By: Michael Mejer
The cannabis industry is growing rapidly and marketing leaders need to come up with unique ways to ensure their brand rises above the noise. Yet, advertising restrictions on cannabis handcuff marketing teams and often prevent brands from reaching their target audiences. Media relations, on the other hand, can help brands stand out in a crowded and secluded market. Media relations is the act of building relationships between business stakeholders and journalists, reporters, show hosts, etc. The goal is to use these connections to work with the media to report on a company’s insights, products, accomplishments, and even thought leadership. The result of all the above? The ability to shape brand perception, gain increased brand visibility, and drive business growth.
The question is… how? How should marketing and/or business leaders get started on their own media relations journey? In this article, we’ll dive into the tips to navigating media relations in the cannabis space from fostering relationships with journalists to crafting unique brand narratives, and crushing your public relations (PR) campaign. But first, we need to discuss what the difference is between media relations and public relations.
Media Relations vs. Public Relations: What’s the Difference?
Essentially, public relations focuses on developing a brand’s story and overall media strategy. It helps answer questions like: Who is the brand targeting? What do we want to say when we reach them? How do we want to say it?
Media relations is a subset of PR that focuses on the distribution of a brand’s story to news and media outlets. It’s all about managing and maintaining relationships with reporters and securing media coverage in various online, print, TV, and radio publications. In short, media relations and public relations go hand-in-hand. And harnessing your media relations skills will only enhance the value and efficacy of your PR campaign. Now, let’s get into those media relations tips.
Media Relations Tips for Effective Cannabis PR Campaigns
1. Find Cannabis Specific Outlets and Media Contacts
This may seem like a no-brainer, but the first crucial step to crafting a winning PR campaign is to identify media outlets and journalists that actually focus on cannabis. There’s no point in reaching out to a Forbes journalist whose main beat is real estate if your brand is an e-commerce retailer. Not only are you wasting your time reaching out to ill-fitting media contacts, you’re inevitably wasting the journalist’s time as well.
This doesn’t mean you can’t reach out to a major publication like Forbes—in fact, if you have a killer story, you absolutely should reach out to Forbes journalists. But be mindful of the journalists you contact. It’s important to find reporters and journalists that create content pertaining to cannabis or your specific niche in the space. This will give you the best chances possible to get your brand’s story featured.
There are various tools such as Cision or MuckRack that can help you identify these journalists and media outlets. But if you’re not in the market for PR tools, a Google search is always a great place to start.
2. Personalize Your Pitches and Communications
Once you find the perfect list of media contacts you want to pitch your story to, the next step is to personalize your outreach. The worst mistake you can make in your media relations is blast the same pitch to every journalist on your list and hope that at least one of them picks it up. Journalists are already being inundated with “spray-and-pray” pitches. If you want yours to stand out, you’ll need to do some research first.
The best thing you can do to personalize your pitch is to research each reporter. What topics do they typically write or talk about? Have they featured anyone you admire recently? Are they located in an area you’re fond of? All of these minor personalizations become major game changers when used appropriately. For example, I’ve seen the best of professional relationships begin through a connection over a favorite sports team or musician.
So, instead of starting your pitch with: “Hey [name], here is my business, here’s what we do, and here’s why you should feature us,” consider starting your pitch with something along the lines of: “Hey [name], I saw your recent article in [publication name] where you talked about innovative cultivation technology and it inspired me to reach out to you…” This personalized pitch will help cultivate a long-term, genuine partnership that will go a long way in crushing your PR goals.
3. Craft Compelling Story Angles
Just as it’s important to tailor your pitch to each reporter you reach out to, it’s equally critical to create a story that will resonate with not only journalists, but a publication’s intended audience as well. If you’re pitching a journalist at a cannabis-tech focused outlet, your story needs to be tech-focused, written for cannabis manufacturers and cultivators, and most importantly, it needs to be unique.
Meanwhile, if you’re pitching a story to an outlet focused on cannabis business news, you’d want to make it resonate with business leaders, and offer up some key information or actionable insights that can help them increase their bottom line. One great way you can add value to your story is to incorporate data or insights to back up your claims. This additional information also adds credibility to your story and your brand name. It’s a win-win.
4. Utilize Social Media to Stay Engaged with Journalists
As stated previously, media relations is all about fostering relationships with people in the media. That said, it’s vital to stay engaged with journalists, reporters, and show hosts on social media such as LinkedIn. From small actions such as reacting to a journalist’s post or bigger moves like commenting on their post or resharing it to your LinkedIn profile, staying in contact with journalists and the like will enable your professional relationships to grow even stronger. This type of comraderie can open doors to other media contacts and outlets that would love to share your unique vantage point or story.
Final Thoughts
There is a lot that goes into an effective public relations campaign, but honing in on your media relations skills and tactics is a crucial step toward success. Too often, businesses send out press releases (sometimes when it doesn’t make sense to) over the newswire and expect dramatic results. This is hardly ever the outcome.
To ensure you get the most bang for your pitch, you need to prioritize media relations. Leveraging these four tips is the perfect way to start.
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© Cannabis Business Executive
