Getting local press coverage without a PR budget

The standard advice is to craft a compelling story angle and pitch it to the right journalist. That advice is written from your side of the exchange, and it is why most attempts fail.

Look at it from the newsroom instead. A local reporter is filing several stories a day, has no researcher, and is working against a deadline this afternoon. They are not short of ideas. They are short of a named human being who will pick up the phone and say something usable in the next twenty minutes.

You are not trying to be a story. You are trying to be the person they ring when they need a quote about your trade.

Why this works better than pitching

A pitch asks a journalist to do work: read it, assess it, decide it is worth a slot. Most pitches from small businesses are announcements, and an announcement is not a story.

Being a source removes work instead of adding it. When there is a cold snap, a storm, a new council rule, a price rise, a scam going around, a reporter needs somebody in your trade to explain it. If you are the person who answers, you are in the paper repeatedly for years, without ever having pitched anything.

How to become one, in four steps

1. Find the actual person

Not the news desk. Read your local paper and community sites for two weeks and write down who covers business, property, council and community. It will be three or four names, and often one person covering all of it.

2. Introduce yourself with no ask

One short email. Who you are, what you do, and that you are happy to be rung for comment on anything in your trade. No attachment, no press release, no request.

Subject: local plumber, happy to be a source

Hi Sarah,

I run Mill Road Plumbing in Chermside, been doing
it 14 years, mostly northside.

If you ever need someone to explain something
plumbing-related on deadline, ring me. Storm damage,
water bills, the flexi hose recalls, whatever.
I will answer and I will be quick.

07 xxxx xxxx, any time.

Dan

That email does not ask for anything, which is exactly why it gets filed rather than deleted. You are a solved problem for a future deadline.

3. When they ring, be fast and quotable

• Answer, or call back within the hour. After that the story is written.
• Speak in short sentences. A journalist needs a sentence they can lift, not a paragraph they have to edit.
• Give a number if you have one. How many callouts you took that week is more useful than an adjective.
• Do not sell. The moment you turn a quote into an advert you become a nuisance rather than a source.

4. Bring them things occasionally

Not announcements. Things you know that they do not, because you are in fifteen houses a week and they are not.

• A pattern: callouts for one fault tripled after a cold week.
• A scam or a dodgy operator doing the rounds locally.
• The practical effect of a new rule that has just been announced.
• Your own count of something. Original data, however small, is the thing reporters can build a story around.

The community route, which is slower and more reliable

Reporters cover community impact readily, and this is the version that requires no media skill at all.

Sponsor the junior team. Do a job free for someone who needs it and do not put it on social media. Turn up to the working bee. This produces coverage as a by-product, and the coverage is warmer than anything a pitch produces because somebody else is telling the story.

What the coverage is worth, honestly

Two things, and one of them is not what you expect.

A link from an established local news site is one of the better links a local business can get, because it is editorial, local and genuinely relevant. That is the search value.

But many local outlets do not link at all, or link to a homepage from a name mention. So ask politely for a link, and if the answer is no, take the mention anyway. An unlinked mention still names your business alongside your town in a source that other things read, and increasingly that matters for how you are described by anything summarising you.

Press is one of seven local link sources, and the others are less glamorous and easier: link building without the outreach spam covers the ones already sitting in your business. If your customers come almost entirely through reputation rather than search, press may matter more than rankings do.