What Does a PR Consultant Actually Do Before Pitching Your Story?

Founders often measure PR by the pitch itself: the email, the call, the follow-up. In practice, most of the work that determines whether a story lands happens earlier, before a journalist's name is even on a list.

What happens before a single pitch goes out?

The process runs in a fairly consistent order, even though the timeline shortens or stretches depending on the story. First, a research phase: establishing what is actually newsworthy about the business right now, separate from what the founder wants to announce, and testing the story against a wider audience's interest rather than the company's own sense of its significance. Second, a positioning phase: deciding what the business wants to be known for and reshaping the angle until it holds up on its own, without the context only insiders have. Third, a targeting phase: mapping exactly who should hear this story first and why. Fourth, a testing phase: pressure-testing the angle and the key facts against the hardest question a journalist is likely to ask, before that question is asked for real. Only once all four are done does a single email go out.

How does a PR consultant decide who to approach?

Targeting is built around the story, not a generic media list. A consultant maps which journalists and outlets have covered comparable stories recently, checks what each one has published in the last few weeks to avoid pitching something they have just run, and prioritises a small number of the right contacts over a broad, untargeted send. The research backs this up directly: Muck Rack's own survey of working journalists found that 88% immediately disregard a pitch that misses their beat, while 70% prioritise a pitch's alignment with what they actually cover above almost anything else a PR consultant sends them. A tightly targeted pitch to five relevant journalists consistently outperforms an identical email sent to fifty.

Why does positioning come before outreach, not after?

A pitch sent before the underlying positioning is settled tends to generate the wrong kind of interest, or none at all. Deciding what the business wants to be known for, and making sure every fact in the pitch supports that, has to happen before a journalist's inbox is involved. Fixing positioning after a story has already gone out to a handful of outlets is far harder than getting it right first, because you cannot un-pitch a weak angle to a journalist who has already formed an impression of it.

What does the testing phase actually involve?

Before a single pitch goes out, a consultant should be able to answer the hardest question a journalist is likely to ask about the story, out loud, without hesitating. This usually means a short internal dry run: stating the pitch angle plainly, then attacking it from the angle a sceptical journalist would take, is the comparison too obvious, is the number verifiable, does the timing hold up under scrutiny. Any weakness that surfaces here gets fixed before outreach, not discovered for the first time in a journalist's reply. Skipping this step is a common shortcut under time pressure, and it is usually the reason a pitch that looked strong internally falls apart the moment a journalist asks one follow-up question.

What does a bad pitch angle look like next to a good one?

A weak version usually starts with the company: "[Company] is excited to announce…", followed by a list of features and a founder quote about vision. A stronger version starts with the reader's problem: a specific pain point, a number that quantifies it, and only then the company's answer to it, positioned as evidence rather than as the headline itself. The difference is not polish. It is which party the first sentence is actually about.

What should you expect to be asked before a story is pitched?

A good consultant will ask for specifics: real numbers, named outcomes, on-the-record availability, and what makes this moment different from any other point the business could have chosen to go public. Founders who can answer these clearly get pitched faster and land more consistently, because the groundwork that usually slows a campaign down has already been done.

What you should be asked before day one of pitching:

• What is the one fact you would want a journalist to put in a headline, if they could only use one.
• What real numbers, dates or named outcomes can you put behind that fact.
• Who is available, and prepared, to speak on the record if a journalist wants a quote same day.
• What makes this moment different from any other point you could have chosen to go public.
• What have you already said publicly about this, so nothing pitched contradicts it.
• Which three outlets, specifically, would actually move the needle for this story, rather than which ones simply sound impressive.

What does the data actually say about pitching well?

Muck Rack's research is consistent on this point year over year: journalists want relevance first, credible sources second, and brevity throughout, with 69% of journalists preferring pitches under 200 words and 58% wanting access to credible sources over anything else a pitch can offer. None of that is a matter of style. It is the practical output of the research and targeting work happening before the pitch is written, not a writing trick applied afterwards. A short pitch that reads well is usually the last step of a long process, not the whole of it.

How long does this process actually take, start to finish?

For a story with a fixed date, a launch, a funding close, an event, the research and positioning work realistically needs two to three weeks ahead of outreach, with targeting and testing folded into the final week. For a story with no fixed date, a founder profile, a thought-leadership angle, a trend piece, the timeline is more flexible, but rushing straight to outreach without the earlier phases is the single most common reason a founder feels PR "isn't working" within the first month of a relationship with a new consultant. Good PR compounds. The first pitch built on solid positioning and targeting tends to open doors that make the second and third pitches faster, not just the first one more likely to land.

What happens if the first round of pitching gets no response?

Silence is information, not failure. A consultant reviewing a pitch that got no replies should be able to tell you which of three things likely happened: the targeting was off and the wrong journalists were approached, the angle itself needs reshaping because it did not clear the newsworthiness bar, or the timing was wrong and a stronger news cycle crowded it out that week. Each has a different fix, which is exactly why skipping the research and positioning phases makes a quiet pitch so much harder to diagnose and correct.

The pitch is the visible part of PR. The research, targeting and positioning behind it is where most of the outcome is actually decided, and it is worth understanding before hiring anyone to do it on your behalf.

If you want to see what that groundwork looks like before your own story goes anywhere near a journalist, talk to Fireflies Management.