Thread by @amandanat

I once scored a media placement that led to 1,600 new customers.

Here's the story of my biggest PR & marketing win — with frameworks you can borrow:

I was doing PR for a DTC snack startup.

No budget, no resources. Just me and my journalism experience.

Who was my target audience? Uh... anyone who might eat snacks. So, everyone. 😵‍💫

In a Google Sheet, I listed out every publication I could think of. With columns:

• Score of 1-5: likelihood they'd write about us, based on their content

• Names of writers who might be interested

• If they've already written about a competitor

Then I drafted my pitch.

Steal my template:

I'm <name, title>, at <company>, a DTC healthy snack startup. I saw you wrote about <related topic> last week, so I figured <category> was your beat.

<personalized sentence*>

I'd love to send you a free box so you can learn more.

Every single pitch was *personalized. I'd mention:

• Our recommendation algorithm → if I was pitching a tech writer

• A particular snack → if I could guess a food preference

• Our Feeding America partnership → if they've covered philanthropy

Trends then which hold up today:

• Magazines and print publications were slow to respond. Required multiple followups and often, multiple snack boxes.

• Blogs were more responsive.

• Writers on Twitter were most responsive.

It was a slog. I spent ~2 hours a day just on pitches.

It was weeks before I saw any small progress.

Then we got our break-through story... in Lifehacker! 🚨

As they wrote their review, I responded quickly to all their questions.

And of course, I sent only our best snacks in the first box.

The result? The writer was honest AND gave us high marks!

This completely earned placement led to 100s of customers in a few weeks. 🤯

Why did this work as a customer acquisition tactic?

Lifehacker's niche affinity + our value.

Healthy snacks delivered = life hack

So I did more audience research:

• Lurked on the Lifehacker site
• Followed the writers on Twitter
• Read their content
• Read the site comments
• Clicked & saw those readers' public social accounts.

This took weeks.

But it led to another placement. 🤑

Kotaku. The gaming site.

Healthy snacks and gamers?!

I thought they'd be an unlikely ideal customer:

They're gaming for hours a day. They're not thinking about nutrition.

But they might eat healthy snacks if delivered to their doors.

So I scored a second big placement.

This led to 100s more customers.

After ~4 months we got more than 1,600 new customers. 🥳

The thing is... this was a lot of work.

I know we make it look simple when we distill our marketing knowledge into these bite-sized threads.

But in reality, we all know deep down that wins like these come hard-earned.

Shameless plug but it’s true: This would have been faster if I had an audience research tool like SparkToro.

If you want to learn how to streamline research for PR, @randfish and I are hosting Office Hours this Thursday!

Come hang (it’s free!):

crowdcast.io/e/sparktoro-of…