Media Coverage for Your Business: What Gets You In

Getting media coverage for your business means giving journalists a reason to write about you that has nothing to do with how much you want the attention. The businesses that land consistent press have something genuinely newsworthy, a clear point of view, and the patience to build relationships before they need them. Everything else is noise.

Most coverage strategies fail not because the business lacks a story, but because the pitch is built around what the company wants to say rather than what a journalist’s audience wants to read. That distinction sounds simple. It rarely gets applied.

Why Most Businesses Struggle to Get Press Coverage

The first thing to understand is that journalists are not a distribution channel. They are professionals doing a job, and their job is to serve their readers with stories that are timely, relevant, and interesting. When a business treats media outreach as a megaphone for its own messaging, it fails. When it treats journalists as partners in telling a story that genuinely matters to their audience, it has a fighting chance.

I’ve watched this dynamic play out across dozens of client engagements over the years. A business would spend weeks crafting a press release about a product launch, blast it to a list of 200 journalists with no prior relationship, and then wonder why nothing landed. The problem wasn’t the product. The problem was the approach. The release read like a marketing document, not a news story.

There’s also a category error that many businesses make when they conflate brand awareness with media coverage. Coverage is not inherently awareness, and awareness is not inherently valuable. A mention in a publication your customers never read does very little for your business. A profile in the trade press your buyers rely on every morning can change your pipeline overnight.

If you’re thinking about media coverage as part of a wider commercial strategy, it’s worth reading more broadly on go-to-market and growth strategy to understand where earned media fits relative to paid, owned, and partner channels.

What Makes a Story Newsworthy

Newsworthiness is not a feeling. It’s a set of criteria journalists use, consciously or not, to decide whether something is worth their time. The core ones are: timeliness, relevance to their audience, novelty, conflict or tension, and human interest. Your product launch ticks none of those boxes on its own. Your product launch that solves a problem three major industry players have publicly struggled with might tick several.

Data is one of the most reliable ways to make a story newsworthy. If your business has access to proprietary data, whether from a customer survey, platform usage, or industry research you’ve commissioned, you have something journalists can’t get elsewhere. That’s the foundation of a story, not a press release. When I was running agency operations, we commissioned a piece of original research for one client specifically to generate coverage. The story got picked up by three trade titles and one national business desk. The product itself would never have earned that attention without the data angle.

Contrarian takes also work, provided they’re grounded in evidence. If everyone in your industry is saying one thing and you have genuine reasons to disagree, that tension is inherently interesting to journalists. The caveat is that the position has to be defensible. A contrarian view that collapses under a single follow-up question will damage your credibility, not build it.

Timeliness matters more than most businesses realise. Journalists work on news cycles and editorial calendars. If you can connect your story to something already in the news, a regulatory change, a market shift, a cultural moment, you’re reducing the journalist’s workload. You’re giving them a peg to hang your story on. That’s a practical advantage, not a gimmick.

How to Build a Media List That Actually Works

A media list is not a database. It’s a set of relationships you’re either building or planning to build. The distinction matters because it changes how you approach outreach entirely.

Start by mapping the publications your target customers actually read. Not the publications you’d like to be in for vanity reasons, the ones that shape how your buyers think, what they talk about, and what they share with colleagues. For most B2B businesses, that means trade press, vertical publications, and a handful of business titles. For consumer businesses, it depends heavily on the category.

Within each publication, identify the specific journalists who cover your space. Not the editor-in-chief, not the general news desk. The person who writes about your category week in, week out. Read their work. Understand their angles. Follow them on social media and engage with their content before you ever send a pitch. This sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it consistently.

When I was growing the team at iProspect from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things that helped us build profile in the industry was a deliberate effort to get our senior people quoted in trade press. Not through blanket outreach, but through identifying two or three journalists who covered performance marketing seriously, building genuine relationships with them, and making ourselves useful as sources when they needed a comment on something. That earned presence compounded over time in ways that paid media simply couldn’t replicate.

Quality over volume is not a cliché here. A media list of 20 journalists you’ve actually researched and have a genuine reason to contact will outperform a list of 500 cold addresses every single time. Journalists talk to each other. A reputation for sending irrelevant pitches travels faster than you’d expect.

How to Write a Pitch That Gets Read

The subject line is everything. Journalists receive hundreds of pitches a week. If your subject line reads like a press release headline, it will be deleted without being opened. The subject line needs to communicate the story, not the announcement. “New product launch from [Company]” is an announcement. “Why [Industry] is getting [Problem] wrong, and the data to prove it” is a story.

The body of the pitch should be short. Three to five paragraphs at most. Open with the story, not with your company. Explain why it matters to their specific audience. Offer something concrete: an interview, exclusive data, access to a customer who can speak to the experience. Close with a clear ask and your contact details. That’s it.

Personalisation is not optional. If your pitch could have been sent to any journalist covering any industry, it will read that way. Reference something specific the journalist has written recently. Explain why you thought of them for this particular story. This takes time. It’s worth it.

One thing I’ve seen work consistently is leading with a question rather than a statement. Instead of telling a journalist what your story is, ask whether they’ve been looking at a particular trend or problem. This opens a conversation rather than making a demand. Journalists are more receptive to dialogue than to being told what to write.

