The Clean and Green Club

Have you been cited in places like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Woman’s Day, Entrepreneur, and the top trade publications in your industry?

I’ve been in all the above–several times each. I’ve also been in hundreds of lesser known publications.

If you’d like that kind of ink, your pitches and press releases have to reflect the reality of the newsroom: overworked journalists sort through a mountain of information, mining for the nuggets to share with their readers, often under severe deadline pressure.

Here are a few approaches that tend to work:

• Solve a problem/ease a pain point/make people’s life better
• Expose some hidden truth that can change people’s thinking or behavior
• Tie in to a current and immediate news story or trend
• Provide a deeper “back story” on a news topic—or on a celebrity’s life
• Dip into your personal journey to show how you overcame adversity, did something really unusual, or separated yourself from the crowd in some other way
• Win an award, achieve a big milestone, etc.
• Create a catchphrase or buzzword that so perfectly captures an idea that it enters the common language

Next month: specific tools you can use to make your pitch. Note: my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, offers six entire chapters on effective publicity. Click on the book title to order your copy.

Match Message, Medium, and Audience–if you want your marketing to succeed.

That sounds simple, but what does it actually mean? It means that you talk to people differently depending on what you want to say (message), how you’re choosing to reach them (medium), and who they are (audience).

So, for instance, you wouldn’t put a screaming “Crazy Eddie”-style radio commercial on a quiet classical station. And nor would you advertise your upcoming lectures on Mozart’s influences from Bach to Haydn on a brassy, teen-oriented Facebook page.

This sounds obvious, right? Then why do so many marketers goof around with stuff like (these are REAL examples):

• A radio spot for folksinger Michelle Shocked that made her sound like a Kiss/Black Sabbath-style heavy-metal rocker–and aired on an acoustic-album-oriented station that would have been perfect for her real sound
• A district-wide direct-mail piece from a candidate for State Representative in a three-town district, with literature that only talked about his own town and ignored the two others (not surprisingly, he lost)
• Twitter feeds that are 100% mindless sales pitches and show zero understanding of how to use the medium effectively
• An ad in my local family-oriented newspaper that actually used the headline, “Sex: Now that I Have Your Attention”–to promote a car dealership!

The truly wonderful thing about marketing in the 21st century is how easy it is to find the exact audience you want, and to target those exact consumers with a message about them, through a medium that they use. If you try to create one marketing message to be all things to all people, you end up being nothing to anyone.

If you want to know more about this concept, I discuss it in much more detail in my marketing books, and especially Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (buy them together and you’ll receive a substantial discount).