“If you can sum up your story in one sentence that your mates in the pub would understand, that’s a good pitch.”
The quote came from The Sun’s Business Editor Rhodri Phillips during a recent event for PR professionals, where he explained the best way to pitch story ideas to journalists.
I'm sure you are already aware of this thinking and regularly put it into practice. But do all of your spokespeople and colleagues also apply the same logic to their interviews and presentations?
After all, how frustrating for a journalist, presenter or producer to receive a beautifully simple and jargon free pitch from a PR team and then their 'expert spokesperson' undoes all their hard work by being convoluted and clumsy - dropping jargon at every turn.
On our media training courses we always tell our participants about the importance of having a key message which should be capable of being spelt out in a single sentence of less than 20 words – otherwise it is likely to be too complex for people to remember, particularly at a time when audiences are often watching or listening to the news while simultaneously browsing on their phone or tablet.
The same applies for presentations, just without (hopefully) people checking their phones.
The shorter the message the easier it is for people to grasp and remember. It is also likely to get more coverage – journalists love strong 15 second sound bites which they can use in the headlines at the start of the news as well as during the main news item.
Strong, short, pithy messages are also less likely to be harshly edited or misinterpreted.
We urge our training participants to use everyday terms in the message (no jargon or acronyms) and think about how they would make their point if they were talking to friends or family in a bar or café.
Of course, we’re not encouraging you to drink while you fine tune your key messages, but if you don’t like the pub test idea, think about whether your key message could be tweeted.
At no more than 140 characters it would need to be to be simple, to the point, and relevant, especially if you wanted it to be retweeted.
Whether you go for the pub or tweet test, you should be able to back up your message with human examples and anecdotes to illustrate it, bring it to life and stimulate emotions in the audience. Facts and statistics will also help underpin your position.
Reducing your key message to a single sentence may seem daunting, particularly if it is on a complex subject area.
But if you think you can’t do it, take a look at this quote from Albert Einstein
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Media First are media and communications training specialists with over 30 years of experience. We have a team of trainers, each with decades of experience working as journalists, presenters, communications coaches and media trainers. Click here to find out more about our highly practicalMedia training courses and presentation training.
