To get publicity for your cannabis brand or business from journalists, you need to understand what writers and media professionals want from brands and businesses. Sending a pitch and expecting to get noticed is a recipe for failure, but new research from Cision, The Global State of Media Report, provides a wealth of useful information to help you generate publicity that leads to brand growth.

Keep in mind, publicity isn’t sales. Instead, publicity is strategic communications. Yes, publicity can lead to sales, but if your only goal for investing in publicity is to close sales, you’ll be disappointed in the results. Publicity is about communicating information that generates brand awareness, which leads to recognition and recall. These are the building blocks that keep your brand top of mind, so when someone is ready to make a purchase (or moving further through the buyer journey and closer to making a buying decision), your brand is the one they think of.

In addition, publicity can support many other marketing investments that your business makes. It can help search engine optimization if online publicity from authoritative websites links back to your own website. It can also fuel many of your other marketing tactics by giving you more content to share on social media channels, include in email marketing campaigns, write about on your blog, and so much more.

With that said, let’s take a look at three of the ways you can get brand publicity from journalists by giving them what they want.

1. Provide Data

According to the Cision report, 68% of journalists say the type of content or information they want to receive from sources is data, and they want it in the form of research results, trends, and market data.

But that’s not all. Journalists were also asked what sources can do to make their jobs easier, and 66% of them said “provide data and expert sources.”

Want a journalist to write about your product or service? More than one out of three journalists (37%) won’t consider doing it unless you provide data that specifically show trends and problems that your product or service solves for the journalist’s specific audience.

2. Create Visuals

In addition to data, journalists want visuals, and often, data and visuals go together. More than one out of four journalists (27%) say including multimedia in your pitches and press releases is a top way to make their jobs easier, and 18% are more likely to consider a pitch if it includes multimedia.

Bottom-line, when you make a journalist’s job easier, you can bet they’re more likely to write about your brand or business, and journalists are using more multimedia assets than ever today. Here’s the breakdown of the assets journalists who responded to the Cision survey say they’ve used in their content:

• Images: 77%
• Videos: 44%
• Data Visualization/Graphics: 43%
• Social Media Posts: 36%
• Web Polls/Surveys: 34%
• Audio: 19%
• Brand Logos: 17%
• Interactives (Dashboards, Games, Etc.): 10%
• Livestreams: 10%
• Animation: 8%
• Quizzes: 7%

3. Provide Accurate and Accessible Expertise

When journalists were asked what their top priorities are and what the top priorities for their organizations are, respondents to Cision’s 14^th Annual State of the Media report ranked “ensuring content is accurate” as the top priority for both themselves and their organizations.

In other words, the best way to get noticed by journalists and generate publicity for your cannabis brand or business is to provide accurate information and make sure journalists understand that the information you provide is accurate.

You can establish your reputation as a reliable source of accurate information for journalists using data and by proving your expertise. When asked what they consider to be the most trustworthy sources for gathering and validating information, journalists ranked newswires as number one (27%), followed by industry experts (23%), press releases (20%), internal spokespeople (14%), and brand customers (7%).

There are two important things to learn from the above data. First, once you can establish yourself (or someone from your business) as an industry expert, you’ll be positioned as the second most reliable type of source according to journalists. That’s a big win and will certainly lead to more publicity for your brand.

Second, you, your brand, your business, and your content must be accessible to journalists via newswires, press releases, and other media publications and websites. Publicity, search engine optimization, and content marketing work together to help your business grow much better than each can accomplish alone.

Key Takeaways to Get Cannabis Brand Publicity from Journalists

Journalists are required to write a lot of articles every day, and they need trustworthy sources, but it’s up to you to ensure writers have access to your brand’s data, visuals, and expertise. When you reach out with a pitch, give journalists what they want, and it won’t be long before you start seeing your brand mentioned in more publications and websites.