Rumor has it our attention spans are shorter than a goldfish. Whether that has scientific backing or not, I can personally attest that I only have mere seconds for something to grab my attention before I move on to the next email or video. Blame it on the nature of clickbait headlines or TikTok videos, it’s the cold, hard truth.
Here’s the thing, I’m not alone in this. We as consumers share this propensity to move onto the next thing if it doesn’t immediately grab our attention. This means our headlines and PR strategies matter. Lucky for us, Connie Glover, Senior Marketing Manager at Trava, and Principal Owner of CMarie Marketing Studio, gave listeners the ultimate PR playbook during her episode of the Real Marketers podcast.
Spend More Time on Your Headline
Sometimes the truth isn’t easy to hear. Whether that’s (finally) accepting that The Office is no longer on Netflix or Connie explaining you’re probably not spending enough time on your headline, the truth is hard to swallow. But coming to grips with the truth sooner rather than later will help you out in the long run.
So, how much time should you be spending on your subject line or headline? 60 percent? 75 percent? Go higher. Connie spills that she and her team spend close to 90 percent of their time on the subject line of a pitch. Mind = blown 🤯 If you’re a skeptic and think this is too much time to be spent on a few words, hear me out...if your audience doesn’t open your email, does it really matter what your pitch says? I rest my case.
Get on Twitter
As Johnny Rose said on Schitt’s Creek, “We’re on the Tweeters,”. While we Johnny has a lot to learn about social media terms, we love his enthusiasm. Twitter is more than just memes and self-promotion on #MarketingTwitter. It’s actually a goldmine for getting journalists to notice you.
Connie explains your first step should be following journalists on Twitter. Pro-tip: create a Twitter list of journalists to follow. Next, you guessed it...start engaging with their tweets! Look for articles they’ve written, comment on posts relevant to you, tag them in content you’ve created, etc. Whether we admit it or not, we sprint to our phones the second we get a notification; journalists are bound to notice you with this strategy. 👀
Pack a Tighter Snowball
If you want to throw your snowball far, you have to pack it down and condense its contents. Same goes for your pitches. Will your audience read a 500-word email? Don’t count on it. Will they read a three-sentence pitch? The odds say yes!
Marketers are guilty of wanting to include the smallest of details in their copy (including yours truly). I guess you can say we’re so passionate about our product that we believe every detail matters! People are faced with constant noise in today’s world. We don’t have time or the attention span to read an email the size of a dictionary. You only have a few sentences before your audience is moving onto the next email; keep your pitch short and sweet. Less is more in the case of PR.
If we touched on every PR secret Connie revealed, this would be a never-ending blog post (which goes against everything we just said 😉 ). Hop on over to Connie Glover’s full episode on the Real Marketers podcast to hear even more PR tips, including how to increase your CTRs on your email campaigns, what PR tools to use, and so much more.
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