The Fletcher Group is a team of experts in PR and content marketing who work to drive action and create long-term impact. Its clients — including B2B, payments and fintech companies of all sizes — range from rapid-growth startups to large multinational organizations.

The firm has been awarded PR Daily PR Team of the Year, Top Lead Gen Content Marketing Campaign of the Year and was a finalist for the Silver Anvil Awards, the top recognition in PR.

Geoff Renstrom, account director at The Fletcher Group, says:

Before Muck Rack, our pitching process was a lot more siloed. In a lot of ways, we weren’t able to be as collaborative because we were worried about doubling up on a reporter.

We tended to have one main contact on any given account who did the majority of the media relations. But we weren’t able to pitch as many timely ideas because we couldn’t quickly double-check that no one had already reached out to certain reporters.

It was a whole process of making phone calls or sending emails, asking, “Did you pitch this reporter? When did you last pitch them? Do you mind if I follow up with them?”

I’ve been using Muck Rack for years as a research and information-gathering tool. A couple of years ago, we had a new team member who’d used Muck Rack in their previous role. They highly recommended it. I’d always been interested in Muck Rack, and our contract with Cision was up, so it was the perfect timing.

Now, about 10 out of our 15 team members use Muck Rack, and pretty much everybody is obsessed with it.

Quickly building media lists based on breaking news and trends'

The pandemic shifted how we approach media. We have our core media lists, but now we do a lot more with breaking news and newsjacking. Muck Rack gives us the ability to quickly search by topics reporters are talking about, which has been super helpful.

For example, back when the first COVID vaccines were coming out, our clients had a lot of research and consumer insights around vaccine incentives. This was a huge news story that was changing almost daily, so we had to be nimble.

There were moments when the Biden administration would hold a press conference and talk about these incentives. Within half an hour, we were able to find and pitch hundreds of health care reporters through Muck Rack. And these weren’t necessarily reporters we’d pitched before — Muck Rack helped us discover new contacts.

This helped us land coverage for our clients in big publications like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today.

We still do this today with a variety of trends and topics. It’s just nice to be able to get in front of the news and reach reporters when they’re still writing a story.

Seamlessly collaborating on automatically customized pitches

When we started using Muck Rack, it blew my mind how efficient it was as a pitching tool. We pitch directly from the platform, and it’s been super efficient. We can automatically customize our pitches to have our contacts’ names inserted into the pitch. It saves us so much time.

We’ve also connected our Outlook emails to Muck Rack so we can see which reporters have opened our emails. It’s helpful information for follow-ups and making sure our pitches are dialed in.

In some cases, we’ve started reporting these pitch analytics to clients. We can tell them, “Hey, this pitch has a 40% open rate, which is double our average,” or “The Wall Street Journal opened this pitch.” This helps the client double-down on specific research or content that’s performing well.

Also, because The Fletcher Group is fully remote, it’s helpful that Muck Rack allows me to see what other team members are pitching and access their media lists. I have team members who work on the same clients and pitches together, so we can ensure we aren’t stepping on toes or double-pitching.

Highlight our value with media and coverage reports

We love using Muck Rack to track our clients’ share of voice against their competitors’.

For any given client, we’ll choose three to four competitors and use Muck Rack’s competitor coverage comparisons tool to monitor what they’re doing. Then, each month, we’ll collect all the relevant coverage — Muck Rack even provides a nice little pie chart! — and add it to our clients’ coverage reports, which also include their press hits, impressions and other key metrics.

We also use these competitor coverage reports to find new journalists to pitch because we can see where our competitors are getting coverage and who specifically is covering them.