Andy Warhole famously said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Are you sitting there wondering when those 15 minutes are going to come for your business or your client? While there are many more ways to get famous now compared to Warhole's time, it's still not that easy to get featured in the media.
But today, we're going to show you how you can do just that, step by step:
- What does it mean to get featured in magazines?
- How to get featured in magazines: provide value
- Step 1: Define your target audience
- Step 2: Find magazines where you want to get featured
- Step 3: Create a press release and send it out to journalists
- Step 4: Track your progress and follow up where necessary
- Step 5: Share your feature
What does it mean to get featured in magazines?
Many PR specialists are concerned with how to get featured in a magazine for free. But the reality is that "getting featured" could mean one of several things:
- Getting the front cover of a magazine
- Landing an interview for an article
- Getting a mention with a quote
- Having a full-blown story written about you by a respected journalist
The term "featured" stems from the old days when most media was in print. However, the same principles apply today, when online magazines are more prevalent than ever.
How to get featured in magazines: provide value
The truth is that most journalists won't feature your client or your business just because of who you are or what you do. If you're wondering how to get featured in magazines, you should have a story first.
Some examples of stories that could get you featured articles in magazines include:
- The launch of a new product
- Opening a new branch of a business
- Winning an award
- Appointing a new CEO
- Launching a scholarship
- Creating a groundbreaking study and presenting the findings
Ultimately, the feature should not be just about your client or business. If you don't have an amazing story to tell, think of what you could do first that would make you or your client interesting to the press.
💡If you're looking to be featured in a top-tier publication, we've crafted a guide to show you exactly how to do it.
Step #1: Define your target audience
Before determining how to get your business featured in a magazine, ask yourself one question:
- Who is the audience that should hear my story?
- What kind of content do they consume and where do they spend their time?
- What are their core beliefs and values?
- Why should they care about what I have to say, and how does my story make a difference in their lives?
Once you know who these people are, it becomes easier to find the magazines and outlets that they read and visit every day.
But what if you don't know where to get started?
You can use media monitoring to track specific terms and see where they get mentioned. For example, you can enter the keyword "fashion" and see the top outlets that publish content with the keyword in the title.
Prowly's Media monitoring helps you do just that. You can:
- Monitor specific terms
- Enter brand names (your own and your competitors' - the sky’s the limit)
- See the sentiment behind each mention (positive, negative or neutral)
- Scrape the entire web and all social media outlets to see each mention of your terms
- See the estimated reach of each mention
- Choose the region and language you want to monitor
- Dial in on specific platforms that are the most relevant to your business
After some time spent on media monitoring, you still won't know how to get featured in a magazine. But you will know which media outlets are a good starting point.
Step #2: Find magazines where you want to be featured
There are two ways to find potential magazines where you could desire a feature.
1️⃣ In the first approach, you have a shortlist of the very best magazines for your story. But don't just stop at the data gathered from media monitoring. Get your hands dirty and read through a few articles or issues to ensure that they write for your audience.
Now comes the hard part: getting in touch with the people behind those magazines. The good news is that journalists are always hungry for a new story. The bad news is that they get bombarded with really bad pitches all day, every day.
This is the more traditional method of getting features and it works, but it has certain downsides.
2️⃣ The second, better way is to use Prowly's Media Database. You can set filters to find magazines that match your criteria or you can search for journalists who publish in your specific magazine of choice.
You'll get a list of journalists, along with...
- The topics they cover
- Their average open rate when it comes to pitches
- Their most recently published articles
- Their social media handles
For example, you can search by country, topic, age and sex to get more fine-tuned results.
The latest features added to the Media Database allow you to search more efficiently with the help of AI. You no longer have to manually find contacts and then dive deep into who writes about what. You can filter according to topics and discover who talks about stories like yours in minutes, and then, send a press release by email.
With all this information in one place, you can create a personalized pitch that stands out. Don't just spam your story - take time to reflect on the journalist’s previously published work. Reference the topics they typically cover and connect with them on X (ex-Twitter) - the list is endless.
Once you have a finished press release, you can pitch it to the journalist directly from Prowly. While we're on the topic, let's discuss press releases.
Step #3: Create a press release and send it out to journalists
If you're still wondering "How do I get published in a magazine?" you're going to have to learn how to write press releases.
A press release is a fairly standard document format where you present your story and what makes it valuable to media professionals. PR pros and agencies create them by the dozen every day, but you can write one too without prior knowledge of PR.
You can use Prowly's press release creator and whip up press releases in minutes with the help of AI. Just feed the main information into the creator and Prowly will deliver a press release that is almost ready to send out.
Prowly's AI Assistant doesn't just fill in the press release, it gives you prompts to add relevant details to make your story really pop.
The tool will give you smart suggestions on what to fix and edit to make your press release stand out.
Just do a bit of proofreading and editing and you can start sending out your press releases to your list of journalists in no time.
Step #4: Track your progress and follow up where necessary
Ask any PR pro how to be published in a magazine and they'll tell you that it is a lot of hard work and, most likely, you're not going to get your pitches accepted on the first try. You'll probably have to follow up a few times and, especially if you're a PR professional with multiple campaigns at a time, you can get lost very easily.
This is why you need Prowly's PR CRM. You can use it to create and manage media lists, filter contacts based on how they engage with your emails, add tags to contacts, automatically update contact details, and more.
The PR CRM helps you send out personalized pitches at scale, all the while tracking your engagement and success metrics. It allows you to build relationships with journalists which increases the chances of each pitch getting published.
Step #5: Share your feature
Show everyone that you know how to get a feature in a magazine. If someone published your story online, you don't have to settle for just 15 minutes of fame.
You can and should distribute the published magazine feature across your social media accounts and to your email lists. Your website is a must, but don't just place the feature on your blog and call it a day.
Instead, create a digital newsroom with your most recent media publications and add a link to it in a prominent place on your website. When journalists want to write about you again and head to your website, they’ll be able to find previous stories and relevant details in your newsroom.
The cool part is that Prowly can let you easily create and embed digital newsrooms on your website.
Not only does this show your most important media wins, but it also lets you track the performance of all your content through the Prowly dashboard, where you can also see the main traffic sources for each content piece.
Conclusion
At this point, you have a better idea of how to be featured in a magazine. It seems like hard work, but if you have the right story, modern PR tools can help you get featured more easily than in any other time in history.
With Prowly as your PR tool of choice, you don't have to reach out to journalists once in a blue moon and ask for features. We give you the tools you need to build meaningful connections with media professionals, so that when you have a story to tell, they're just one click away.
