In PR Hot Seat, Sandra Stewart and Sarah Grolnic-McClurg of Thinkshift Communications deliver expert advice on your PR dilemmas. No names, so no worries. Go ahead, ask us anything. We're here for your questions and quandaries: [email protected]
Dear PR Hot Seat,
We’ve produced some thought leadership articles that are polished and well-written, but I can’t seem to get any of the outlets in our field to publish them. Yes, I’ve asked for feedback, but no one has written back to me. Any idea what’s going on?
Sandra: Oof. Editors often do not write back. But I get it—they receive streams of submissions and can’t spend their day giving feedback. And it often is possible to self-diagnose what ails your team’s articles. Put on your brutally honest hat and ask yourself these questions:
Do we have a point of view? Editors want to publish fresh, surprising, challenging or controversial perspectives. Your articles may not express much of an opinion—or at least, not one that is new or provocative.
Are we targeting the right outlets? Maybe your articles have plenty of appeal—for a different kind of publication. Are you writing for a niche or technical audience but pitching to a mainstream business publication? Or are you shooting for a top-tier general news outlet—say, The New York Times opinion section? Competition for those placements is fierce, and unless your author is a celebrity or a Fortune 100 leader, has insider perspective on a hot news issue, or is telling a heart-wrenching personal story, you are unlikely to land one.
Are the articles self-promotional? A marketing piece in thought leadership drag is not going to fool anyone. Definitely draw on your experience and examples, but also be sure to anchor your points in data, reference other actors in the field, draw lessons that others can apply, and propose broad principles.
Have we followed the publications’ submission guidelines? When outlets publish guidelines, they’re telling you, “This is what we want.” Believe them.
Answering these questions should point you to some likely flaws. Fix them and you’re likely to get better results. Or don’t fix them (because the powers that be just can’t get there) and be happy you have some good marketing content.
Sarah: Love it Sandra. You’ve hit all the major points—we’ve seen so many variations on those themes.
Here’s a thought: If you think you’ve really covered all four of those items and still aren’t landing the placement, send a draft article to a trusted colleague who knows this kind of work and ask them to review it with Sandra’s points in mind. Maybe you’re just too close to the copy?
Next, I’d get granular by taking just one article and one outlet and digging deep into it. Here’s a silly question, for example: Is the copy really within the stated word count? A more serious one: Does your author really have credibility on this field or topic?
Then, here’s a laborious way to analyze the fit between your topic and the targeted publication. First, look at the contributed pieces the outlet has published and create a sample of, say, five to 10 recent pieces. With your sample in front of you, ask the following questions:
Does your piece fit in, tone wise?
Does it use examples relevant to the field?
Does it add something new that readers of this particular outlet would want to know about but that isn’t so new it breaks their brains?
Does it really address concerns, topics and timely issues for these readers?
These questions get back to one of my golden PR rules: Know the audience. In this case, in trying to place your contributed article, you’ve got to have something that’s of interest to the outlet’s readers and the gatekeeper who will publish it.
Sandra, I know we’ve had tremendous success placing pieces when we’ve ghostwritten them with the right idea for the right outlet already identified and approved of by the client. The light bulb goes off: Hey, this is the perfect topic for this outlet and it’s right on the money for this client to write about! And then, and only then, does the writing start. Bonus point, it is written the way we know the outlet likes things written. Our placement success rate for this approach is way over 80%.
When this very targeted approach doesn’t pan out, it hurts. Like, quite a bit. That means we’ve got to rewrite the thing to send it elsewhere since it’s so tightly matched to one place. Ouch! Yet it usually runs somewhere since the idea is solid. And, like you said, if it doesn’t run anywhere in the end, which is a rarity for us, you’ve got some solid content to place on partner sites and use in many ways on your owned and social platforms—remember to dice it and slice it. It’s nice if the author knows the backup plan and sees the value in it. Sell them on that before you undertake the heavy lift.
Last point: Another factor is how you pitch or present the piece to the outlet. We can talk about that another time and also get into tactics like pre-pitching an article idea and working with outlines. There are many ways to go about getting thought leadership placed in media outlets!
