Exposure: Insider secrets to make your business a go-to authority for journalists

By Felicity Cowie and Eileen Burbidge

Have you ever seen a competitor get great headlines and thought, ‘Hey! Why wasn’t that us?’

• Get insider secrets to find out how to set your business apart and cut through the noise, using media coverage
• How to prepare your business to become a go-to authority for journalists from day one
• The end-to-end process of getting media coverage, demystified
• How to align media relations with your growth strategy and scale coverage

Included: An invaluable media relations toolkit with actionable templates, scripts and cheat sheets for transformational results

FELICITY COWIE is a media relations troubleshooter for some of the world’s leading organisations and former BBC News and Panorama journalist. She’s worked on 100,000 story pitches from both sides and now makes her insider secrets available to YOU...

"A must-read for founders. This is truly a game-changing guide" Eileen Burbidge MBE

• Language: English
• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Release date: Jun 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788603416

Felicity Cowie

Felicity Cowie is a media relations coach who empowers early-stage businesses to work with journalists to gain competitive advantage. Having been pitched at least 100,000 story ideas in 15 years as a journalist, she knows what breaks through and why, and her mission is to help new businesses collaborate effectively with newsrooms to make an impact from the start! As a journalist, she worked as a producer on the BBC's main news planning desk (for all its national and world news outlets) and was an editor of its investigative documentary series Panorama. She pioneered ‘user generated content’ across BBC News, especially on 7/7, and won two Royal Television Society Awards for her teamwork. As a media relations consultant and trainer for some of the world’s leading organisations (including the NHS, UCAS, and Virgin), she successfully pitched, and coached others to pitch, stories resulting in 1000s of pieces of media coverage.

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Introduction

‘Why wasn’t that us?’

You decide to catch up on the latest industry news and go to the media source you most respect, a newspaper, magazine or broadcast channel. Your eye (or ear) is instantly drawn to an intriguing headline. But what’s this? A competitor, or a business you’ve never heard of before, is featured prominently, showcasing how they do exactly what you do.

Your stomach contracts as the report continues with a quote from the founder. You just know you’d have said it all far better. Now the journalist is describing your rival as a ‘pioneer’, ‘market-leader’ or ‘go-to authority in this space’, basically giving them a turbocharged third-party endorsement and competitive advantage over you.

Ping! A message pops up on your screen from your key client or investor: ‘Hey, why wasn’t this us?’ with a link to the story. Aargh!

For many founders, this is the inciting incident that shifts ‘get media coverage’ from a ‘desired outcome’, which is cut and pasted from quarter to quarter (‘we really must get on that at some point’), to a priority.

With every ‘hey, why wasn’t that us?’ and repost on social media by the competitor (‘humbled and thrilled to be featured as the industry leader in the news headlines today’), the discomfort and urgency grows.

An alternative inciting incident is that a journalist approaches you out of the blue, offering your business a high-profile opportunity for exposure, but on a tight deadline. If you want to be world-class you need to show up as world-class. But how can you do this when under pressure to meet a deadline that you never saw coming?

These are very common and equally difficult points from which to start working with journalists for the first time. Why? You’re on the back foot in both situations and unlikely to have time and headspace to work out how a media agenda best fits your own direction of travel. Getting headlines and recognition for something you’re not committed to can throw your business so far off track you have to start over.

A far better plan is to start right now, with this book, on getting ready for media relations.

What is media relations?

Most businesses don’t understand media relations. They muddle it up with public relations (PR) which, in turn, gets stuck under the heading of communications, which is usually associated with marketing. For the majority of people who don’t work in any of these areas, the whole lot often feels confusing, full of ‘talkative, creative types’ inhabiting an intimidating world, which doesn’t offer a sense of belonging to them.

This book focuses solely on media relations and whilst it’s true that the ultimate purpose of media relations is to get your business in front of the public (who can be defined as anybody from existing to potential customers, to new talent or investors in your sector, to the whole world), this is done indirectly, via journalists.

So, when you work on media relations your audience isn’t the public at all but journalists.

PR and marketing happen when your business speaks directly to the public through activities that are controlled by your business.

You can design adverts and marketing campaigns and place them exactly where your own research indicates they’ll have most impact. You can create all the content on your own social media channels. You can curate your events and how you stream or report on them.

This is a fundamental difference, which is critical to acknowledge before you go anywhere near a journalist. Journalists will almost certainly have different ideas from you about what the public wants, are under no obligation to do what you ask, and newsrooms use different processes from business to gather and share information.

