Did your company just put together a press release in the hopes of getting some coverage for a new product or service? This press release isn’t going to do you much good if you don’t have a media list set up.
A media list, which can also be called a media contact list or a press list, is a list of media members who might be interested in the products or services your company has to offer. It should include everyone from news reporters and journalists to bloggers and podcasters.
Would you like to see a media list example and learn how to build a media list from scratch? In this article, we’re going to set out to teach you everything you need to know about creating an effective media list.
Continue reading to find out how to bring a media list to life.
What Is Included in a Media List?
Building a media list usually won’t be something you can do within a matter of just hours. You’re going to need to collect quite a bit of information from a variety of different media members.
So, what exactly should be included in a media list? It should almost go without saying that you’ll need to get both the first and last names of media members. You might also want to get any nicknames that these media members go by to make your interactions with them feel more personal.
But you obviously won’t want to stop there. You’ll also want to include these things in a media list:
- The company that a media member works for
- A media member’s title
- A link to the website for a media member’s company
- Links to a media member’s social media accounts
- Contact information for a media member (office phone number, cell phone number, email, etc.)
You might also want to try to get your hands on any miscellaneous information about a media member that you can. If, for instance, a media member has worked at other organizations in the past or has won awards for their work, that would be great for you to know.
What Would Be a Good Media List Example?
Once you have all the information that you’ll need to build a media list, you can begin to actually put it together. But if you haven’t ever created a media list before, you might not know how to do this.
The simplest way to do it is by opening up a new document in Google Sheets and getting to work. You’ll be able to come up with different categories that you can add across the top of your spreadsheet before filling them in for each media member that’ll be on your media list.
This is what a media list example might look like:
Name: John Smith
Organization: Best Podcast Ever
Title: Lead Podcaster
Website: bestpodcastever.com
Social Media: https://twitter.com/bestpodcastever, https://facebook.com/bestpodcastever
Phone: 123-456-7890
Email: [email protected]
Other: Started his podcast in 2020. Currently has 1.3 million subscribers. Plugs one cool tech item at the end of every episode.
A media list example like this shows all the kinds of information you’ll want to include on your list. It’ll make it so simple for you to make sure someone like John Smith receives the right press releases from your company.
How Can You Build a Media List?
Now that you know what should be included in a media list and have seen a media list example, you should be ready to begin building a media list. It’ll be very important for you to take the right approach to doing it. It’ll leave you with a long list of media members who will get your company’s press releases from now on.
As long as you create a media list correctly, you also shouldn’t have any issues adding to it over time. It’ll be simple enough to incorporate information for new media members into your media list without any problems when you set it up in the right way.
Here are the steps you’ll need to take to build a media list from the ground up.
Pick a Target Audience for Press Releases
There are tens of thousands of news reporters and journalists scattered throughout the country today. It’s not going to be possible for you to include every single one on your media list.
Rather than trying to do this, you should pick a target audience for your company’s press releases and use it to narrow down the number of news reporters and journalists who appear on your media list. You can focus solely on those media members who operate within a very specific space.
If, for example, your company specializes in selling a sports-related product or service, you’ll want to aim to target your press releases at those who work in sports media. You might want to make your target audience even more specific than this by only including those who cover a particular sport.
Decide Which Media Members to Include
Once you know what your company’s target audience is going to be, you can start collecting a list of media members you’d like to include on your media list. For now, all you’ll need to do is put together a list of their names.
You’ll need to do a decent amount of work to create this list of names. You should spend time poking around online to see which organizations you’d like to have cover your company’s products or services and then find the names of people who work for them.
This will be one of the most tedious parts of building a media list. But you should start to feel like you’re getting something accomplished when you see all the names of the media members you’ve been able to find.
Gather All the Necessary Information
After you have the names of media members that you want to include on your media list, you can begin gathering information for each one. As we alluded to earlier, you’ll want to get your hands on information like their titles, their websites, links to their social media accounts, their contact information, and more.
Once upon a time, gathering all this information would have taken weeks and maybe even months. It often required picking up the phone and calling around to get as much information as you could.
But these days, the internet has made it relatively easy to find information about most media members. Many of them will even go out of their way to make it easy for other people to find this information online.
Choose What to Use to Create a Media List
When you have all the necessary information for your media list collected, you can begin to create the media list itself. You can use Google Sheets to do it, or you can find some other software that’s designed to provide you with the right media list tools and help you create a media database.
No matter what you decide to use, you should make it a point to keep your media list neat and tidy. You don’t want it to turn into a big mess and have it almost impossible to find the information you need.
Commit to Updating a Media List on a Regular Basis
Like those in most other industries, media members aren’t staying with the same organizations for decades at a time anymore. They often bounce around from one job to the next, which can present challenges when you’re trying to use a media list to your advantage.
With this in mind, you’re going to have to work on updating a media list regularly. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to update it every few months so that it’s as current as it can possibly be.
Why Is It Important to Have a Media List?
If your company is going to go through the trouble of creating press releases and sending them out, you’ll want to see to it that they end up in the right hands. But there’s no guarantee that this will happen if you don’t have an updated media list.
This media list will enable your company to send out press releases to the media members who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. It’ll increase your chances of getting the media coverage for these products or services that you so desperately desire.
You’ll also be able to create working relationships with a wide range of media members. They’ll have an easier time contacting your company when they need something because of this.
Let Us Help Get Press Releases Out to the Right People
In a perfect world, all companies would have the time and resources that it takes to create media lists using the media list example we just provided. But this isn’t always the case for companies.
If your company could use a helping hand when it comes to creating press releases and getting them out to the right media members, eReleases can assist you. We’re one of the largest press release distribution services around and can give your company the help it needs.
Contact us now to get more information on our services.