5 tips for reaching out to press

In most cases, when you want journalists to write articles about your app, you need to tell them first about its existence. Contacting journalists might be pretty intimidating, but hopefully less so with these tips.

Reach out to the right contacts

In my experience, reaching out individually instead of sending emails to every address you find works better. You can also tailor your email to the individual journalist. For example, if you know that the journalist spends a lot of time on their iPad, you can focus more on your iPad version.

I recommend looking at the "Team" or "About" pages of individual news outlets and reading up a bit on the journalist. Your goal is to find those who will most likely be interested in your app.

Twitter is also great for this. You can read the bio and recent tweets and customize your email accordingly.

Spend some time on the email itself but don't overthink it

Your email introducing your app should be fairly short. Ideally, focus on just the main issue it solves for people or what makes it unique when you are in a crowded category. One brief paragraph should do it.

Don't waste precious space on empty introductions like "I would be pleased if you could take a look at my app" and similar. This is self-evident from the fact that you are sending the email in the first place.

Your goal is to present a concise email that will get skimmed. If they open your email and it is a wall of text, they might decide to give it another look next time, and then it gets lost.

Have resources ready

This is mainly about Press Kit. You should link it at the end of your introductory email and note that detailed description, features, assets, and similar are available.

Having a Press Kit ready signals to the journalist that should they decide to write about your app, you have resources ready to make it easy to cover your app. I think there is nothing worse at this point than a journalist being excited about your app but then unable to find usable screenshots and deciding not to cover it because of this.

However you prepare the Press Kit, do not provide it as ZIP file. Here are the reasons why.

And I have a project called ImpressKit, which makes it super easy to create an optimized Press Kit for your app. Feel free to check it out.

Don't take it personally

Journalists get so many pitch emails, press releases, and similar that most of them get ignored for one reason or another. It is not about you or your app.

I would also advise against "spamming." You know. These tactics where you get some promotional email and two days later reply from the same contact along the lines of "Did you get my email?". You will only annoy people.

Plus, there are honest ways how to get in touch again. You can either try a different journalist from the same outlet or send a Press Release when you have a new update, which brings us to the next tip.

Use Press Releases to get the word out

Press Release is an excellent opportunity to reach out to the press when you have a new update that brings new features or improves existing ones.

These don't have to be complicated—just a couple of paragraphs describing what is new. The only important rule is to write these from the point of your app. So there should be no "I" in the text.

Here are a couple of examples from my app that brought me significant news coverage. And they weren't complicated to prepare.

I found that one of the more significant benefits is that you don't have to worry about being pushy in contacting the press. Press Releases are a standard format in the media world. And the press is accustomed to receiving them.