The Art of Storytelling

Storytelling is the heart of publicity.

As publicists we are always telling/pitching stories to a variety of media and influencers. As a business owner you can contribute to your company’s publicity by being a good storyteller, or by seeing a good story within your company and getting the professional storytellers to pitch it.

In publicity our storytelling has the objective of achieving column inches for our client within traditional and digital media.

Who is the audience for this story? As a publicist I consider our direct audience for our media releases and stories is the media we are pitching to. No need to get complicated and think about customer demographics but think about the media you are pitching to.  Why you ask…you know the demographics of who is reading/watching/listening to their stories/show. But to get to their readers/viewers/listeners you need to convince the journalist/producer first. This is why they are the most important people for your audience when storytelling.

Things to ask yourself when planning your pitch to media:

• Is it for a magazine, newspaper, TV show, radio show, blogger etc. Different media outlets actually need different things for a story?
• Is this a lifestyle, technology, fashion, hard news, soft news story?

Depending on the answers to the above questions you will start to shape your story/pitch and will work out who your key media are to pitch to.

Now that you know whom your story is best suited to you now need to become clear on the angle.

When deciding if a story is newsworthy for media as a publicist you learn to ask a lot of questions. Just like a journalist you quickly need to get to the – who, what, when, where and how.

And the most important question of all – why is this different and why is this interesting?

You need to answer this question honestly. As what may be interesting for your board of directors is not necessarily interesting to the media. Your story needs to sound like a story not an advertisement.

Once you have worked out your story the last thing you need to decide is if this story warrants one-on-one pitches to media or if you can send your media release out to multiple media. The tip here: if it is hard news, one-on-one pitching. If it is soft news (like colour trends and themes) you could send it to all media.

Wishing you the best with your storytelling.

~ The Dawn til Dusk Publicity team.

(*Image Source: Pixsooz)