Crafting creative and catchy pitches to send to the media in hopes they will cover your client's news.
After spending a few weeks at the internship and really feeling like I was starting to understand the lay of the land at a hospitality PR firm, I attempted a pitch. Pitching, I learned, is arguably the most important part of a press kit as it is the main way to reach out to the press with an idea. Pitches can be written about anything from a restaurant celebrating a national food holiday to news of a special menu that the chef has curated. They are to be creative and concise, making sure to catch the attention of a writer and entice them to write a piece for their publication on whatever subject the pitch is about. Pitches are a chance for a publicist to be creative and highlight the restaurant, bar or hotel using puns, jokes, catchy phrases or other entertaining writing techniques. I learned that they can be very fun to write and can be an exercise in imagination.
“Pitches are a chance for a publicist to be creative!”
There are many ways to write a pitch and each publicist may have his or her own style but the essential elements are as follows.
Elements:
PR firm label
Font: Bookman Old Style
Salutation
Creative introduction
Central theme
Pictures
Next steps
Hyperlinks to relevant links (website or social media)
Boilerplate
Writers, especially those for well known national hospitality publications such as Bon Appétit, Southern Living, Buzzfeed, Gourmet, Garden & Gun among others get many pitches each day. Therefore, as mentioned above, it is extremely important to craft pitches that are creative and interesting. A busy writer does not want to waste their time reading a boring pitch on a subject they would not write about. Therefore, it is also very important to only pitch ideas that you think the writer would actually be interested and publish. This means doing some research on publications and writers. If you are trying to pitch a client’s vegetarian dish, you may want to find out what writer at Gourmet usually covers vegetarian food. If would be a disservice to pitch this kind of dish to the writer who covers butchering and barbeque. Not only would you have wasted the writer's time, you might also damage your relationship with that writer and hurt your chances of securing a story in the future that is actually relevant to the subject they cover. Relationship building is a large part of PR and successful publicists have writers that they work with often.
In order to keep track of writers you want to pitch to it is often helpful to make an Excel spreadsheet called a media list where you can record a writer’s name, publication, email and the subjects they frequently cover. In addition to a media list, you can also include the boilerplate of your client in the pitch to make the life of a writer easier by providing them with essential restaurant facts to include in their article before they have to reach back out to you and ask. A creative Hattie B’s pitch I crafted for National Hot Chicken Day is included below.
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