How to Land Press Coverage for Your Business? Here Are Six Tips

I first stumbled into media relations by eating at Maxie’s Delicatessen with my dad every Saturday. We started to sit with the owner, and I told him I started a marketing agency during my sophomore year at Babson College. So, he hired me to help get new customers.

I was up front with the owner at the time that I didn’t have a lot of experience yet, but I knew Maxie’s had a fantastic story. It was marking its 30th year as a community deli that had become a common gathering spot for locals in nearby towns. So, I put together a plan to get Maxie’s story into the local newspaper.

I knew how to write a press release and source reporters. So, I created a one-page story about the deli, started looking for reporters who wrote about similar stories, and sent them an email. I got a couple of replies, and a couple weeks later, Maxie’s Delicatessen had a half-page story in The Boston Globe and a front-page feature on the Daily Voice website.

The line to get in Maxie’s was out the door.

That’s when I realized my company, Build You Marketing, could truly provide value to businesses and entrepreneurs by helping them get into the news. Since then, we’ve been able to work with businesses across the United States, including Hawaii, Michigan, Virginia, and Massachusetts, to land features in outlets such as Entrepreneur, CNBC, Business Insider, WCBV-TV, The Boston Globe, and many more.

Here are six tips you can use today to land press coverage for your business:

1. Why Now? Why This Story?

Before you pitch anything, you have to answer two questions a reporter will immediately ask.

The first is “Why now?” A reporter needs a reason your story is relevant to their audience now. For example, it could be the month of your company anniversary, related to a current event, or appropriate for the time of year. The second is “Why this story?” Your story needs to genuinely be unique. You need reporters to be wowed by the headline. If you can’t provide a wow factor for your story in one line, a reporter won’t be intrigued.

A simple way to pressure-test your story is to run it through the seven factors of newsworthiness: impact, timeliness, proximity, prominence, conflict, human interest, and novelty. The strongest stories typically check several of these boxes, not just one, making them much more compelling to reporters.

2. Keep the Story to a Single Page

Reporters are buried in pitches so they don’t have the time to read five pages about your story. Your press release should never run longer than a page, and it should be built so the most important information comes first.

The official terminology for this is the “inverted pyramid. Lead with your most newsworthy fact, then the who, what, when, and why it matters, and save the backstory and the nice-to-know details for the end. The test I use: If a reporter read only my first two sentences and stopped there, would they still understand exactly why this story matters? If the answer is no, I go back and rewrite the top.

3. Find Reporters Who Wrote Similar Stories

Reporters always are looking for good stories. They need to hit their story quota and will rely on inbound pitches for some of those pieces. However, it has to be aligned with their “beat” (the industry/topic they cover). One of the most common mistakes I see is business owners blasting a press release to every reporter email address they can find. The better move is to find the handful of reporters who already cover stories like yours.

Start by writing your own headline, then search for similar ones: Google for comparable stories and themes, ask Claude or ChatGPT to find similar articles, dig through the archives of outlets in regions that make geographic sense for your business by keyword. Somebody has almost certainly written about something adjacent to what you’re pitching, and those are the people who will care about it and have an audience that will care, too.

4. Build a Relationship Before You Pitch

Once you’ve got your target reporters, warm up the relationship before sending them any sort of pitch. Find them on social media and engage with their work (comment, like, reshare, etc.). Reporters notice the people who read what they write, and it makes them feel good.

One warning, though: Don’t overdo it. Engaging on every single post the moment it goes up makes you seem disingenuous. I’d keep it to about once a week, and only on new posts. You’re going for subtle name recognition, so that when your pitch shows up, they think to themselves, “Oh, I recognize that name.”

5. Start Small and Build Up

People might not love me for this piece of advice but resist the urge to swing for a feature from a national outlet on day one. Start by getting featured in smaller outlets such as on podcasts, self-submit sites, or hyper-local press. You can then leverage those pieces in your pitch to larger outlets to show that you have early traction. That way, a reporter can trust that there is some level of interest in your story.

6. Follow Up More Than Once

Journalists receive hundreds of pitches every single day. Trust me, I was out to dinner with a reporter connection of ours, and he showed me the absurd amount of emails he receives each day. A single email almost never lands the story.

I plan for a sequence of four touches: the initial pitch email, two simple follow-ups, and a final check-in that literally says, “Just thought I’d check in one last time.” That last email is when we receive most of our replies. Keep each email short, all on the same thread, and reattach the press release every time so the reporter never has to go hunting for it. And, sometimes, if I am really confident a story would be a fit for a reporter, I will reach out to them on social media as well.

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Jake Ross ’24 is the CEO and founder of Build You Marketing and a graduate of Babson College,