How to engage with journalists to get the best coverage

Above the noise

The average journalist now creates 10 piece of content a week. That why they’re more time poor than ever before. It’s why it’s harder than ever before for PR professionals to build and maintain relationships and get responses from journalists. Lookatmedia™ is an out-of-the-box SaaS solution designed to help your organisation foster more productive relationships with journalists.

Here’s a few tips on how you can use Lookatmedia™ to engage with journalists to get the best coverage.

Grab journalists’ attention

Ever flicked through a news feed looking for an image or headline that catches your attention? Journalists do the same thing when deciding what to cover. When you send a Media Release, it needs a headline and lead to capture a journalist attention…but that’s just the start of the process.

Most Media Releases provide a link to a folder of images and other resources as support. The problem is this is not enough if you want to keep a connection with a journalist. You can create a Media Release in Lookatmedia™, publish online and link it to fully illustrated articles. You can also provide links to pre-approved images and video in your Lookatmedia™ Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. You can also manage and provide all of the other assets and access a journalist needs.

Write something new

It’s a failure of imagination to think that journalists have fully formed storylines in mind after reading a Media Release. Sometimes they need a helping hand to get the ball rolling. Lookatmedia™ makes it practical and easy (and even enjoyable) for your PR team to create, illustrate and publish multiple storylines on the same subjects. By doing this, you offer journalists a ‘menu’ of storylines and ideas to explore, inspiring them to cover subjects with a fresh perspective and compelling visual content.

Understanding your target audience

Just as you have profiles of customer types, you need profiles of journalists and media groups. Lookatmedia™ provides you with a path do that. To access content like images and video from your Lookatmedia™ centre, journalist and media representatives need first to register. Once registered Lookatmedia™ allows you to track and audit the content downloaded by individual journalists. This reporting provides you with an opportunity to understand the needs of individual journalists. It also highlights the most popular content, guiding future content strategies. Over time it allows you develop your own categorisations of journalists, enabling your team to improve the targeting of your media engagement.

Accuracy

The difference between a journalist and an influencer is an attention to accuracy. Journalists need accurate content to research and publish. Their credibility is built on accuracy. Lookatmedia™ was designed as a resource for serious journalism.

Lookatmedia™ provides you with an enterprise wide, full featured Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. It allows those in your organisation responsible for the management of images and video to add accurate titles and descriptions, attributions, and usage rights.

When your PR team illustrates articles in your Lookatmedia™ centre , smart workflows allow them to access and download images, videos and their titles, descriptions, and attributions directly from your DAM into articles. This information can then be updated for editorial use.

Other resources

What’s the substance behind a Media Release or article your PR team creates?  Do you have reports and stats to support your supposition? If you do, then Lookatmedia™ provides you with a safe place to publish and manage this content Lookatmedia™ allows your team to create and link Media Release, news, events, and story ideas to other content. It’s a complete media ecosystem that allows journalists to manage their own content discovery journeys and unearth all they need to research and write content. They can even take their own self-guided tours of pre-approved images and video to discover additional resources to illustrate their stories.

Soft sell

The days of hard selling to journalists have gone the way of the dodo. If a journalist hasn’t responded to a media release, it’s because they’re too busy...or not interested in the content of your email. If a journalist doesn't know who you are or hasn’t heard from you in a while, pushing too hard can result in you being placed on a blacklist in their email folders.

The best response is to develop and implement a new media engagement strategy that incentivizes journalists to come to you.

Send out your Media releases and back them up with your new Lookatmedia™ centre. Once they’ve visited your new media centre for the first time, they will understand the depth and substance of your offer, inspiring them to visit again and again. It’s how you build more productive relationships with journalists.