I define media relations as ‘working with journalists to gain unpaid news coverage’. This broad definition covers everything from:

•choosing to work with journalists, to get positive news coverage to ultimately grow your business to

•responding to journalists contacting you during an unexpected win or crisis at your organization, and getting the best news coverage you can in that situation to further boost your reputation or mitigate reputation damage, for the best impact on your business growth.

And everything in between.

How can media relations help your business?

So why bother with media relations at all? Why not de-risk how you get in front of the public and invest your money, time and energy wholly in PR? It’s an excellent question, especially when we have so many incredible tools and channels to share our own news. Long gone are the days where the only way of getting the word out about your business was via established media outlets. Now, many organizations have social media audiences that far outnumber the circulation figures of sector and even some national media.

But here are the eight mega benefits of media relations:

1. Gain exposure with zero to low financial investment

Unpaid media coverage has none of the up-front costs of advertising, marketing campaigns or events. Even social media channels, free to set up, often require budget to acquire a consistent stream of meaningful content if they’re to gain traction.

However, just one strong piece of media coverage will win you exposure to thousands if not millions of readers or viewers and is ‘evergreen’; you can showcase it on your website for years. What you do have to invest is some time in order to prepare and offer journalists something they’re willing to report on. And where you have control over your advertising, campaigns and events you have none over how journalists independently report the information you give them. For this reason it’s wise to make a financial investment in skills to help you best navigate those risks and gain the coverage you want.

However, that investment can be as little as the cost of this book! The Media Toolkit, which forms the second part of this book, includes everything you need to successfully gain exposure. And what you gain if you succeed is exposure from journalists who know how to write to engage, and in almost every media outlet more than one person will work on your story, so you gain a crack team reporting on you.

2. Build credibility

Third-party media coverage serves as outside validation and helps establish credibility for a business. Journalists know how to find holes in a story and can choose anybody to work with, so when your business is featured in a Financial Times or Bloomberg news story, this is proof you’ve stood up to their scrutiny and selection. Investors need a reason to believe in your business, and media coverage can give them this, particularly if you can demonstrate the growth of your business from your first big contract win, to partnerships signed and awards won, to transformations delivered in the real world.

When you publish content on your own channels this is always viewed as self-promotional, no matter how valuable. However, if a third party selects and includes you in their content this carries greater trustworthiness.

In Chapter 3 we’ll look at how you can select journalists and outlets most likely to be valued by the people you want your business to reach. In focusing on these targets, you increase your chances of becoming their go-to sources for news.

3. Build pipeline faster

If you’re getting all the coverage above from media outlets that are viewed and valued by your ideal customers, then you can build your pipeline much faster via these platforms, which will be far more established and far-reaching than your own nascent social media channels.

4. Get highly valuable shareable content

You can leverage media coverage to grow your own channels faster. Media coverage generates buzz because people find ‘being in the news’ or knowing somebody in the news exciting.

You can put backlinks to it on your website, ‘As featured in…’, or post it on social media with words such as ‘delighted to be joining the global conversation about [the subject of the coverage] in this news story’ and attach a screenshot or link to it. The coverage will drive up ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing and engagement on your own channels and boost search engine optimization.

Investors rely on recommendations from people in their trusted networks, so by sharing your media coverage (especially on channels such as LinkedIn) you’re maximizing opportunities for this coverage to be flagged to them within their online communities and newsletters.

This content also increases your chances of winning further engagement from journalists. In Chapter 4 we’ll look specifically at how journalists can have a ‘pack mentality’ and how you can take an initial piece of coverage in a trade or sector outlet and use it to go all the way up the ‘ladder’ to mainstream media.

5. Find product-market fit

Einstein said, ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.’ And I’d offer as a variant on this, ‘If you can’t explain it to a journalist, you haven’t understood your product-market fit well enough.’ It may be painful to experience a journalist’s blunt ‘I don’t get it’ when you attempt to pitch. However, you can take this as free consultancy!

Journalists LOVE case studies, so if you can’t provide one that’s compelling enough for a journalist this is further feedback that you’re not yet defining the problem that your product meets for the market and showing how you solve it.

In the Media Toolkit in the second part of this book you’ll find specific guidance on creating case studies that work for journalists.

6. Become a thought leader and ‘category king’

If you’re wholly focused on getting one product out to market and that fails, then your only option is to seek out more markets and hope you find your customers before your budget runs out. But if alongside your race to product-market fit you’re also getting exposure and recognition as somebody with valuable ideas or thought leadership in your space, then you become bigger than your product, which means you can test out several products until you find something that takes off. This helps you buy time if you need to, but if you’ve nailed your product-market fit this is a powerful way of communicating that you care about your customers and their worlds – you aren’t just selling to them.

