A Martech vendor’s media coverage guide — Azadeh Williams // AZK Media

Quotes

• “I’ve seen so many media pitches and media agencies pitch which is one of the reasons I started AZK media because I thought it was really important to create a fresher, more effective way to get a martech vendor’s name out there through the right media and marketing mix.” - Azadeh“I’d love to share some of the big epic fails that frustrated me as a journalist and that now as a consultant, I advise our clients to avoid. Press releases that are too promotional and salesy will not get picked up by the media. If there’s nothing newsworthy in them, it will bore the journalist and it’s not going to get picked up.” - Azadeh“What’s worse than that is if the pitch demonstrates little to no knowledge of the key in these issues of the martech landscape  that are newsworthy to the journalist or actually what the journalists are writing about at the time of the publication.” - Azadeh“I’ve heard different things from different people about the purpose of press releases. Press releases used to be really important to get your story in front of journalists and they can decide whether they want to pick up the coverage, or write a story about what you’re doing and now it seems like a way to drive essentially SEO arbitrage where you can launch a press release and there’s some sort of aggregators that basically drive back links to your website from various publications.” - Ben “There are various purposes for press releases. I do know of companies that just put out. It’s like a PR blast across the wire and such and they just do it for a backlink purpose and that’s perfectly fine. You just want to use it for SEO but don’t hassle a journalist with it because it’s going to get picked up as news.” - Azadeh“If you actually want to get a mention from a journalist and get published to get the street cred, it’s not going to happen with a press release that is written for SEO and backlink and wire distribution purposes.” - Azadeh“Also don’t expect a journalist to actually put backlinks. It’s very rare that they put a third-party backlink. Because what the media publication actually wants you to do is stay on their channel as much as possible so they might do interlinking on their own or their own digital magazine but they’re not necessarily going to do third-party links to your website.” - Azadeh“The next step is when you finally have that winning pitch to journalist, and they want to interview the founder of your martech company but that person is so boring, they have no media training, they have this scripted thing that their PR team have put together that’s just this pouring drivel, and they just don’t answer the questions that this journalist asking and often a journalist is very time poor.” - Azadeh“So if you’re going to an interview and you’re going sidetracked, meandering or worse your voice isn’t coming clearly, the likelihood is you might get just a sentence out of that interview in a feature. So media training is very important for any thought leadership expert within the martech company and I can’t stress this enough.” - Azadeh“I’m torn because on one side I understand how media training is really important. People need to understand how to formulate their ideas so they are consumable for journalism. On the flip side, I’m not sure if you could coach out boring.” - Ben “I think there’s some level of training that can help the experts. They don’t have to be a TED-talker but they can be just able to answer the question in a simple and concise way that a journalist can just pick it up. They don’t have to be the world’s greatest entertainer.” - Azadeh “Sometimes a CEO is very shy and they don’t want to be in front of a journalist but they will find an alternative. They will find a Head of Product or someone else that is far more extroverted and happy to be the champion of the company and they become the go-to person whenever it comes to the media. Find that magic person within your martech company.” - Azadeh“One thing that is absolutely gold to journalist is a really good case study. So if you have your customers speaking on your behalf, that is the holy grail. So build really good relationships with your customers, build those amazing case studies, make your customers your champions, so that when it comes to media coverage those customers can really shine on your behalf and journalists absolutely love it when your customers can talk.” - Azadeh“It’s an important thing to think about when you’re trying to generate buzz. The more you can have other people talking for you, the more authentic that communication is going to feel. No one likes a self-promoter but they don’t mind being promoted to when it’s something that is authentic.” - Ben“I would say as one final point is, don’t underestimate the power of thought leadership. It’s people that trust other people and that’s how you're gonna build your foundation as a Martech vendor. Choose your champions that you want to elevate and give them a thought leadership content plan. Have them write articles every month or have them pitch it out in the press or just across their LinkedIn pages.” - Azadeh“That’s great advice. It’s important not only to work on communicating what you’re selling but also trying to cultivate the industry and the knowledge around you. The more that you can give, the more  trust that people are going to have with you.” - Ben