitches and broad blasts should build on each other. A reporter will probably pay more attention to your email or call if he or she already has some knowledge of your organization because of prior news releases. And broadly distributed news releases and story ideas gain more traction with reporters you’ve personally pitched in the past.

Targeted pitches or broad blasts? The answer is “yes.”



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Henry@StimpsonCommunications.com
508-647-0705


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