How to Get Media Coverage in a Market You Have Never Sold Into

Coverage in a new market is not won by translating your existing press materials. It is won by working out what that market already believes, and then positioning your company as the answer to a question it is already asking. The story that earned you coverage at home will almost certainly not travel unchanged, because the reason it was interesting at home was local, even if nobody noticed that at the time. Here is the process I use at market-entry stage, what the first ninety days realistically look like, and the mistakes that cost the most time.

Why does home-market PR usually fail abroad?

Because the credibility that carries a story at home does not cross the border with the product. Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer special report on brand growth found that more than two-thirds of people now say it is important, or an outright purchase deal breaker, that the brands they buy are headquartered in their own country, up five points since 2023, and that the average domestic trust advantage has widened to nineteen points. You do not arrive in a new market as a neutral newcomer. You arrive with a measurable disadvantage that has grown over the last three years.

That is not an argument against entering a market. It is an argument for treating earned media as one of the first things you do rather than something you get to after launch, because third-party endorsement from a publication the market already trusts is the fastest available substitute for local familiarity you have not yet had time to build.

What does a new market need to hear before it will cover you?

Not what your product does. Why it exists here. Three things have to be established before a journalist in a new market has any reason to write about you, and the order matters:

• That the problem exists in their market, on their terms. A statistic from your home market is context. A statistic from theirs is a story.

• That you are credible enough to quote. This is where coverage, customers, regulators, trials or partners from other markets do their work, not as boasting but as evidence that somebody independent has already checked you.

• That there is a reason to write about it now. Market entry on its own is not a reason. A change in local regulation, pricing, availability, a local partnership or a fresh local data point is.

Most failed entries skip straight to the second point, lead with credentials, and never make the case that the problem is local at all.

How do you work out what the story is in a market you do not know?

Read before you write. Two weeks of reading a market properly saves two months of pitching into it. What I look for:

• The last eighteen months of coverage of your category in that market's national and trade press. Which framings recur, and which angles have already been written to death.

• Who is already quoted as the local authority in the category. If that is a competitor, it is a position you have to argue your way into, not around.

• The specific consumer or regulatory anxieties that keep resurfacing. In the UK that is often cost and independent evidence; in the US it tends to be scale and speed. Neither is a stereotype, it is what the coverage shows once you have read enough of it.

• The local calendar: regulatory dates, industry events, seasonal peaks, and which trade titles set an agenda that nationals later pick up.

Who should you pitch first, and who should you leave until later?

Trade press first, nationals later, almost without exception.

Trade titles in a new market do three useful things at once. They are far more likely to cover a company at entry stage, because entry genuinely is news to their readers. They create the citable third-party record a national journalist will find when they check you. And they are read by the local buyers, partners and analysts you actually need on side.

Nationals should come once you have either a local data point, a local customer willing to be named, or a local angle on a story that market is already running. Going to nationals first with a market-entry announcement is the most common way to burn a first impression, because you have asked a busy journalist to care about what is, from where they sit, an internal milestone at a company they have never heard of.

What does the first ninety days realistically look like?

For a genuine first entry into a market where you have no coverage, no relationships and no local proof:

• Weeks one to three: reading, positioning and message development for that market, plus a press list built around the specific story rather than exported from a database.

• Weeks four to six: trade and specialist outreach with the story framed locally. First coverage usually lands here, if it lands.

• Weeks seven to twelve: building on that coverage, approaching nationals with local proof now in hand, and starting the relationships that make the second campaign considerably easier than the first.

Anyone promising national coverage in a new market within a fortnight of starting is describing a paid placement, not earned media.

What proof will a journalist in a new market ask for that your home market never did?

More than you expect, and none of it is personal. It is a function of being unknown. Have all of this ready before you pitch rather than after somebody asks:

• Local availability. Where can a reader in this market actually buy or use the thing, and from what date. A story about a product nobody there can get is not a story.

• Local pricing, in local currency, including whatever changes at the border: duty, shipping, or differences in subscription tiers.

• Independent validation that carries weight locally. A UK consumer journalist will read a Which? verdict differently from a US award; a US technology reporter will look for a trial, a named customer or a benchmark.

• A spokesperson available in that market's time zone at short notice. This sounds administrative and it decides stories, broadcast ones especially.

• Anything that localises the claim. Cision's 2026 report found locality to be one of the most universally emphasised needs in journalists' own words, with more than 200 respondents specifically calling for local angles or local tie-ins, and some saying plainly that they reject pitches without one.

Does the approach change between the UK, the US and Canada?

Materially, yes, and it is one of the more expensive things to learn the hard way.

The UK market is comparatively concentrated, so a small number of well-chosen relationships go a long way, and consumer press expects independent evidence before it will endorse anything. The US is far more fragmented, with regional and vertical press doing much of the early work, and with speed and scale mattering more in the framing than they do in the UK. Canada rewards genuinely local relevance more sharply than either, and a story carrying no Canadian data and no Canadian voice will usually be passed over however well it performed elsewhere.

The mistake is rarely not knowing this. It is writing one pitch and sending it to all three.

What does this look like in practice?

Y-Brush entered the UK as a French health-tech product carrying a claim, the world's fastest toothbrush, that reads in the UK as novelty rather than credibility. Leading with the claim would have earned exactly the coverage that kills a considered purchase: brief, amused and dismissive.

The approach was to build the evidence case first, so that the UK conversation was about whether the product worked rather than whether it was a gimmick. That produced a Which? endorsement alongside WIRED and T3, and repositioned the product from novelty to a credible everyday consumer solution. The lesson generalises well beyond toothbrushes: in a new market, argue the category before you argue the product.

What are the most common mistakes?

• Announcing the entry as though it were the story. 'We have launched in the UK' is news for your investors, not for a UK news desk.

• Reusing home-market data. A statistic about American consumers carries close to no persuasive weight with a British journalist writing for British readers.

• Sending one pitch to three countries. The angle should differ per market even when the underlying news does not.

• Skipping trade press because it feels like a step down. Trade coverage is precisely what makes the national story checkable later.

• Leaving local relationships until after launch. They take months to build and cannot be bought from a database.

• Treating the first campaign as the whole plan. Market entry is where relationships start, not where they pay off.

Entering a market is a positioning problem before it is a media problem. As a Senior Freelance PR Consultant working across the UK, US, Canada and ANZ, most of what I do at entry stage happens before a single journalist is contacted, because the pitch is only ever as strong as the answer to one question: why should this market care, now, in its own terms.

If you are taking a product or a business into a market where nobody has heard of you yet, talk to Fireflies Management.