KGBTexas’s tips on mastering the pitch and measuring for success

The PR industry’s current pitching strategy needs rethinking. All day long, reporters are bombarded with outdated, uninteresting, or irrelevant pitches. This can lead to great frustration, with reporters feeling their time is not being valued and PR strategists wondering why their pitch didn’t capture reporters’ interest. Understanding tips on mastering the pitch can help PR professionals craft messages that stand out and resonate with their audience.

Adding to this challenge, our media landscape continues to fragment. Audiences are engaging less and less frequently with traditional media and instead consuming media through various channels and formats, including blogs, short-form content and social media posts.

This fragmentation is an ongoing and pervasive threat to the news industry. As a result, reporters are being more selective with their time and inboxes, using data and analytics to separate what makes the front page from what gets marked as spam.

To this point, a new report from Cision illustrates that data may be the differentiating factor between a good pitch and a bad one. According to Cision’s 2024 Global State of the Media Report, 61% of reporters would prefer to receive data over any other type of content from PR professionals – second only to news announcements and press releases. Also in the study, more than half of journalists said the most valuable information their PR contact can provide is data and research.

There are a few benefits to using data in a pitch. First, journalists are far more likely to cover stories supported by facts and data. A story without data will read more like fiction, persuasive writing, or a marketing brochure, which 55% of journalists surveyed by Cision say would lead them to block a PR professional or put them on their “do not call list.”

Data also lends to credibility, which, according to Cision’s report, is the top perceived industry challenge in the newsroom. By packaging a pitch with relevant, well-sourced data, you can simultaneously offer value and show respect for the reporter’s craft. Even if a reporter does not use the data, the gesture demonstrates you have done your due diligence, fostering trust and leading to future story opportunities.

Data is not only being used to drive narratives and draw in journalists. On the monitoring side, professionals are employing data to shape, inform and measure the success of campaigns. This new phenomenon is called “data-driven PR,” which refers to using data to drive PR or marketing strategies.

In our day-to-day jobs as PR and marketing specialists, we use data in more ways than one. We use data to monitor trends and inform us when a pitch will likely land. We rely on data to track the success of our campaigns and where the gaps lie, as well as to understand our clients’ customers better and what drives them.

Media impressions, advertising value, and publicity value are three indicators used to evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign, and if you work in the communications sector, you have likely heard of them. These metrics don’t provide the whole picture, even though they can provide some insights into PR and marketing outcomes. Click-through rates, for instance, can show the reach of a certain campaign or story, but not how well it connected with its target demographic.

The PR industry is therefore shifting towards a new way of reporting success that factors in new key performance indicators like share of voice, brand sentiment analysis, and a client’s progress towards their goals. These metrics guide future strategies for engagement by giving clients a more comprehensive view of their brand and how it is received.

OK… Now what?

Data for the perfect pitch

Now that we have discussed the move toward data-driven strategies, how do we begin implementing them? With pitching, finding the right kinds of data can be a challenge. The internet is littered with junk reports, analyses and surveys, making it more difficult than ever to tell trustworthy from untrustworthy content.

Like the journalist, it is our job to separate facts from promotional data. Say a local cybersecurity provider publishes a white paper about the cybersecurity threat landscape. Although the paper may provide valuable insights, the author’s goals influenced the type and amount of data they chose to present. As a result, other sources with less of a reputation for bias, such as state and national databases on cybersecurity incidents, may prove more persuasive to a journalist.

Before the data-gathering process begins, you should identify the story you want to tell, and the data needed to support it. Data without a narrative focus is just that – data. A reporter will ignore even the best data if it does not offer a compelling story.

Data for insights and strategy

Internal or third-party data analytics dashboards are useful in building strategy and measuring outcomes. Such tools allow for better data visualization and comprehension, making it easier to draw insights from and act upon.

At KGBTexas, we use LexisNexis to measure PR outcomes. Through Lexis’ Newsdesk platform, we can perform a variety of functions, from viewing a client’s media coverage over time to performing competitive analyses.

Other tools for measuring PR outcomes have recently become available through advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence, also known as Gen AI. According to Cision, Gen AI is used today to generate more nuanced insights.

Gen AI is also replacing traditional data-gathering methods for pitching. Earlier this year, Google released AI Overviews, which summarize the findings on a particular topic or research question in just a few short paragraphs. While these overviews are an incredibly time-efficient way of gathering data, they also carry hidden dangers that every communications specialist should know about.

While it is admittedly far easier – and much more tempting – to pull a statistic from an AI-generated summary than sift through mounds of data, these large language models are not foolproof. They can make mistakes – which is why we must cross-reference the summaries with our research. That means downloading and reading reports thoroughly to ensure their findings are consistent with Gen AI’s.

The PR industry is constantly evolving, and data is driving the train. At KGBTexas, we embrace data-driven strategies so we can continue to deliver excellence, forging new relationships and fostering trust with news media and ultimately our clients.