← Insights
Every year the editors who cover construction equipment sit on a panel somewhere and say the same thing: most of the pitches in their inbox get deleted without a reply. Not because the news is bad, but because the person sending it never took the time to understand the publication, its readers or its editorial plan.
We spent time this year listening to construction trade editors talk about what actually earns coverage. None of it was surprising to us, because it is the way we have worked with the trade media for more than 25 years. But it is worth writing down, because getting published is still one of the most cost-effective things a construction equipment manufacturer can do for its brand.
Trade editors share what earns coverage at an industry marketing summit.
Read the magazine. Read the website. Pull the media kit and the editorial calendar and keep them where you can find them. Editors can tell within two sentences whether you know who their readers are, and a pitch that does not fit the audience is the fastest way to be ignored.
The editorial calendar is your friend. If a publication has a compaction equipment feature scheduled for April, an editor wants your roller application story in February, not the week the issue closes.
Editors told us they regularly receive the same pitch from two different people at the same company, sent to several members of their team on the same day. That does not create urgency. It creates noise.
Decide what you want. Is it a product announcement, a contributed article, an interview with your product manager or a customer story? Say so in the first sentence. Then send it to the one editor who covers that beat and give them time to respond before you follow up.
The strongest pitches we send never open with the equipment. They open with the jobsite problem the equipment solves: the contractor who could not get a lift onto a tight urban site, the aggregate producer fighting downtime, the dealer trying to keep rental fleets working through the winter.
Editors are looking for stories their readers will recognize. Your product becomes the hero of that story only if the story exists in the first place.
An editor should be able to publish your news without asking you a single question. That means: