In the foreword to Exposure: Insider Secrets to Make Your Business a Go-To Authority for Journalists by Felicity Cowie, venture capital investor in tech companies, Eileen Burbidge, writes: “Founders are always inundated when starting or scaling their companies and seeking out media coverage may seem a vanity project whilst forsaking investing time in the early team or product.

“However, these efforts aren’t mutually exclusive and often what’s needed to help develop a stronger talent pipeline or customer acquisition funnel is, in fact, media coverage and establishing the company’s position as a thought leader, expert and innovator in its field.”

Cowie (pictured) goes on to share eight key benefits of media coverage:

Gain exposure with zero to low financial investment
Unpaid media coverage has none of the up-front costs of advertising, marketing campaigns or events.

However, just one strong piece of media coverage will win you exposure to thousands if not millions of readers or viewers and is ‘evergreen’; you can showcase it on your website for years. What you do have to invest is some time to prepare and offer journalists something they’re willing to report on.

In Association with

Build credibility
When you publish content on your own channels this is always viewed as self-promotional, no matter how valuable. However, if a third party selects and includes you in their content this carries greater trustworthiness.

Build pipeline faster
You can reach your pipeline much faster via media platforms, which will be far more established and far-reaching than your own nascent social media channels.

Get highly valuable shareable content
You can leverage media coverage to grow your own channels faster. Media coverage generates buzz because people find ‘being in the news’ or knowing somebody in the news exciting.

Find product/market fit
Einstein said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. And I’d offer as a variant on this, “If you can’t explain it to a journalist, you haven’t understood your product-market fit well enough”. It may be painful to experience a journalist’s blunt ‘I don’t get it’ when you attempt to pitch. However, you can take this as free consultancy!

Become a thought leader and ‘category king’
If you’re wholly focused on getting one product out to market and that fails, then your only option is to seek out more markets and hope you find your customers before your budget runs out. But if alongside your race to product-market fit you’re also getting exposure and recognition as somebody with valuable ideas or thought leadership in your space, then you become bigger than your product, which means you can test out several products until you find something that takes off.

You may be attempting to create not just a new product but a new category of product. If you’re the only person who can talk about this category and the need for it, then you can create a role for yourself as a ‘go-to’ authority for the media. To gain this traction as a ‘category king’, or ‘queen’, you need to use words that journalists will understand and amplify.

Get funding, and more funding
Media coverage is evidence that you have valuable skills in addition to your business. As uber-venture capitalist Bill Gurley said: “The great storytellers have an unfair competitive advantage. They are going to recruit better, they will be darlings in the press, they are going to raise money more easily and at higher prices, they are going to close amazing business developer partnerships and they are going to have a strong and cohesive corporate culture. Perhaps, more to the point, they are more likely to deliver positive investment return.”

Gain external validation
In my experience, this is, without a doubt, the benefit most businesses want from media coverage. They may understand the other seven benefits logically, but this is the one that speaks to their hearts.

It’s a powerful human need to feel that what you’re doing matters to the world. We want to get our businesses off the ground but paradoxically need to feel reassured we aren’t drifting meaninglessly above and away from the world we want to interact with and impact.

+ Felicity Cowie has worked as a media relations troubleshooter for organisations and is a former BBC News and Panorama journalist. Click here to view more about her new book on Amazon.