Tips to garner local media coverage – DSP 40

Everywhere we look these days it seems like there’s some media outlet doing a piece on float tanks. They also seem to always feature a float center. How do you get to be that center in the piece? Find out the process from start to finish as Graham gives out his secrets to getting a news piece published on you and your center.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: All right. Hi everyone. I’m Graham.

Ashkahn: My name is Ashkahn.

Graham: Hi everyone, today’s question is, “How do I get local media to cover my center?!”

Ashkahn: That’s a good question.

Graham: Yeah. So you should probably reach out to them and make sure that they know about you.

Ashkahn: I mean, that’s basically the crux of it. You’ve got to reach out and make sure they know. I mean, so there’s some media that will just contact you.

Graham: Yeah. And if that happens, at least in our experience, the chances of them running a story is humongous.

Ashkahn: If they reach out to you, for sure.

Graham: Float tanks are interesting enough, it doesn’t even matter if you bomb an interview or something, they still want to cover and they want it for something. So call that the “winning the lottery strategy of getting media coverage” by just waiting around for someone to reach out to you. And on the flip side, right, it takes some active outreach on your part to actually get people to know that you A) exist and B) want to take the time to write a story on you.

Ashkahn: And the short story is that it’s kind of a tough racket, it’s not a very two way conversation most of the time. A lot of it is just feeling like you’re tossing stuff into the void. And that’s why it can be a little hard to talk about, sometimes it’s just hard to even know what worked, exactly.

Graham: So one thing I will say is it’s a number’s game. If you really want to get covered by a certain local paper or your biggest local paper and so you send out a press release kit and you send it out to them, you probably are not going to get covered, right? For here in Portland we have a media list of about 50 different media outlets from small time blogs to actual TV stations, to the kind of big weekly papers that we have, also radio. In between all of those, we have this list of people who we submit our media press releases to each time we want to get covered.

And of those, maybe 5% or something will actually run a story on you. From every time we really blanket at them hard, we’ll maybe get three or four little articles and possibly something that’s a big piece. But even that is really a gamble. So it’s a numbers game. Don’t get one-itis and just be focused on a single media outlet that you want.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I mean, it does seem like we’ve had more success kind of working with smaller publications, which makes sense. It is a nice place to start because it helps build momentum. And stuff like that works pretty well in kind of the PR world it seems. It kind of moves likes a circuit that seems to exist. And having an article written about you in one place seems to make it more likely that you’ll have an article written about you somewhere else. So, instead of reaching out to your local news channel starting with local bloggers or people who are just a little bit more hungry more content and don’t have as much of a bombardment of people contacting them.

Graham: Yeah. Starting small and building up is a great idea. And even including examples from the previous press that you’ve gotten when contacting bigger press is really good. Maybe they’ll see something in one of those articles that’s an angle that they can take that they haven’t haven’t thought of before, or just showing how other people have written about it is nice for bigger publications. The actual process, here, that we’re talking about is preparing a press release, which is usually about 300 words. That’s something that you’ll send out to your giant master media list. You can also prepare something, which is what I call the press kit, which includes more photos, maybe examples of previous press, some info about floating and float tanks that they might not know but isn’t exactly in your press release itself.

And because float tanks are so weird and people don’t know about them and because they look interesting and can include some really good photo references, a press kit is totally what I recommend doing. So, that might be anywhere between 8 to 10 pages long with a lot of images scattered in there.

Ashkahn: And the release itself, the press release, you kind of want to write as if you were writing the article. It’s basically, the more work you can save these people from doing, the more it will be like, maybe, I will run this story. Like there is a bunch of this work is already done for me.

Graham: Yep. So you’re writing as though you’re one of the paper’s reporters or the news broadcasters that’s going to be covering it. And along those lines too, when you do write your press release, don’t just make it about you — the moral of the story being just about a local float tank center that’s opening up. Rather than just promoting your business with a news article, the more you can identify as part of bigger movement, I think the better for your chances of getting published.

Ashkahn: Yeah. And just look at almost any float article that’s out there that you can get your hands on — it’s almost always about floating as a concept. And it’s recent popularization and the benefits that it can have people — stuff like that. And then in there they mention and here’s the float center in our town. I don’t know, I’ve almost never seen an article that’s just like about a float center.