Follow up once, after three to five business days, if you haven’t heard back. One follow-up is professional. Two is persistent. Three is the reason journalists have filters on their email. If there’s no response after a follow-up, move on. The story wasn’t right for them at that moment, and that’s fine.

The Role of Thought Leadership in Earning Coverage

Thought leadership gets used as a phrase so often it’s almost lost meaning. What it actually describes is a simple thing: having a perspective on your industry that is specific enough to be interesting and credible enough to be trusted. Businesses that earn consistent media coverage almost always have this. Businesses that don’t, often don’t.

Building a thought leadership position takes time, but the mechanics are straightforward. Pick two or three themes where your business has genuine expertise and a defensible point of view. Write about them consistently, whether through a company blog, LinkedIn, or contributed articles to trade publications. When journalists are looking for sources on those themes, your name should come up.

Contributed articles are an underused tactic. Many trade publications actively welcome well-written pieces from practitioners, particularly if those pieces offer genuine insight rather than thinly veiled promotion. A bylined article in a publication your buyers read every week does double duty: it builds your credibility with that audience and it signals to other journalists that you’re a credible source worth talking to.

The businesses that struggle with thought leadership are usually the ones trying to be interesting about everything. Focus is what makes a perspective credible. If you’re the person who has a clear, well-reasoned view on one specific problem in your industry, you’ll get called on far more often than the person who has a vague opinion about everything.

It’s also worth noting that thought leadership and growth strategy are not separate conversations. The way you position your expertise in public shapes how buyers perceive your business before they ever speak to your sales team. That’s a go-to-market consideration, not just a PR one. The reasons go-to-market feels harder than it used to often come back to exactly this: businesses are competing for attention in markets where credibility is harder to establish and buyers are more sceptical than ever.

How to Use Data and Research to Drive Coverage

Original data is one of the most reliable routes to earned media, and it’s one of the most underused by businesses that aren’t large enough to commission major research. But the bar for “original data” is lower than most people think.

A survey of 200 of your customers on a topic relevant to your industry can generate a story. An analysis of trends in your own platform data, anonymised and aggregated, can generate a story. A piece of primary research on a question your industry hasn’t answered yet can generate multiple stories across multiple publications. what matters is that the data has to be genuinely interesting and the methodology has to be defensible. Journalists will ask questions. You need to be able to answer them.

When you have data, lead with the finding that is most counterintuitive or most significant. Don’t bury the headline in a press release that spends three paragraphs introducing your company. The data is the story. Your company is the source. Keep that hierarchy clear in how you present it.

Timing matters here too. If you can connect your data to a current news cycle or an upcoming industry event, you increase the chances of coverage significantly. A report on hiring trends in your sector released the week before a major industry conference is more likely to get picked up than the same report released in a quiet news week in January.

What to Do When You Get Coverage

Coverage is not the end of the process. It’s a moment in a longer relationship-building effort, and how you handle it matters.

Thank the journalist. Not with a gushing email, but with a brief, professional note acknowledging the piece and offering to be useful to them in the future. This is the foundation of a relationship, not a transaction. Journalists remember the people who make their lives easier and the people who make them harder. Be firmly in the first category.

Amplify the coverage across your own channels, but do it in a way that serves the journalist’s audience as much as your own. Share the piece with a genuine comment about why it matters. Tag the journalist. Make it easy for their work to reach a wider audience. That creates goodwill that pays forward into future pitches.

Use the coverage as social proof in your sales and marketing process. A quote from a credible publication on your website, in a proposal, or in a sales deck carries weight that self-produced content cannot replicate. This is one of the concrete commercial returns on earned media that often gets overlooked in the obsession with reach and impressions.

I’ve judged the Effie Awards, which are built around measuring marketing effectiveness, and one pattern I noticed consistently in the winning cases was that the most effective campaigns almost always had an earned media component. Not because PR is inherently more effective than paid, but because coverage from a credible third party carries a different kind of trust signal. That trust compounds over time in ways that are genuinely difficult to buy.

The Honest Limits of Media Coverage as a Growth Strategy

Media coverage is not a substitute for a good product, a clear value proposition, or a functional sales process. I’ve seen businesses chase press as a way to paper over more fundamental commercial problems, and it doesn’t work. A profile in a national newspaper won’t save a business with a retention problem or a pricing model that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Coverage is also difficult to predict and impossible to control. You can do everything right and still not get the story. A journalist might love your pitch and then have it killed by an editor. The news cycle might move in a direction that makes your angle irrelevant overnight. These are not failures of your strategy. They’re the nature of earned media.

The businesses that handle this well are the ones that treat media coverage as one component of a broader growth strategy rather than the strategy itself. Paid, owned, earned, and partner channels each have a role. The mix depends on your market, your stage, and your commercial objectives. BCG’s thinking on commercial transformation makes a similar point about the danger of over-indexing on any single channel at the expense of a coherent overall approach.

There’s also a meaningful difference between coverage that drives commercial outcomes and coverage that feels good but does nothing for the business. A profile in a prestige publication that your buyers never read might satisfy the ego but won’t move the pipeline. Always ask what you want coverage to do for the business before you decide which publications to target and what stories to tell.

For a broader view of how earned media fits into a commercial growth plan, the go-to-market and growth strategy hub covers the strategic frameworks that help you make those decisions with more rigour than instinct alone.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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