What ongoing PR actually looks like, week to week
PR isn't a launch moment — it's a weekly loop of monitoring, angle-spotting, pitching, and follow-up. Here's the machinery, and where the real busywork hides.
Most people picture PR as a moment: the big announcement, the launch, the feature in a magazine. The actual work is quieter and far more repetitive. Ongoing PR is a loop you run every week, whether or not anything is "happening" — and the firms that win are the ones who run it without dropping stitches.
1. Monitor
Before you pitch anything, you watch. Not vanity alerts — the specific beats, reporters, and storylines your client could credibly join. Most weeks the news isn't about your client at all; it's about their industry, a competitor, a regulation, a trend. Your job is to be reading it before your client forwards it asking "can we say something about this?"
2. Spot the angle
A story isn't an opportunity until you can answer one question: why would this reporter care about my client, today? That's the whole craft. "We have a product" is not an angle. "The thing everyone's writing about this week has a wrinkle only my client can explain" is. Most pitches get ignored because they skip this step.
3. Pitch as a person
Journalists reply to people they recognize, not to a platform's no-reply address. The pitch that lands is short, references something the reporter actually wrote, and makes a small ask. It goes out from you, and the reply comes back to you — because the relationship is the asset, not the tool.
4. Follow up like a human
One follow-up, well-timed, is the job, not an annoyance. A sequence that treats a reporter like a lead in a funnel is. The difference is whether you're tracking the conversation or automating it.
5. Track what landed
Coverage no one recorded may as well not have happened. Every placement, every reply, every "not now, but keep me posted" is data you'll want in three months when you're deciding who to pitch next.
6. Report so the client sees it
The client didn't watch you do any of the above. The report is where the invisible weekly loop becomes visible — and where a boutique firm proves its value against a retainer.
The point
None of these steps is hard on its own. The difficulty is the glue between them: the copy-paste, the spreadsheet reconciling, the "wait, did we already pitch her?" A tool's job is to remove the glue, not the judgment. That's the whole reason Pitcher exists — monitoring, sending from your own inbox, coverage tracking, and the client report in one loop, so the weekly machinery takes minutes instead of afternoons, and your time goes to the one thing software can't do: spotting the angle.