6 Key Pitching Tips for 2025

Media exposure can be a major asset to your business. But the websites, news channels, and influencers that can deliver it have no incentive to give you free coverage. That’s why developing an informed PR pitching strategy is so important.

Doing so can help you earn media coverage with compelling stories. That can further assist you in expanding your brand’s audience, building trust, and growing your business without having to spend a fortune on media placements. This guide highlights six expert pitching tips to get you started.

Key PR Pitching Tips for Businesses

As you read through the tips below, remember the importance of crafting a tight pitch. Christopher Savage, CEO and owner of Savage Global Marketing, reminds us that today, “attention spans are shorter, skepticism is higher, and people want things fast.”

So, even when using the best practices, you’ll need to stay concise and share value early. Otherwise, your pitches will struggle to get past the first gatekeeper. With that in mind, here are six tips for success:

1. Understand the Media Landscape
2. Create a Strong Story Angle
3. Write Powerful Copy
4. Be Strategic about Following Up
5. Build and Maintain Relationships
6. Learn from Rejections & Successes

Understand the Media Landscape

First, it’s important to understand where the media landscape is today. This impacts how you’ll need to pitch to cut through the noise and stand out.

Natalie Henley, CEO and Owner of Volume Nine Digital Marketing, says, “The biggest shift [today] is the higher than ever level of noise with AI-created content and pitches. So, the biggest thing is, if it’s worth it, take the time to stand out and be unique.”

Another element of understanding the media landscape is knowing where to find your target audience. To do that, you have to get clear about whom the story is for. It could be the local business community, a niche digital community, or people in a certain age range, among other groups.

Once you know who the story targets, you can prioritize the media channels that this group visits most frequently. That could be a local news channel, an industry blog, or even a social media page.

The key thing to keep in mind is that a generic pitch to the wrong person will almost always be ignored. For the best results, your PR pitching strategies should reflect the state of the media landscape today and your target audience.

Craft a Strong Story Angle

Next, you need a story angle that goes beyond announcing a new product, feature, or location. The pitch should be newsworthy, relevant to the media company’s audience, and maybe even beneficial to them.

For example, instead of just announcing a new location, you could pitch a story centered around how the local community made it possible. Or bring direct value to the media company’s viewers by offering a special discount on products during your grand opening.

Another idea is looking for connections to current events or ongoing trends. For example, if a media channel has been covering an economic downturn, you could look for ways to connect your message to that ongoing story. This makes the pitch bigger than your company, which is often necessary when hunting for earned media placement.

You can also use data to inform your pitch. For example, you might fund a study that’s relevant to the local community and look for ways to build a story around it. Savage says companies should “Use smart data, but tell a story that they see themselves in. That’s what sticks.” So, make your target audience the hero of your pitch, not your company.

Write Powerful Copy

Now you’re ready to create the pitch you’ll send to the media outlets you’re targeting. Savage says, “If your message feels like a template, it’s game over.” So, focus on personalization.

This process starts with a great subject line. Make sure that yours are specific to the opportunity you’re pursuing. Try to spark curiosity, but don’t go overboard and fall into clickbait. Finding the right balance isn’t always easy, but you can get there over time by using A/B testing to optimize your subject lines.

Next, try to reference something directly relevant to the person reading the email within your first few lines. This shows you thought of them when writing the message, so they’ll at least know that it’s been personalized beyond generic AI content. That can be enough to convince them to continue reading.

Keep the proposition concise and end with a clear call to action showing how you want to move forward. You can also A/B these parts of the message to optimize them over time.

Be Strategic about Following Up

You won’t always convince a media company to feature your story with a single message. The people who field these requests tend to receive many of them and have to make tough decisions about which ones to engage with further.

So, don’t be discouraged if you aren’t seeing results immediately. You may just need to send follow-up messages to keep your story at the top of the person’s mind. But not all follow-ups are equally successful.

That’s why it’s worth thinking critically about the best times to send follow-ups. Mid-morning to lunchtime, around 10 am to noon., is generally considered one of the best parts of the day for these messages. You can also consider after 4 p.m.

The advantage of these time slots is that they’re typically when journalists are at the computer and not in a rush. Just make sure that you respect boundaries.

Send a few follow-ups days or weeks apart, and if you don’t hear anything, the outlet probably isn’t interested in telling your story. If you send too many messages, you’ll damage the relationship and reduce the odds of being featured in that outlet for future stories.

Build and Maintain Relationships

Relationships are also important to consider when looking for earned media placement. You can increase your chances by being a good partner to the companies that engage with your brand.

For example, when your story gets featured, share it on your channels to increase engagement for the media company. You can also comment on posts, link to the page on your site, and try to provide value in other ways.

This shows media companies that you’re not just after their help, but are also willing to create value for them. You can build trust with media outlets over time with this strategy. Plus, once you’ve done that, the pitch coordinator should pay closer attention to your messages moving forward.

Learn from Rejections and Successes

Finally, look for ways to learn from your results over time. This is the best way to drive improvement. You can track data, see what strategies have gotten you the most media placements, and use those more consistently moving forward. The longer you do this, the more improvements you should see.

You can learn from successes and failures. When a pitch works, review it to see why it did. Maybe the story was closely connected to the community, or you connected your new product to an ongoing trend in the industry. Either way, it’s a sign of what you may need to continue doing moving forward to see similar results.

Failures show you what doesn’t work. You can always learn from the nos, refine based on feedback, and test different approaches to optimize your strategy over time.

Common Mistakes with PR Pitching

Let’s wrap up by reviewing a few common mistakes to avoid while making your pitches:

• Sending mass, generic pitches: These have never been effective, but they’re especially unlikely to succeed in the age of generative AI. Focus on personalized, concise pitches for improved results.
• Making it too promotional: Media outlets don’t want to promote your brand for free. You have to connect what you’re advertising to something directly relevant to the outlet and its viewers.
• Burying the lead: Pitch coordinators receive many messages daily. You’ll need to share your value proposition early or risk being ignored.
• Ignoring the follow-up: You can stand out from the crowd just by following up. Do it strategically and within professional boundaries to increase your odds of getting a story featured.

Some of these common mistakes may sound obvious, but they can be difficult to avoid in practice. For example, you may not think you’re burying the lead, but if you don’t share a value proposition in the first sentence, the recipient could move on before seeing it.

That’s why it’s important to track data and test different pitch formats. Doing so gives you a more objective sense of the mistakes you’re making. It can also help you find problems you may not have noticed otherwise.

Review Pitching Tips, Create Your Own Strategy, and Earn Media Placements

Pitching tips like these can help you stand out in the competitive PR landscape. But they’re only a starting point. For the best results, you’ll need to develop a custom strategy that reflects your company’s unique branding, products, and growth goals.

An important part of that process will be learning from your early results. Look for trends, prioritize messaging that gets results, and continue refining as you receive feedback to find the ideal way to pitch your brand.

About the Author

Anna Peck Content Marketing Manager at Clutch

Anna Peck is a content marketing manager at Clutch, where she crafts content on digital marketing, SEO, and public relations. In addition to editing and producing engaging B2B content, she plays a key role in Clutch’s awards program and contributed content efforts. Originally joining Clutch as part of the reviews team, she now focuses on developing SEO-driven content strategies that offer valuable insights to B2B buyers seeking the best service providers.

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