The myth of the big launch
Many founders and marketing leaders believe PR is a one-time event, a funding announcement, a product launch, a viral moment that puts the brand on the map permanently. It is not. The brands that consistently earn media coverage treat PR as a long-term relationship-building exercise, not a campaign with a start and end date.
This distinction matters enormously for how you allocate resources. A six-month agency retainer spent entirely on a single launch event is rarely a good investment. The same budget applied over two years to consistent media engagement, byline articles, and genuine relationship-building with journalists tends to produce far more durable results.
What journalists actually want
After working with journalists across business, technology, and marketing media globally, we have a clear picture of what gets read and what gets immediately deleted. The consistent answer is that journalists want stories that are specific, timely, and independently verifiable, stories that their readers will find genuinely valuable, not stories that make a company sound good.
They do not want generic "we are disrupting the industry" narratives that could apply to any company in any sector. They do not want pitches that require them to do all the research. They do not want exclusive access in exchange for "positive coverage", that is not journalism, and experienced journalists will remember you for it.
The best PR pitch solves the journalist's problem, not yours. Make their job easier and they will come back to you.
The three things you need before you pitch
A consistent point of view
Journalists do not just cover companies; they cover ideas, trends, and expertise. If your brand does not have a clear, consistent perspective on something important in your industry, there is nothing to write about. Before you start pitching, you need to decide what your brand believes, not in a marketing sense, but in a substantive, arguable sense. What is the conventional wisdom in your market that you think is wrong? What are you seeing in your data that others are not talking about yet?
Accessible spokespersons
The best stories are told by people, not companies. Journalists need someone they can quote, interview, and call when they need a comment on a breaking story in your sector. That person needs to be available quickly, willing to speak on the record, and able to say something more interesting than the official company line.
Something to show
Data, case studies, proprietary research, or unusual operational insights give journalists something to anchor a story on. If you can say "we analysed twelve months of client data and found that brands who do X see Y% better performance than those who do not", that is a story. If all you can offer is "we think we are pretty good at this", that is not.
Building relationships before you need them
The biggest mistake brands make in PR is waiting until they have something to announce before they contact journalists. By that point, you are a stranger with an ask. The journalists who respond quickly to your pitches are the ones who already know who you are, because you have sent them useful information before you needed anything in return, because you have engaged thoughtfully with their work, because you have been a reliable source when they needed a comment or a statistic.
Building this kind of relationship takes time, but it is not complicated. Follow the journalists who cover your space. Read what they write carefully. Send them a note when they publish something that connects to what you know. Point them toward information or people who might be relevant to stories they are working on. Be genuinely useful without an immediate agenda.
What you should actually measure
Coverage volume is a vanity metric. What you should be measuring is whether your PR activity is influencing the specific outcomes that matter to your business: whether prospects mention having seen your brand before they come to you, whether your conversion rate from organic search has improved as your share of voice grows, whether the quality of inbound leads has changed.
Slow is fast in PR
The brands that show up consistently in earned media are almost never the ones that ran the most aggressive campaigns. They are the ones that built media relationships quietly over years, stayed patient with the timelines, and kept showing up with something genuinely useful to say. That requires a different kind of commitment than most organisations are prepared to make, but for those that do make it, the compounding effect is real, and the long-term cost per piece of coverage is far lower than any agency retainer.