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A few years ago, I sat across from a client and watched their excitement drain in real time. We had spent three weeks crafting what I believed was a flawless press release for their product launch. The result? Zero media pickups. Not one.
That moment forced me to confront something uncomfortable. After more than eight years in marketing and PR, several of the strategies on which I had built my reputation were quietly failing. Not because they were poorly executed, but because the landscape had shifted underneath them while I kept running the same plays.
Here are three tactics I used to swear by — and what I do instead now.
Blasting press releases for every client announcement
For years, my default move for any client milestone was the same: write a press release and distribute it through a wire service. New product feature? Press release. Leadership hire? Press release. Partnership announcement? You guessed it.
It felt productive. Clients loved seeing their name on a newswire, and I could point to the distribution numbers as proof of reach. But reach and results are two very different things.
Journalists I had relationships with started telling me they were drowning in pitches — and most wire releases went straight into the delete folder. According to a State of the Media report from PR Newswire, one of the top challenges PR professionals face is that press releases simply aren’t generating the media pickup they once did.
The turning point came when a client’s genuinely newsworthy funding round got buried because the journalist I pitched had already ignored three of our earlier non-newsworthy releases that quarter. We had trained the media to tune us out.
I stopped sending press releases for anything that wasn’t material news. No more releases for minor product updates or routine hires. Instead, I started pitching personalized story angles directly to three to five journalists who actually covered my client’s space. I researched what each reporter was writing about and framed the pitch around why their audience would care — not why my client was excited. The volume of outreach dropped dramatically. The pickup rate tripled.
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