You may be attempting to create not just a new product but a new category of product, to become a ‘category king’, a business that creates entirely new niches to dominate. If you’re the only person who can talk about this category and the need for it, then you can create a role for yourself as a ‘go-to’ authority for the media. To gain this traction as a ‘category king’, or ‘queen’, you need to use words that journalists will understand and amplify. This whole book shows you how to do this.

7. Get funding and more funding

All the benefits above are going to put you in a strong position to win investment.

Businesses which generated the highest amount of media coverage typically saw a 35,635% increase in their funding between Series A and Series B. Conversely, companies which generated a low level of media interest only saw modest increases in their funding – 143.6%.

(Source: Hard Numbers and CARMA, 2020)

Media coverage is evidence that you have valuable ‘vision-telling’ skills in addition to your business. As uber-venture capitalist Bill Gurley said:

The great storytellers have an unfair competitive advantage. They are going to recruit better, they will be darlings in the press, they are going to raise money more easily and at higher prices, they are going to close amazing business developer partnerships and they are going to have a strong and cohesive corporate culture. Perhaps, more to the point, they are more likely to deliver positive investment return.

(Source: Gurley, 2015)

And this all holds true for crowdfunding too, where media coverage serves to build the buzz and community ahead of the fundraise.

8. Gain external validation

In my experience, this is, without a doubt, the benefit most businesses want from media coverage. They may understand the other seven benefits logically, but this is the one that speaks to their hearts. In my early conversations with new clients, I’ve noticed that many really struggle to put into words or outcomes exactly what they want to get out of media coverage. They just know they want it. And I believe what they want is the external validation that media coverage offers.

It’s a powerful human need to feel that what you’re doing matters to the world. We want to get our businesses off the ground but paradoxically need to feel reassured we aren’t drifting meaninglessly above and away from the world we want to interact with and impact. We also know that to attract and retain top talent, great customers, investors and members we need a way to prove that what we’re all doing together is valid.

Why learn from me?

Do you know how hard I’ve struggled to create this book for you?

I’ve always found the act of writing both magical and incredibly difficult, despite more than 30 years of getting paid to do it. I’m lucky enough to have learned from and worked with some of the world’s leading writers, including two Nobel Prize winners and longstanding household names in the world of UK-based news. From the age of 15 I’ve worked both as a journalist and then closely with journalists and I’ve never found any of it easy. I’ve worked under enormous pressure to cover global breaking news and to think on my feet. Even on ‘quiet’ news days I questioned my life choices when faced with the relentless shift working and the relatively low salaries that characterize a career in journalism.

But for all that, the wrench from the newsroom culture was hard and I was shocked by the hugely different cultures I found inside other businesses. I was astonished by the perceptions and high and low expectations people had about working with journalists. I was confused by some of the very common media relations practices used in the corporate world that are completely at odds with how journalists work. So I felt compelled to write this book. I wanted to put something that I know works into the hands of businesses. I wanted to shortcut the confusion and the risk. I wanted to help businesses view media relations as an extension of their business strategies and a negotiation rather than an adversarial situation. Stories are the currency of all journalists, so if you have a good story to tell, then it’s entirely possible for you to be on the same page as them.

How to use this book

If you’re currently experiencing asthma-inducing levels of pressure to steady your business following headlines that are rocking your whole future direction or to go out and get media coverage but don’t know where to start, then breathe out… One… Big… Long… Breath. Help is here!

You’re the subject matter expert, you know what you want to talk about and this book will give you everything you need to win the best exposure and traction for your business. You’ll gain understanding of strategies with tools to help you share your story and make you a go-to authority for journalists, using my insider secrets.

I’ve kept it concise because I know you need shortcuts, and we start with you right inside your business today. In Chapter 1, I show you the three key things you need to do to get it media-ready. Then in Chapter 2, I demystify how journalists work so that you can collaborate with them with your eyes wide open.

In Chapter 3, I show you how to choose the best stories and fit them to the right times, places and media outlets to give you maximum impact. Then in Chapter 4, we deal with what happens when you get what you want! This section shows you how to amplify coverage once secured and manage intense media interest successfully. We look at how to prepare yourself as the figurehead of your business to work with journalists.

Now you’ve gained your media relations wisdom, I show you in Chapter 5 how to embed it into your business and how to most