4 Ways Visuals can Make Your PR Pitch a Success
By: Dmitry Dragilev
In this fast-paced world of information, it’s vital to stick out, but getting eyeballs on your content takes a certain level of skill or budget. Visuals are going to be a huge component to any successful PR strategy, and below are some ideas worth considering for your next campaign.
1. Focus on video.
These days, it can feel like you need to create a branded TV station for sharing videos, but short clips that pack a punch in terms of information or announcements stretch further than text-based updates. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel here. Reach out to your marketing or customer success team to see what they have on hand, e.g. product demos, how-to tutorials, interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and case studies. Whether trying to gain inclusion in listicles or earn more substantive reviews, product-based videos can help showcase your product to relevant online outlets. Consider how-to presentations that center around high search-volume keywords. Work with the marketing department to confirm volume, then execute relevant concepts.
Related: Developing a PR Plan
2. Create rich content.
Journalists are short on time, and writing a typical press release doesn’t cut it anymore. Your story is far more useful to a publication if the entire narrative is provided, not just small parts of it. In these instances, visuals speak a thousand words. To get your creative juices flowing, consider infographics. They can be time-consuming, especially with the data-wrangling alone, but they grab attention and help vivify dry subjects. Provide an embeddable infographic that can draw in backlinks for other publications.
Other ideas include media galleries with high-quality images, as well as social-media embeds that offer an interactive element to your release, allowing the recipient to like, share, favorite and view comments without having to leave your page.
3. Consider your branding options.
Regardless of your chosen visual, it’s important to ensure that branding is consistent and clear. The tricky part will be navigating publications’s policies. Some are happy to share branded graphics, while others may not be. This is why it’s vital to keep branding consistent. Even if the logo is chopped off, you should still be able to recognize the colors. Either way, have a branded and non-branded version of your visual ready. Always submit the branded version first, and if there are any conflicts, you have Plan B on hand.
Related: 9 Must-Have Visual-Marketing Tools on the Web
4. Develop an online newsroom.
A recent survey showed that 79 percent of digital journalists visit the online newsrooms of both large and small companies. Apart from generating page views, the extra benefit is that you can localize and archive your press releases. Sometimes an email pitch alone doesn’t do your story justice, even with all the attendant visuals, and it could be greeted cruelly by virus scas and spam filters. Remember to keep the newsroom on-brand, host a press kit, store your visual assets and make it all super easy to find. Adding rich content allows for attention-grabbing opportunities that distinguish themselves from the plain-text, no-news releases floating out there.
Press pitches have long been consistently black and white to avoid seemingly overly self-promotional. More colorful, visual pitches will help to tell your story in ways that mere words can’t, so test these ideas out, and let me know how you get on!