Graham: Yeah. Maybe like in the business section, where it’s like local entrepreneur does crazy new thing. And so, you have two really good topics right there that you can kind of wedge yourself into. One is just the rising tide of float tanks across the country and their movement. And the other one is even broader, which is the movements of mindfulness and meditation, and just taking time out of your daily life to process. And that also is getting kind of getting kind of a lot of traction across the national media and even international media especially as new studies come out on meditation and the benefits there of making your float tank center part of either of those greater concepts is way more likely to get a bite from the media than just making it about your center.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Okay. So you have your press release, it’s in your press kit, and then what do you do?

Graham: Then you blanket everyone. So send it out to that list of 50 people you have. And from here on out, the name of the game is really about follow up. If all you do is send out your press kit or press release to those 50 people and kind of say like, alright done with that, don’t need to touch it again, you’re probably not going to get hugely good results. These people get tons of press releases. I mean you’re like probably one of 500 or 100 press releases that they got that day if you’re in a larger city right. So actually getting them to pay attention and stand out becomes the next big step, and that, in my mind, is all about follow up. So after a few days once you’ve e-mailed them, e-mail them again with some more pictures.

And this is also a good lesson, which is don’t just email them and say like, did you get my press release because they totally did and they totally didn’t care or they would have gotten back to you. And so, the next step is like rather than saying, “Did you get this?,” send them something else that’s useful like, “Oh, just you so know, here’s a little video interview I did with one of my floaters, in case this is useful for you. Here’s some higher lens photos of my tanks just in case you need that for your article or something.” That is a much better approach for follow up. And you know over the course of a few weeks follow up a few times like that, give them a phone call maybe once.

And almost every time you won’t hear anything back still. You’re giving them more photos, you’re giving them a phone call to see if they want an interview with one of your clients, or if they want free floats — offering free floats is always one of those good kind of follow ups that you can throw in there. And again, it’ll probably be radio silence. Most likely what will happen is after you’ve done this four or five times over a few weeks, one of your customers will come in and say, “Oh, I really like that article that popped up in so and so magazine,” and you’re like, “What are you talking about?” and they pull it out and, sure enough, there is the press release that you wrote that popped up in a magazine with someone else’s name attached to it.

And that’s almost always been our experience and other floating centers. Which is really interesting, like what the heck is going on there?

Ashkahn: Yeah, I’ve even been interviewed for news articles and they don’t tell you when they actually come out or anything. You just find them eventually — like, wait a minute, that’s my name in there.

Graham: Yeah, which is crazy. And so, we don’t know for sure what’s going on but my theory is that the people writing the article never intended to publish it. They might have done a follow up interview if they had a float specific piece they want to do. But what happened was they were fact checking some piece and it didn’t quite pan out or a big advertiser fell out of the last second and all of a sudden they have these inches of column space that they need to fill by their print deadline, which is maybe two or three days from then. And so, they’re just scouring through their brain and through their archives for a piece that’s well put together that already has references that they can slap in there, which is probably interesting to their readership, right? So the more that you’ve been on their mind and the more you fit that bill, the more that you are able to actually be well written and have good photo documentation and not be so self promotional. The more that you stick in their mind, you might end up in that magazine.

Again, this is just my theory from talking to PR people, but certainly, the lack of response, the lack of follow through,  almost the lack of fact checking that goes into a lot of these articles really make it seem like it’s a last minute copy and paste job.

Ashkahn: You also mentioned an interview with one of your customers — I find that to be a very common request, and that might be something you want to think about going into this — knowing who you’re going to ask in your mind, maybe two, three of your customers that would be willing to do something like that. Whenever we’ve had an article, they interview us and they maybe take like half a sentence from what we say, but they really seem to want quotes from your actual float customers, which makes sense.

I mean that’s much more credible, like every business owner says his business is excellent. Obviously, it’s not exactly a very respectable way to write an article. So yeah, keep that in mind as you go into this, knowing who might be good candidates to reach out to in your customer base.

Graham: Again, this is all a really good base to get you started. Fortunately, getting press written about you is not unique to float tanks as well. So there’s tons of great material out there even down to really what newspapers and magazines are looking for in an exact word count in kind of content wise paragraph wise from a press release that you want to write. So definitely do a little follow up research and just kind of keep the general lessons from this in mind. Hopefully, that helps you navigate the silent sea of sending out these press releases

Ashkahn: Yeah. All right. Well, excellent. If you guys have any more questions for us that you want to see answered on this podcast you can just go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast or send us an e-mail

Graham: Send a smoke signal, we’ll be looking to the east!

Ashkahn: Just write it on a rock and throw it through a window, like anything, it’s all good.

Graham: Alright! Thanks everybody.

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