Your company just put out its third press release this quarter. You distributed it via the wire, it sits on your website, and you shared it on your social media channels. It gets some likes and comments on LinkedIn, but then it fails to have a lasting impact. Meanwhile, one of your competitors is showing up in industry newsletters, getting quoted in a relevant article, and taking the stage at the conferences you and your prospects also attend.

You might be wondering, “Why isn’t that us?”

Or maybe you are a founder of an early-stage company gearing up for the next funding round. You're already active on the circuit, attending VC events, posting semi-regularly on LinkedIn, but you want more people to know not just who you are but what your company is trying to build. Earned media feels like a natural extension of your pitch and an obvious path to reach investors, partners, and customers who haven’t found you yet.

Both scenarios point to the same need: a real media outreach program rather than an occasional press release.

Add to these motivations the fact that earned media — meaning genuine coverage in trusted publications and reputable outlets — is quickly becoming a key source of AI citations. Your website and your SEO work still carry weight, but earned media increasingly shapes what large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini say about your company when someone asks.

The case for building a media outreach program is clear. The harder question is where to start and how to set goals that are ambitious without being unrealistic. A successful plan comes down to three things:

1. Strong key messaging
2. A clearly defined audience
3. Personalized outreach that meets that speaks directly and specifically to the media professionals you want to engage with 

Here's how you get there.

Step 1: Define your PR goals

It may seem obvious, but the first thing to do is to define what you are hoping to achieve. Try to avoid more general goals like "brand awareness" or "more leads." Instead, get specific. Are you trying to attract investors ahead of a raise? Win customers in a market you already serve, or break into a new one?

The more specific your PR goals, the more targeted your approach can be, and the more likely you are to get results. Ask yourself what success actually looks like a year from now, not in general terms, but in a sentence you could say out loud to your team.

Step 2: Define your audience and your message

Once you know what you're trying to achieve, identify exactly who needs to hear it. Not "the climate tech industry," but the specific person (or persona, in marketing speak) on the other end of your message. This might be a grid operations leader at an investor-owned utility, a project finance director, or an engineer at a battery energy storage manufacturer.

Then, try to understand what that person cares about, and what problems they are facing day to day. How can you help them? In a crowded field where everyone claims to be "accelerating the energy transition," a distinct point of view will help you craft media pitches that make a journalist or podcast host want to pay attention.

Step 3: Identify where your audience already is

Now that you know who your specific audience is, it’s important to understand where they spend their time. Yes, they may occasionally read The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, but they are also there with a few million other people. In today’s fragmented media landscape, a 30-minute conversation on an industry podcast or a mention in a trusted, industry-focused newsletter will often do more for your visibility with the right people than a one-line nod in a mainstream publication.

In a world where there are roughly seven communications professionals for every journalist, competition is fierce to get meaningful coverage and reporters are stretched especially thin. Instead of landing that one big story in a major outlet, try for a steady presence across industry podcasts, trade publications, and newsletters, plus speaking slots at niche conferences. The good news is that these earned media outcomes can be easier to achieve with the right pitch and the results will be more targeted for your organization.

Where do you begin? A good start is to find five to 10 target media professionals that carry real weight with your audience. Not outlets, but individual reporters. Study their recent work and think about how your message connects to what they're already covering. Then craft pitches that communicate your point of view and align with the stories they’re already tracking.

Step 4: Define your success metrics

With your goals, audience, and shortlist of journalists, you can finalize a set of concrete success metrics. How many earned media mentions are you aiming for over the next six months? In what kinds of outlets? Are speaking engagements part of the plan? Do industry awards make sense for your organization right now?

If you have pitched the media before, be brutally honest with yourself. Where did it work, where did it fall short, and why? Did you start strong and run out of time? Did you get the responses that you expected? 

It’s very important to emphasize that launching an earned media strategy takes time. If you're starting from zero, don't expect a dozen mentions in your first couple of months unless you have genuinely newsworthy news to share. Even then, a media push tied to a single announcement is much different from a sustained outreach program. The former can generate a burst of coverage that fades quickly. The latter, built on consistent relationship building and thoughtful pitching, takes longer to gain traction but pays off for far longer.

Step 5: Stay the course

Once your goals and metrics are set, the real work begins, and so does a true test of your patience. Every team has at least one person eager for quick wins. Aim to land one or two early, just enough to build momentum and enthusiasm, but plan for this to be a long game.

And when you get some success, don’t stop. Practice patience!

To keep yourself on task, start a regular meeting cadence that works for your team to check in on progress. Every two weeks is a reasonable starting point, and use that time to evaluate what's landing, what isn't, and what needs adjusting. Make changes where they're warranted. But if two weeks go by without a placement, that's not a sign your strategy is broken. Give your approach room to work before you decide to overhaul it.

Building toward earned media that compounds

That competitor showing up in the right outlets again and again didn't get there by luck. Somewhere behind that steady coverage is a strategy, a shortlist of the right journalists, and the discipline to keep pitching even when results were slow to start.

There are a lot of unique stories still to be told about the energy transition and the people building it. Climate tech and clean energy companies that treat media outreach as an ongoing program, not a reaction to whatever announcement is next on the calendar, are the ones that get remembered. Everyone else is just a headline that came and went.

Need help building your media outreach program? We would be happy to chat.

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