Getting featured in the Daily Mail

During my crowd-funding campaign I was trying to get as much exposure as possible so that people would hear about the campaign and invest in MyCarGossip.

I hired a start up PR company and got a little bit of exposure using them but they kept being told that the journalists would only write about the crowd-funding once I had raised all the money. This obviously wouldn't help me during the campaign because I wanted the PR to help get the funding!  At the same time as using the PR company I hired, I was trying to figure out how to get a piece into a big newspaper myself.

I tried everything, I even did a YouGov survey to get some interesting statistics that I could create an a press release about so that I could send it to journalists. The question we asked YouGov to post to their community was:

"If I was involved in a car accident, I am confident that I’d know what information that I need to note/take down for my insurance company” 

The aim of this question was to find out how many people would actually know what information to take down in the event of a car crash. There were a choice of answers that they could pick from. 

We ended up getting some really interesting results from the survey, out of 1,485 drivers 60% were unsure of all the information that they would need to take down in the case of a car accident. 

I spent ages sending the press release out to a very long list of journalists that I was given but it still didn't get featured in any newspapers.

I knew that I needed to try something different.

The Daily Mail

One day I was reading the Daily Mail and I came across an article that was written by a journalist about a woman who was running her own business from home. I really enjoyed the article and so I decided to search for the journalist on Twitter. Her name was at the bottom of the article so I searched for her on Twitter and found her profile. I tweeted her saying that I really enjoyed her article and could I tell her about my story which is similar to the one she had written about. She tweeted me back with her email address and so I sent her a press release about MyCarGossip which I had written.

I was so surprised when she emailed me back asking to interview me for a piece in the Daily Mail!

The next day she interviewed me and a few weeks later I was on the front page of the Daily Mail app under the money section and on their website there was a large photo of me along with the story.
In just a couple of days it was shared 179 times on social media.

A Local Paper

I then did the same thing with a local newspaper from my area and they also asked to interview me!

They even sent a professional photographer to my house to take some photos of me with my car. The funny thing was that he said he expected me to be wearing overalls, he thought I was an actual mechanic. I had to explain that I am not a mechanic, I am the founder of a motoring website for female drivers.

I learnt so much about PR whilst I was trying to raise my investment and once I had completed my crowd-funding I was then featured in more interviews because I had successfully raised the money.