Getting press attention starts with thinking about things from a journalist’s perspective and showing them something newsworthy. Using quiz insights is an effective but under-utilised way to get those journalists excited to feature your business, and we’re breaking down exactly how to do that…
The 3 biggest challenges identified by journalists in Cision’s ‘State of the Media’ 2024 survey are:
- Maintaining credibility as a trusted news source/combating accusations of “fake news” – 42%
- Adapting to changing audience behaviours around media consumption – 41%
- Lack of staffing and resources – 36%
You’re helping to solve all three by including a quiz alongside all the other goodies in your press releases. Providing original market research findings not only makes your story stronger, it eliminates the need for journalists to spend resources on searching for evidence – you are the credible source!
Including a successful quiz in your press release gives journalists the opportunity to get in on some of that wonderful shareability – broadening the reach of their story.
Here’s how to generate that total diva, red-carpet-arrival energy and keep all eyes on you!
What are your press goals?
First thing’s first. Before you get to a journalist’s perspective, you need to identify what kind of press attention you actually want. As always, your business strategy guides this with your overarching aims.
Do you need to boost brand awareness in a new market segment? Or is your focus on sharing significant financial results before looking for your next round of investment? Two very different aims, with different audiences, but a quiz boosts the likelihood of getting press attention with both.
Businesses want to tell people about different types of developments, like:
- Start of a new business: The ‘We’re here!’ announcement – tell them who you are, where you are and why they’re glad you’re here.
- New product launch: Why is it great? Include pricing and availability.
- Updates to existing products: Why is this better?
- Events: Like the grand opening of a new showroom, charity ball, corporate away day, pop-up shop. Don’t forget the basic where, when and how information – in amongst all the excitement.
- Mergers and Acquisitions: Merging with another company, or acquiring one, is something that should be shared with your customers. Include the new leadership structure.
- New partnerships: With other businesses or influencers – and how this benefits both your audiences
- Welcome new staff: Particularly at executive level
- Awards: Show off a bit! Include why the award is important to cement your reputation
- Rebranding: Make sure people still recognise the ‘new you’ and boost awareness
- Competitions or contests: Give really clear details about how to enter and what you win
- Charity work: Let people know if you did a big fundraiser for a charity, give prizes to your local school’s Chrsimas raffle, sponsor the local football team – it’s a good ‘hearts and minds’ story. And it makes local people want to spend their hard-earned money with your business.
- Something’s gone wrong: Even if it’s not as bad as KFC’s ‘no chicken’ crisis, it’s a good idea to explain or apologise if something’s gone wrong in your organisation.
- Industry news: Getting press coverage that’s about wider industry news, with your expert insights, positions you in thought-leader territory.
Now you’re clear on the business goals you’re aiming for, it’s time to look at things from a journalist’s perspective.
Boil it all down to, ‘What do you want people to know?’ and ‘What’s the story?’
Get really specific with this. Each ‘new thing’ you want to share needs its own press release that focuses on the precise details.
There are 7 key steps to attracting – and keeping – press attention.
1. Identify a relevant and timely topic
28% of journalists said that their biggest challenge is ‘Competing with social media influencers and digital content creators for audience attention’. The conclusions of this report noted that: “A consistent theme throughout the survey results was the need for relevant content from the public relations professionals who reach out to them. When asked to describe the “perfect” PR pitch, relevance was by far the most cited factor…”
Your quiz topic needs to be:
- Relevant to current events or trends
- Aligned with your brand
- Interesting to your target audience
When your target audience and the journalist’s readers are the same people – you’re onto a win-win-win!
Going beyond what’s reported in mainstream media will unearth topics that are fresher and close to the hearts of your niche audience.
If you have a Social Listening Team, use their latest data insights on trending topics – and whether they’re long term or flash-in-the-pan trends.
If you’re working at a smaller scale, there’s almost too much online information that can help: trending hashtags, customer comments across different social media channels, forum discussion, Reddit threads, news from legitimate outlets that matters to your audience…
When you’re designing your quiz, you’ll obviously be considering – and looking forward to – the data insights you’ll be able to use to make strategic business decisions.
You also need to work out what story you can tell from those insights. Journalists write stories – what angle are you going to offer them with this topic? Consider different outcomes from your analysis and how that alters the story your data tells.
2. Create engaging and insightful content
Quizzes, by definition, are interactive and personalised – that’s why people love doing them. They’re hooked by the idea of getting tailored advice just for answering some questions on everyone’s favourite subject – themselves!
You just need to make sure that you know your audience well enough to create a quiz that’s interesting, informative, or entertaining enough to grab their attention. And if you give them genuinely useful, personalised insights, they’ll be sharing it on social media before you can say ‘engagement metrics’!
And it’s those very engagement metrics that will help to convince journalists that this is a story worth writing.
Using a ScoreApp template to design your quiz means that you know it’s got fully customisable question types and category scoring that delivers powerful results. Every quiz is optimised for mobile devices, so it always looks professional and stays user-friendly.
3. Collect and analyse your data
21% of journalists said their biggest challenge is ‘Verifying information and finding credible sources.’ You’re presenting them with first-hand data analysis with the insights from your quiz. Publish this original data in a white paper on a page of your website, to further enhance its credibility.
Now go back to your original thinking when you were choosing a topic. What compelling story can you tell from your results analysis? What’s the story?
What’s the angle?
- Surprising: Not what you, or others in your field, would predict
- Countering a long-held claim: Is this controversial? A sign of the times? Why the change?
- Different to other findings: Have other organisations done similar research and got different results? Why? What does this tell us?
