Creating great content is indisputably the first and most crucial element of an effective content marketing strategy. But the second, and no less important, step is honing your outreach practices in order to earn placements with the publishers you’re targeting.BuzzStream and Fractl collaborated to survey more than 500 publishers for a two-part study to learn how to engage publishers more effectively, and the answer to improving your pitch open rates is this: 10 meaningful words. Here’s why—and how.
The Challenge in Content Promotion
Content marketing is booming, which means that you’re facing more competition than ever in publishers’ inboxes. Editors at some top-tier publications are receiving more than 300 pitches a day. Sorting through 1,500 pitches per week means that press release fatigueis the new norm for high-authority publishers, and they have a limited amount of time and patience for considering your content.
The frenetic pace of content promotion is precisely why keeping your pitch concise and to-the-point is critical to getting noticed by popular publishers. In fact, “descriptive” and “brief” were two of the top four qualities that publishers told us were present in pitch subject lines they want to open. Since we learned in our first publisher study that 85% of publishers open pitches based on your subject line alone, implementing these qualities can make a dramatic improvement in your outreach efforts.
Here are four quick fixes for giving your pitch that competitive edge.
