MARKETING MATTERS
How to get feature articles into the media 10 Steps to ‘Free’ Publicity By Phil Turtle, MD, Data Centre Industry PR and Turtle Consulting
Introduction Feature articles are the perfect complement to press releases and case studies for a high impact PR campaign resulting in lots of highly informative coverage showcasing your company’s know-how and capabilities. But how do you start writing one?
How do you make sure that what you write is what the editor wants? And how do you actually get your feature articles into the pages of your key magazines and websites?
Phil Turtle shares the steps to placing a feature article in the media and why you probably shouldn’t let the sales director write it.
1. First you must decide what type of article you want to contribute to the magazine. Although you’ve been reading these sorts of articles for many years, you are unlikely to have noticed they fall into several different categories. This article, for example, is an instructional or teaching article. Generally one or two pages and 800 to 1600 words. Opinion features allow you to make a controversial statement on any aspect of the market or technology – generally one page and around 800 words. Then there are technology features where you explain the ins and outs
of some up-coming technology that you or others are working on. These tend to be 1.5 to three pages, 1000 to 1800 words - and need several good photos or diagrams to support them. Business features deal with commercial aspects of what’s going on in your market or sector. As a rule of thumb they are 1000 to 1800 words and illustrated with graphs or charts. Case studies deal with a particular customer problem and solution, but I’ll explain those in a separate article. There are more examples, but you’ll figure this out in the next step.
2. Do your due diligence. One of the biggest gripes I hear from editors is that many PR agencies, and to a lesser extent company representatives doing their own PR, phone them without having even read their magazines. This is beyond rude. It is imperative to understand that your next step is ‘selling’ your feature idea – and the editor is your prospective customer! So, as with any prospect, you need to find out
exactly what they’re in the market to buy. After all, you wouldn’t try to sell a pink Fiat 500 to a company director would you? So here’s what you need to do: Grab two or three copies of the magazine you’d like to be in (I do the same with its two or three closest competitors as well) and look through all the one or more-page articles and apply ‘yellow stickies’ with what you judge to be the ‘category’ of each. Having done this, you now know what ‘categories’ of article the editor is in the market for.
3. Now decide which of that particular editor’s preferred categories your topic would best fit into and write a 50 to 60 words synopsis of what the article could cover – and the key information his/her readers would glean from reading it.
4. Big Caveat: Feature articles are information not advertising. If you want to overtly promote your products, buy an advert!
5. Ok, you’re armed with your non- advertising synopsis – now pick up the phone and call your preferred editor. It may take many attempts to get through – they are very busy people – and cardinal rule, always ask ‘can you speak’ as soon as you get through. Outline your idea by discussing the synopsis and find out if he/she is interested in the topic. Let the editor give you guidance on what to cover within the article and any particular ‘slant’ they would like on it. Then ask a) what is the deadline? b) what word-count is required c) how many high-quality illustrations/ photos are needed to support it.
6. Congratulations. You just made your first ‘placement’. But remember this is a contract – the editor is giving you two or three pages with a communication value of three times the advertising cost – so it’s easily over £10k-worth of publicity he/she is giving you. You must not let him/her down!
7. Only now do you write the article. Get your notes of the topic you want to cover and also grab the copies of the specific magazine you
38 NETCOMMS europe Volume III Issue 3 2013
www.netcommseurope.com
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