A Business Reporter's 4 Tips for Pitching Your Company

As a reporter and editor at Forbes Magazine, Erika Brown handled a lot of story pitches from companies. Now she's director of marketing and business development at Matrix Partners (one of HubSpot's investors), making pitches of her own.

In an interview earlier this fall, Erika explained to HubSpot's Karen Rubin how she thinks companies should pitch.

The full video is below. Here are her top tips:

(1) Know Your Company: "One of the things I found that was the most frustrating as a reporter was people who would call and email you and they really didn't know what they were selling." 

(2) Be Open and Honest: "Whenever I felt I got some pushback and someone was trying to hide something from me ... my journalist reflex got excited and I thought, 'Ah! There's a story!'"

(3) Know Your Target Audience: "What you should always think about when working on a media strategy is what your customers read ... if you think about what they care about, and where they're going to get information, that's where you want to be."

(4) Know the Writers You're Pitching: "You really need to pay attention to what they write about and what they care about."

Comments

Posted by Rick Burnes on Thu, Nov 06, 2008 @ 08:24 AM