What to pitch when you have no ideas
As a brand, it’s exciting when you have a new announcement or launch to share with the world. Sadly, you won’t always have big news to share all the time.
In fact, most businesses rarely do.
Which is why it’s important to have a variety of ways to showcase your expertise and pitch your products during the quiet times.
How can you brainstorm pitch perfect ideas when you’re in a dry spell?
Here are four ways to get media attention for your brand that don’t rely on new products or major announcements.
Always be evergreen
To gain media attention, make sure your brand’s promotional strategy contains evergreen topics.
An evergreen topic is one that doesn’t lose relevance over time. They endure despite fads or trends.
Plus, they always appear as fresh news to your audience.
What’s great about evergreen content is that these pitches have the greatest potential of all publicity strategies to become more popular as time goes on. Because its value and relevance to your audience stays high over time, evergreen content will never lose their attention.
Several types of content are considered evergreen. You may even already have evergreen content in house that you can reuse. If not, you can easily create timeless content that will always provide value.
Lists, tips, and how-to articles are a few examples of evergreen content you can use to get media attention. Evergreen content also can be shared in the form of infographics, images, and videos.
Pitch with the seasons
If your promotions strategy needs a shakeup, seasonal (or topical) content is a great alternative to try.
What is seasonal content? It’s content that is tied in with specific holidays, events, or periods of time.
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve are great examples of seasonal content. As are pitches focused on fall, cultural references, Daylight Savings Time, and clothing trends.
While timely and easy to include in your promotional strategy, it’s important to note that season content has a limited window of opportunity. When using seasonal content in your media outreach, make sure you pitch early enough in advance to that your media pickups don’t appear days or weeks after the seasonal tie-in has past.
No matter how spectacular your pitch is for fall, no one is going to cover it on the first day of winter.
embrace marketing holidays
While it’s common knowledge that October 31 is Halloween, did you know that November 5 is widely celebrated for being National Donut Day?
Now you do.
Commonly known as a marketing holiday, days such as this are perceived to exist purely for commercial or awareness purposes, rather than to commemorate a traditionally or historically significant event.
Some marketing holidays happen more than once a year, while others take up an entire week. There are even special causes, like Breast Cancer Awareness, that are celebrated for an entire month.
No matter what your brand story is, you can bet that more than one of the nearly 3,500 nationally-recognized marketing holidays will apply to your business. What’s great about these holidays, is that they apply to all age ranges and media outlets—from millennials on Instagram to Hoda and Jenna on The Today Show.
Now that’s something we can raise a glass and toast to! Especially on May 25, which just so happens to be National Wine Day.
Newsjack the news
While it may pay to have your head down and be hard at work, sometimes it helps to stop what you’re doing, look up, and watch the news.
Even if the news has nothing to do with you.
Why? Because something happening locally, regionally, or nationally may just spark an idea that does apply directly to your brand.
This concept is called newsjacking. And it occurs when you take a popular topic and use it as the launching point for what you want to pitch.
Put more simply, newsjacking means taking something that’s popular and trending and using it to bring attention to your brand.
How can you make newsjacking work for you? First, your tie-in to the news must be related in some way. For example, use the newsjacked topic to lead into information about your brand.
You also can successfully newsjack by publishing a blog post with your take on a news story, tweeting your stance on an issue using a relevant hashtag, contacting the journalist covering the original story directly with your pitch, or going live on Facebook to hold a press conference.
As with most media outreach, make sure you’re performing newsjacking in a timely fashion. Nothing is worse than trying to bring an awareness to your brand through an issue that is no longer being talked about.
