Pitching bloggers takes time–and time is money
Posts about how to pitch bloggers abound, and almost universally the following points are made:
- Read the blogger’s blog and know what he or she writes about
- Personalize the email
- Don’t use corporate speak—sound natural
- Be transparent
The point of this level of groundwork is to build a relationship with a blogger, preferably before you need to pitch on behalf of a client.
All of this takes time, and I’m curious as to how PR agencies, especially those that work under a billable hours model, approach this.
When pitching traditional media, you pull together and update your media list, making sure your contacts are still where they were when you last pitched them. This is a task that someone more junior in the agency can do; they can also look up and add niche publications that might fit the product/whatever you are pitching. You pull together your release, send it, and make sure you follow up with a call, etc. It’s all finite, manageable, and it can be done in a reasonable amount of time. When you’re billing a client at $150-$200 an hour, this shouldn’t take too long, certainly not weeks. And, once you’ve established a relationship/trust with someone on the Home & Garden beat, or the environmental reporter, you can pitch other relevant stories down the road. Nurturing these relationships builds strong practice groups and enables PR practitioners to become trusted sources.
Contrast that with the “must do” list for pitching bloggers. About the only step a junior person could be handed is the research on locating the potential blogs to pitch. Even that step is going to take considerable time, depending on what you are pitching—sifting through millions of blogs, determining which fit, have a following, and are active.
The person that will be doing the pitching needs to be the one to read the blogs on that list—that’s the only way to include the right info in the email (see: ‘personalize email’ and ‘don’t use corporate speak’). Scanning won’t do, you need to actually read the blog to make sure the product/pitch is relevant. This takes time.
Some will fit the pitch perfectly, some won’t. Get rid of the ones that don’t, and start to build a relationship with the ones that do. That takes more time.
Then, each pitch email needs to be personalized—no bulk emails. That takes yet more time. By now you’ve sunk a lot of time doing what needs to be done to pitch bloggers on behalf of your client. If you’ve invested 40 billable hours—and depending on the number of bloggers you’re pitching it may be way more than that—well, welcome to the $6,000 – $8,000 press release.
The kicker is that if you’re successful in pitching the bloggers on behalf of the client, and the client comes back and says “great, now do the same thing for this other product,” depending on how targeted the first was—say it was a hair shampoo—and now the client wants you to do the same for toothpaste or hand lotion, you might not be pitching the same bloggers, because many blogs are niche categories. And so the process has to begin again…from the start.
How are agencies tackling this? Are they concentrating on A-list bloggers only, that might not fit the niche for their products exactly and maybe that’s why we see items like this pop up occasionally? How are clients responding—are they understanding of the ramp-up/learning curve that is necessary (and the costs associated with that investment of time), or do they come to agencies expecting that expertise (even within niches) to be already there? Are agencies picking “designated pitchers”—social media experts whose job it is to do the pitching—or does it vary by client team?
