Lexie Smith
Hey guys, I'm Lexie Smith, a mom, multi hyphenate entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of the PR bar Inc, coaching platform and agency. In my career I've had the privilege of guiding countless brands, genius, publicists, eager students and ambitious entrepreneurs on their PR journeys. I've danced with the Giants and nurtured startups, directed in house PR departments lend my expertise to boards and spread knowledge across universities nationwide. Throughout all of this, I've seen our industry change and evolve, while simultaneously proving that some timeless fundamentals remain unshaken. This show takes you behind the scenes of the world of media, marketing and PR, aiming to teach you all the new tips, tricks, and how the best and brightest are achieving success overseas. Now it's time to grow. Welcome to the show. Hello, hello, I am back with minisodes for season six of the pigeon and sipping podcast, still can't believe it's been that long. Just so you know, in between my incredible guest interviews if you're new to the show, once in a while, I will feel inspired to hop on and share a bit of my own tips, hacks, advice and learnings. So that's what I'm going to do today. In a bit of context as to or to the why behind this episode, I just finished a what I call pitching S O S training with a PR agency. Now quick background, I do offer private trainings on a variety of topics, largely for PR agencies or in house PR teams, pitching SOS is when a agency is just having a really hard time with a specific client or an account. They're just not seeing results. And they want me to come in and audit their media list, audit their pitches and see if there's something they're missing. See if I have suggestions or tweaks or ideas on how to land coverage for their clients. So this particular client came to me, she has an influencer client who really, really wants to be on TV. And I've had a lot of success with my clients landing on TV. So she decided to book me for a pitching SOS. Now, we've talked through a lot of different things during this call. But one thing I wanted that I thought was different, or I had an idea that I haven't shared on the podcast, were some hacks when it comes to follow ups that you may or may not have thought about. Okay, so first and foremost, the first hack is to follow up. A client of mine recently just landed a segment on New York live and she did this post a follow up. So follow ups work. So gently PSA reminder that if you haven't followed up for your pitch, do so although do so thoughtfully. So how can we do so thoughtfully. Hack number two. This is something I've also shared on this podcast before. So it's really another reminder, if you don't already make sure you have a pitch tracker or an email tracker integrated into the platform you're sending pitches. So for me and my team, we send all of our pitches through Gmail. So we use a completely free extension called streak that allows us to see a if our email has been opened, and then be how many times it's been opened. Before sending a follow up, we go in and we check this, it helps give us an idea of how frequently an editor is looking at our email. If we see for example, that they have been viewing it incessantly that day, maybe they've read it three times already, then we probably will give them a little space and follow up the next day if we don't hear back. So you can start to make some decisions or play around with different strategies when you have that data available. The other data point and this is more of the AHA or the new thing I want to bring to the mix today has to go back to research and what I lovingly call professional stalking. So we spend as publicist or as entrepreneurs DIY or as freelancers trying to land their next paid piece. A lot of time researching and building up our contact or our media lists, right. And sometimes we make the mistake of thinking once we've done our research for that list, and we start the campaign that our research is done. Here's a tweak you can try. Here's something that my agency does that I could not hands down. Suggest anymore. Before sending a follow up to let's say, Mary Sue, I don't know, just Mary Sue came to mind, we're going to the day, we're going to send the follow up, go onto any public social platform that we have access to, to see if we can learn anything that indicates we shouldn't send the follow up that day. So here's what I mean, we could go on to Twitter. And if we noticed on Twitter that morning, she's currently put a hashtag journal request out looking for sources for an article. Well, now we know her inbox that day is probably being flooded with an influx of source requests, and her brain is on that article. So here's an indicator for us to not send the follow up that day. Here's another example of an indicator. Let's say we follow this Mary Sue, or we'll pick someone new, let's call Barbara. Let's say we follow Barbara on Instagram. And we go look at Barbara's Instagram stories before we send the follow up. And we can see that she had posted 20 stories from her covering an award show the night before. We're all human best guesses either she's exhausted today, or now she's compiling all her notes and editing her coverage from the night before. So if we had sent her an evergreen pitch or something unrelated to the award show, ding, ding, ding indicator for us not to send that pitch today. One more example for you. Let's say that we had sent the original pitch, and we had gotten out of office. Now it's easy to forget that when we're going through a sequence of following a lot of follow ups, but don't go back to that out of office responder and pay attention to what it says you'll likely see that it will tell us how long they're out of office. So if it said, you know we're I'm out of office for the next seven days. First off, don't send the follow up in those seven days. And probably don't send it on the seventh or eighth day because we all know when we get back from vacation, we are weeding through a very inundated inbox, right? So here's an indicator to maybe wait for the ninth or 10th day. Those are some of my kind of favorite hacks to think about. When following up another couple of reminder about follow up emails, keep your follow ups succinct, to the point. And if you have new information to offer, or a new asset or something new or different to point out, do don't just send Hey, circling back, or hey, did you see this right? That's kind of no one likes that. It's annoying. Like yes, I saw that. I just was busy. So what can you add that's new, that makes them want to revisit your pitch.
Lexie Smith
All right, just a few quick tips and hacks on follow ups. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via email or slide into my DMs on Instagram. If you guys ever have an idea for the show, or you want to pitch to be on the show, feel free once again to reach out you can apply for the show if you listen to episode 100 It'll tell you exactly how to do so. Thanks for listening to me and until next time on the pigeon and sipping podcast. Cheers Hey guys, if you are enjoying the pigeon and sipping podcast, please do me a huge favor and leave a review wherever you are listening. If you want to connect with me to learn more about the PR bar Inc. You can do so on Instagram Act, the PR bar underscore inc or you can check out my website at the PR bar inc.com Cheers