The importance of building relationships with journalists

Length: 7-minute read

Quick summary: This article is part one of a two-part series on the value of media relations. Part one provides an overview of the Australian and New Zealand media landscape and how building relationships with journalists can benefit your business. Part two discusses what makes a good story and how to get the right story in front of the right audience to make a meaningful impact on your business pipeline.

How building relationships with journalists can benefit your business

When it comes to building your business profile, media engagement is critical to success. As your business grows, relying on direct conversations with potential customers is no longer a viable option. It’s crucial to get your business’s name in front of your key target audience, and to build a reputation with prospects beyond what word-of-mouth alone can achieve. You need positive media coverage of your business and key people so that you can stand out from competitors. Media stories might focus on industry recognition and new product or service announcements, as well as new partnerships or big customer wins. However, positive media coverage doesn’t just happen. You need to invest in building relationships with journalists to ensure you’re having impactful conversations with the right people.

Strong media relations can help position your business, as well as individual business leaders and spokespeople, as thought leaders in your industry. For organisations that work in the business-to-business (B2B) space, good media relations are crucial to help grow a broader audience and build a better business pipeline for ongoing success.

A strong public relations (PR) and omnichannel marketing strategy will help you align your messaging and campaigns with target media publications. This will ensure you have the right message in the market, in front of the right people, at the right time. However, getting all your ducks in a row can be challenging, especially if you don’t know the ins and outs of the media you’re engaging with. For the best chance of success for your business, there are two things you need to know: how the Australian and New Zealand media landscape operates; and how to build connections that matter with local journalists.

Getting to know the Australian and New Zealand media landscape

A lot of B2B companies will already have experience with media engagement. Many will have experienced success in other regions like the United Kingdom, United States, Europe, or broader in Asia Pacific. While media in different regions arguably all work the same way—in simple terms, they’re all after a good story—here in Australia, the media landscape operates a little bit differently.

The media here can be tighter and more niche than other markets. Australia and New Zealand are smaller countries (at least by population size) than those in other markets, so there’s a lot of businesses competing for publishing space in a finite number of publications. And, each of those publications can have markedly different interests in terms of the stories they are interested in and the companies that they want to engage with. This means that you need to be careful with what news you share, with whom, and when. For example, sending media releases to the same few publications every week often results in media fatigue and can do more harm than good when it comes to building a solid reputation with journalists.

How to get media coverage in Australia and New Zealand

To achieve cut-through in the local Australian media landscape, it’s important that you invest energy into understanding which journalists and media houses are right for your business. For example, national, metropolitan, and regional general news media might be interested in your business if you’re significantly increasing your local footprint, generating new jobs, and helping to boost the local economy. However, they are unlikely to be interested in the latest industry award you’ve received (especially if it’s paid for) or the latest business product or service you’ve launched in the market. On the other hand, this might be exactly what trade media want to hear from you.

It’s important to research the publications and journalists that you want to approach before you pitch a story. This will ensure that you have the right audience for your content and you’re not wasting the media’s time, or your own, by pitching a story that won’t go anywhere.

When journalists are looking for a story, they’ll consider the following:

• Is it timely? News should typically be just that: new. Journalists and media publications generally aren’t interested in outdated information or something they’ve already covered extensively. You need to know that your story will add something new to the conversation to give your business the best chance of securing coverage.
• Is it unique? You need to add something different to a conversation if you want to achieve media coverage. Even if your comment is timely, if it’s the same as what’s already being said in the media, it’s unlikely you’ll achieve cut-through.
• Is there a human-interest element? If your story has something to do with a well-known person, it will be more likely to garner media interest. In the B2B space, this includes CEOs, other C-suite executives, and spokespeople well-known to the organisation or with a wealth of experience in the industry. However, you must be sure that what your CEO has to say is timely and unique; don’t pitch your CEO for comment simply for the sake of pitching them, as journalists will quickly realise that the emperor has no clothes.
• Is this local and/or high impact? Because the Australian and New Zealand media landscape is quite small and specialised, journalists and publications tend to be interested more in news stories and updates that directly impact the region. However, if the story impacts a significant number of people, businesses, regions, or countries, they might be more inclined to pick up the story, especially if you can also demonstrate a strong local angle.

Building relationships with journalists: what you need to know

If your news story meets these criteria and will likely garner interest from local media, the next step is pitching it to the right journalist and publication. While anyone can search for and email a journalist with a story, pitching a story properly is an art. And, building relationships with journalists can take you to the next level where you’re considered a trustworthy source of news and information. This will ensure that journalists aren’t just waiting for you to send them information; they’ll actively approach you for comment and contributions, if you’ve built a good rapport with them.

Additionally, having a good relationship with a journalist can ensure that they’ll be more likely to write positively about your business; on the flipside, a bad relationship can lead to negative coverage. Building relationships with journalists takes time and consistency. However, there are a few things you can do to help foster a good relationship with media. This includes providing any facts and figures they may need upfront (within reason), and ensuring your spokespeople and customers are available for comment when needed. Journalists are often short on time, so making sure you give them everything they need all at once will help them write your story quickly. It also reduces the chance for it to languish in their inbox while they prioritise other pre-packaged stories.

How the right PR agency can help

PR and marketing are key to generating buzz about your business and its products and services. Getting your news out to your target audience is more important than just telling the world at large. To influence the right decision-makers and build a strong pipeline, you need to secure media coverage in the right publications at the right time. This means you need to have a comprehensive PR and marketing strategy and know whom to talk to, when, where, and about what.

Achieving cut-through in a competitive media environment can be challenging. Building relationships with journalists is a critical starting point to help get the news out there about your business. To do this, you need to invest time and resources into engaging with media on a regular basis. This can be challenging to achieve when your focus is on your business (as it should be). The most effective way to engage with journalists is to invest in the services of a dedicated PR and content marketing agency.

PR agencies live and breathe media. They know that not all journalists are the same, and not every single one will want to talk to your business. It’s their job to know who is interested in what and which publication is the best fit for your news. This can be trickier than it might seem. Furthermore, choosing the right agency can be another tricky task as a generalist agency is unlikely to deliver consistently strong results with the right media. This is why it’s essential to work with a specialist agency that understands your industry, already has strong relationships with key journalists and sector publications, and can leverage that trust and understanding to garner positive coverage for your business.

Recognition PR—part of The Recognition Group, Australia’s leading group of PR and marketing specialists—has more than 35 years of experience in building relationships with journalists and helping B2B professional services, IT, and financial services companies across Australia and New Zealand reach their audiences and tell their stories.

For more information on how Recognition PR can help your business better understand the value of journalist relationships in the Australian media landscape, download our latest whitepaper or contact the team today.