- It’s funny: Humour sells
- Applies to a lot of people: If you have a large number of participants, lead with that, statistical significance lends credibility
- Big industry problem: Have you just uncovered it? Have other people been hiding it?
- It answers a common client pain point: So a lot of people will want to know about it!
- Has led you to adapt something: You’re a ‘change-maker,’ leading where others will want to follow.
Don’t just include a list of statistics in your press releases. Save your contact’s brain power and tell them the data story.
Make the power of the story as obvious as possible.
4. Write a strong press release
Your press release needs to be clear, concise, and contain everything your contact needs to know. Every time they write a story, it’s their reputation on the line.
So give them everything they need to be confident in you as a source and in the interest-level of the story. And give it to them quickly – yours won’t be the only press release landing in their inbox today!
Use the inverted information pyramid structure, where important information comes first, leading down to secondary points. Where possible, used bulleted lists for ease of skimming.
- Logo: For immediate identification
- Release date: This might be ‘for immediate release’ or ‘for release on [date]’. The timing may be important, especially if it’s about a launch or event.
- Contact info: For the person in charge of PR and media communications (this might be you!)
- Headline: Get straight to the point with your most interesting findings. That’s the hook.You need to lead with your unique findings and the implications for your industry. Like ‘70% of freelance writers actually prefer fruit to biscuits’, or ‘Find out the 1 unexpected feature that 95% of accountancy software users would pay more for’.
- Specifics: Who, what, where, when, why – it’s the why that’s the heart of the story
- Quiz: Emphasise its shareability by including the metrics so far
- Expert quotes: Easily confirmed if they’re from you/your CEO/ department head – giving their take on your quiz insights
- Multimedia assets: Include a link to any relevant images, infographics, animations, charts, graphs, maps, and video that are cleared for press usage. 72% of journalists said they’d used images provided by a source.
- Background details: Full company details, including a link to your website, and a synopsis of your company for background
The great news is that 68% of journalists find press releases to be the most useful source for generating content and ideas.
When asked ‘What type of content do you most want to receive?’ – a whopping 74% said news announcements/press releases and 61% said original research reports. So here you are with your quiz insights, making their lives so much easier by giving them exactly what they want!
5. Target the right media outlets
This might seem obvious, but there’s no point sending your press release to every news media outlet. Why would Glamour magazine readers be interested in your new B2B SaaS product? Why would The Economist publish an article about your new ice cream flavours?
Extreme examples, but it’s just as important to personalise your media pitch as it is your quiz.
Show them how your audience is also their audience. Or convince them that your shiny new thing is perfect for their readers. Research the outlet and the journalist you’re emailing. t
Jay Rayner is a long-standing, respected restaurant critic and food journalist. He recently sent a plea to the entire PR industry, pointing out the frustration of continuous irrelevant press releases:
“And what staggers me is the vast number that have absolutely nothing to do with my beat. I just had a look over the last 24 hours. They include releases and emails about a children’s festival in Leicester, the odds on Robert Downey Jnr returning as Iron Man, something from a wellness guru, stuff on celebrity real estate, a few financial analysts reports on a greetings card company, and another on car production…It is clear to me that a staggering number of you put together random, unfocussed lists of journalists and then just send them everything, despite it being irrelevant to them.”
Those examples don’t seem so extreme now! You’re only wasting time and energy by sending a press release to everyone you can think of. Journalists want people to read their stories. You want people to buy your product or service.
Ideally, the Venn diagram of these two groups is completely overlapping – then you successfully get the press’s full attention! No wonder 68% of journalists said the best way to gain their favour is by ‘understanding their target audience and what’s relevant to them.’
Mr Rayner’s curt conclusion is excellent advice for everyone: “In short, if you don’t want to deal with so much rejection, target your message.”
6. Share on social media
41% of journalists said that their biggest challenge is ‘Adapting to changing audience behaviours around media consumption’. As people get their news from multiple mixed media sources, journalists are now competing for attention with content creators and influencers.
One of the Cision report’s key takeaways is rather splendidly subtitled, ‘Content Is King, and Multimedia Is the Heir Apparent.’ This section highlights that Instagram is the top platform journalists are planning to increase their presence on, “which aligns with the finding that multimedia is among the types of content journalists want the most from PR professionals – and that the right multimedia can be the key to securing coveted earned media coverage.”
Journalists want the likes, comments, shares, internal link traffic, newsletter sign-ups, and time on page, to boost their visibility and engagement metrics – just like you do.
Show them just how many people have already participated in, commented on, and shared your quiz.
The figures and positivity are undeniable evidence. When they continue to share the quiz with their story – they get a full dusting of that shareability fairy dust too!
7. Don’t forget to follow up
If a journalist gets in touch with you to answer questions or get more information, don’t leave them waiting. 26% said they’d put someone on their ‘don’t call back list’ for not getting back to them on the same day or within the deadline.
In case you don’t hear back, schedule the follow-up email as soon as you’ve sent the press release. That way you can’t forget about it.
After sending your press release, follow up with journalists to answer any questions and provide additional information. Just be aware of how many follow-ups you’re sending. When asked how many times you should follow up after a press release: 27% said never, 64% said once, and only 8% said multiple times.
Definitely follow-up – but don’t inundate people’s inboxes with multiple repeat emails.
Generate shareable survey results fast with ScoreApp
You’ve found journalists with an audience in alignment and you’ve got an array of engaging content. The power of a ScoreApp quiz is the final layer of sequins that really makes your whole press strategy pop.
Get your sparkle on, try ScoreApp today, for free. And watch those press heads turn…
