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reporter’s dream, and I can’t recommend it enough. These services provide a handy, clickable link to your release (no attachments!), with a host of well-designed formats that include downloadable, high-res images. The days of stodgy press release attachments are over, and more often than not, they can get you stuck in a Spam filter, which leads to nowhere, fast.
Uncovering Pitch Angles
With your press release in place, it’s time to figure out ways to get your story picked up, and here’s where your pitch angle comes in. A pitch angle is a particular slant on the news you’re sharing. It’s the “juice” of your news release, and it can be catered to a specific audience or outlet. To illustrate the process of uncovering different pitch angles, I’ll use an example. I recently managed a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a local company with a unique food product. The company, Smiling Hara Tempeh, wanted to launch a new product line, “Hempeh,” which is soy-free tempeh fortified with hemp seeds. To source the beans and hemp for Hempeh, they planned to partner with Growing Warriors, a veteran-owned and operated farm in Kentucky—a fortuitous partnership that made their campaign really stand out. For the press release, I lead with the news: the K ickstarter launch, the unveiling of the new product, the partnership with Growing Warriors, and the fundraising goal of $20,000. (I’m happy to report that by the end of the campaign we exceeded the funding goal by over 25%.) As for pitch angles, we wanted to cast as wide a net as possible, to get the story picked up in as many outlets as possible, and so we explored as many different story angles as we could think of. In the end, our pitch angles touched on the following themes: healthy cooking, vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free lifestyles, veteran farming programs, the changing laws around growing hemp, and the superfood benefits of hemp. Smiling Hara Tempeh is a small family-owned business, so other potential story angles
Sometimes you’ll get bites right away. When I pitched Smiling Hara Tempeh to an editor at a popular national food magazine, I received a reply within five minutes.
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flyavl.com March 2015 | capitalatplay.com
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