While knowing the benefits of media coverage is all well and good, scoring it can be a serious challenge – especially if you’re not a particularly newsworthy business. It’s a problem faced by many companies and business leaders: you want to get media coverage, but you can’t think of anything important to share with the world. Journalists are always on the hunt for a juicy story, but if your company is distinctly drama-free, it can be difficult to get their attention.
A lot of the time, the problem boils down to businesses confusing ‘a good story’ with ‘free advertising’. If you’re approaching a journalist with a piece of sales copy that’s been badly disguised as a news story, you’re not going to get anywhere. The journalist will be able to spot your ploy a mile off, and won’t even justify your message with a response.
So what’s the solution? While it might seem hopeless, in reality, there are a lot of ways to score that all-important media coverage. If you don’t have any interesting news to share from your day-to-day business life, then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and make something newsworthy.
One of the most popular ways to do this is through research, especially when the findings reveal something new about an important industry issue. The research doesn’t need to be the most academic in the world: an online survey usually works fine. As long as you can get enough people involved, then a journalist should still be interested in what you’ve discovered.
And if you don’t have the time or resources for conducting your own research, then why not try to make a compelling story out of someone else’s? As always, think like a journalist: are there any new pieces of research available on the Australian Bureau of Statistics? Is there any way you could transform this research into a meaningful story about something that’s happening in your industry? These are the kinds of questions that go through a journalist’s head every day. Make sure they’re always on your mind, too.