Top tips for landing international coverage

International outreach has become an integral part of our digital PR strategy at Kaizen, and over the years, our clients continue to expand into different international markets, meaning the importance of understanding international audiences has become paramount.

Not only can international outreach help with brand awareness globally, but unique stories can be formed for each country, allowing you to potentially build links and coverage from major publishers all over the world.

Our Digital PR team decided to share some of their top tips when conducting international outreach:

• Be aware of the culture – When you’re sending hundreds of emails, you can forget how easy it is to overlook certain social cues or how informal/formal you may come across. If you’re outreaching internationally, be sure to be formal and polite, especially in Germany, Italy, and Spain. As their culture is more formal, ensure you use their surname along with their title (i.e .Mr/Mrs/Ms). Whilst in Norway, you can call people by their first name, just like in the UK.

• Ensure you have data for each specific country – If you’re planning to outreach to a number of countries or an entire continent but your research only focuses on a specific country – save your time! Journalists are normally only interested in data relevant to their country – if it’s a survey, be prepared to answer questions around participants.

• Being aware of Bank holidays in other countries – This is a simple tip, but can easily be forgotten – it might also be worth checking their working week hours, for example in the UAE the working week is from Sunday to Thursday.

• Be mindful about the number of journalists you can contact – In our experience, we’ve noticed that a number of journalists write about the same topic for numerous publications, so you might try to contact the same person twice.

• Don’t use Google Translate – You might be tempted to conduct outreach by using Google Translate for your email templates, but unfortunately, this isn’t such a great idea. Google Translate might be great for checking a word, but it’s not so good at putting sentences together, meaning your message won’t be understood. Always try to find a native speaker to craft your email templates or proofread them.

• Create an angle around friendly rivalry – Some countries for example Norway and Sweden or Italy and Spain tend to have a friendly rivalry and if you have sufficient data for the two countries, that can make a good angle.

Get in touch to find out more about international Digital PR or share some of your top tips with us via Twitter.