Press can serve a lot of purposes but one of the main ones is credibility.
But it especially mattered for the product we were building: a product that helped empower the blind via object recognition. Why? Targeting the visually impaired is quite difficult; you can’t use traditional marketing techniques like social media. Instead, we relied on press to capture the attention of our relatively unconnected audience. Indeed, we found that sighted readers would almost definitely recommend our product to their visually impaired relatives and friends.
After being featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, Business Insider, SIRIUSXM Radio, and HuffingtonPost among others, we learned three major principles when it comes to pitching journalists.
The first basic principle behind finding press–as it is with selling anything–is to understand what’s in it for the other party. If you want to sell something, you have to show the other party–the journalist–that it’s in their interest to write about you.
At the end of the day, media companies are businesses. How do they make money? Ad revenue. How do you increase ad revenue? Increase number of potential clicks by increasing page-views. How do you increase page-views for a story? Make sure it’s “juicy” and that people want to share it on social networks.
