Hunting down tech PR feature opportunities

There are often times when clients don’t have any news themselves to discuss, but that shouldn’t be a barrier towards getting press coverage. Features are a crucial part of working a PR account and a great way to get a client’s message out.

Become a feature seeker

Our clients expect to appear in all the right places. There is nothing worse than opening a publication and finding a perfectly targeted article with no mention of the client. The marketing team gets a lot of questions about how PR helps deliver leads and participating in a debate that offers a chance to convey thought leadership above rival vendors is an opportunity not to be missed. Part of the dark art of PR involves hunting down a variety of features from a range of relevant publications every week. It’s important to make some time in your day that isn’t dedicated to one specific client but rather just about checking in with journalists to see what they’re writing in general and what topics they’re interested in. You can often find that you have a client perfectly placed to help them with a feature that you might otherwise never have known about.

In tech PR, there is often a significant amount of overlap between clients, especially in terms of the publications they are hoping to be featured in. This means that allowing for feature hunting time can have a real multiplier effect in terms of coverage achieved relative to time invested.

Which feature is best?

As well as trusting us to leave no stone unturned when it comes to finding features, clients should also expect us to know which features are relevant, which ones offer the best exposure to the most appropriate audience and which ones will provide the best platform to position them as a thought leader. If we know a client’s business inside out we can map out a core message and explain to the journalist why that message is interesting for their readers. The aim is to take the hassle out of the content side of things for clients – give us a half-day brain dump every quarter and we’ll deliver the interviews for the right articles in the right publications. 

Create the debate

However, as useful and necessary as uncovering existing features is, it has its limits. By keeping our ears open to what journalists are talking about, we can take things one step further – create the feature yourself and pitch it to the journalist.

Pitching a feature idea well requires several important steps; firstly you need to really listen to what the journalist has been saying and understand what they (and more importantly their readers) are interested in. Secondly, spend a little time to come up with an angle that your client could offer to the journalist and, therefore, help bring shape to the feature. Journalists hate lazy pitching. Cathy has already outlined why no news is no excuse for not delivering coverage and making sure that your client isn’t missing key features is a critical part of that. As long as you are hunting down as many relevant feature opportunities as possible and creating your own feature ideas, no news from clients need not be a problem!