Today I’m excited to welcome our guest Gloria Chou to the show. We get to talk about getting started with PR, how to reach out and get noticed, and we’ll dive into personal branding as well.
Gloria Chou is a US diplomat turned PR guru who helps early-stage thought leaders get recognized by earning them press placements. Her mission is to make PR more accessible so that everybody can learn how to gain traction and build credibility for their businesses without hiring an agency to do all of that pitching for them.
THE FIRST TOUCHPOINT FOR PR
Brandon Birkmeyer: Is the first exposure just liking and following them and commenting, or do you introduce yourself right off the bat? What’s your first touch?
Gloria Chou: I think the first touch is just knowing (going back to the media list) is who’s covering your industry? As you’re browsing those stories, you might click “like”, you might do a comment.
I don’t have a systematic formula for that, but I think knowing who’s covering you and then I would actually start writing your pitch to know how can you frame all of the things you want to say in a very concise email. Three or two paragraphs so that when you do a reach out, you can say, “Hey, I love this article. I sent you an email on Tuesday. Let me know if you got it.”
That’s kind of what I teach in my program. The reach out on LinkedIn is not just to add them to your network, but to tell them to check their damn email because it’s just so hard these days with spam blockers. You need those multiple touchpoints for them to actually read their email.
GLORIA’S PR JOURNEY
Brandon Birkmeyer: For the people who are getting started and need some kind of process to follow, it sounds like you’ve thought about this. How have you advised people? You coach people on this. If people want to work with you, go to gloriachoupr.com and find out what you’re teaching right here.
What is just the taste of it so they understand the method that you’re using and they know if they want to work with you?
Gloria Chou: My methods are unlike anyone else’s because I’ve never actually worked a single day or an hour at an agency of any kind since I used to be a diplomat.
I came into it with no Rolodex, with no industry contacts, and was never invited to any kind of networking thing. What I had to do is I literally had to cold call and dial the operator at CNBC and New York Times.
FIND THE METHOD THAT WORKS
Throughout years of cold calling and cold emailing, I started to pick up on patterns on when the pitch would be actually opened or actually responded to. They had these three elements, so that’s how I came up with my CPR method.
It stands for Credibility, Point of View, and Relevance. Your email really needs to have three things.
The credibility part is very simple, one sentence like, “Hey, I am a mompreneur and I’ve seen this problem first hand.” It’s just why you’re in a position to pitch this. It doesn’t mean that you’ve been awarded anything, or that you need to have a million dollars; it doesn’t mean that you need to have any kind of press features. It’s very simple, just one sentence.
A Point of View is turning your product brochure into something that is newsworthy. It might be giving three tips for winter skincare. It might be three little-known ingredients to battle eczema. I like threes, so I like bullet points. Your pitch might be, “I am a software founder. We are doing AI research and we found these three things in consumer behavior.” It might be something like a prediction or trends.
The last part of the CPR method is Relevance. Why are you pitching this now? It’s probably the most important part of the pitch because if it’s not relevant right now, they’re going to file it away and they’re not going to want to ask you any questions to follow up.
PR NEEDS TO BE IN-THE-MOMENT
Think about what season we’re in. If you’re in e-commerce or if you are selling bracelets on Etsy, it might be something about holiday gifting. It might be about seasonal, like holidays, buying trends, shopping trends. If you are a career coach, it might be something around graduation and the three most sought-after things that employers are looking for.
If you were in a heavily regulated industry like finance or healthcare, it might be something to do with new regulations or policy guidance. You might want to ride on the coattails of that and say, “Hey, this just came down. This is a new piece of policy. Here are three ways to make sense of it.”
I know that a lot of different companies were able to get press especially during the PPP and the SBA loans because they were able to pitch stories around helping consumers make sense of that.
These are all the ways that you can start as a founder to translate your “marketing speak” if you will, into something that is newsworthy, into something that is not selling the journalism anything.
BEST PRACTICES FOR PR FOLLOWUP
Brandon Birkmeyer: Let’s talk about that idea of relevance a little bit more now. If I’m reaching out to someone and I’ve done the steps to build in credibility, added my point of view, and made it relevant, and don’t get a response or get rejected, how long do I wait before I reach out again if I do it all?
Gloria Chou: Before you send any emails, I want you to install an email tracking software. I wish I had this when I was pitching. It’ll tell you exactly if your email is being open or not so you don’t have to go down a deep rabbit hole of despair of saying, “They don’t like me!” It’s really not that personal.
Install an email tracking device. That way you can monitor whether or not it’s been opened. Here’s the thing about follow-ups—they’re getting hundreds of emails a day. If you’re not staying top of mind, they’re just going to go to the person that they know, do a search and say, “Oh, I need a spokesperson on fitness.” It’s going to be this person, but why not throw your name in the hat?
YOU NEED TO BE CONFIDENT
If you listen to my podcast, my first episode is with a Forbes writer. She says a lot of times people don’t follow up with her and she kind of forgets and thinks, “Who is that person that emailed me last week about this?” They have to go back and search their inbox.
I always say follow up every week. I’d rather you err on the side of being too much of a pest than err on the side of “I’m scared”. I think as founders, getting over that initial fear, there’s just so much mental work that, that you need to do that.
There’s no way you’re going to compete with a PR agency that’s getting paid 20 grand a month. I want you to err on the side of being too annoying because a lot of times founders are not persistent enough.
FOLLOWUP KEEPS YOUR NAME AT THE PR FOREFRONT
Brandon Birkmeyer: Yeah, it might just take that frequency for them to notice. We just don’t respond to half the things. That doesn’t mean we’re annoyed. We just think, okay, I’ll put that in the file with the 10 others that I got.
However, there is some advantage to continuing to show up, especially if you’re being authentic about it and not annoying.
Gloria Chou: Yeah. I actually interviewed somebody from Business Insider. She says that she doesn’t respond to all the emails, but she actually has a unique color-coding system where every email she gets, she files away under a category.
Anytime she’s being tasked with the editor to write a story, guess what? She’s going to go back to that category. Just because your name’s not being called out, it doesn’t mean that they don’t see your name in a hat. Just go on and pitch it.
THOUGHT LEADERS SHOULD PITCH THEMSELVES
Another thing is email. We also need to be following them on social media, which is going back to what we said earlier and the reporter that I interviewed from Forbes. She said that so few founders actually reach out to her on LinkedIn. They’re so used to getting someone else to do it for them. She feels so refreshed when she actually gets an outreach from the founder directly.
This is the ethos of my whole method. Why not just cut the PR middle person out anyways. They want to speak to you the founder. For me, now I have my own podcast. When someone pitches on behalf of their dad or their uncle, I literally write back and said, “Why is he not pitching on his own?”
Why do you need someone else to pitch for them? For me, to get onto this podcast, I pitched you from me. I didn’t say, “This was Gloria’s assistant.” Out of every podcast I’ve gotten on, no one has ever needed a media kit or said, “I need to talk to your assistant.”
Let’s just remove that middle man. That just doesn’t work anymore. We’re not in the Madmen days of advertising. Do your own pitching. It’s totally fine.
CONNECT WITH GLORIA
Podcast: Small Business PR
Instagram: @gloriachoupr
www.gloriachoupr.com/masterclass
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