3 Media Monitoring Tips to Boost Your PR Pitching Strategy

Every PR professional knows the importance of a great pitch. They’re the key to unlocking valuable earned media coverage, and journalists rely on them for ideas and to generate stories.

According to the 2025 State of the Media Report, journalists are looking for relevant pitches that include something truly unique. They need to stand out from the crowd, as Camille Rollason, Insights Sector Director at Cision, explains, because journalists “now find themselves competing, not just with each other, but with podcast hosts and YouTube creators, who may get more views on a single video than a major newspaper gets on their entire website.”

Crafting a killer pitch and finding the right reporter to deliver your story can be challenging. But smart use of media monitoring tools can transform your PR pitching strategy, helping to filter through the noise and understand the topics and journalists aligned with your brand’s earned media goals.

This was the topic of our recent webinar, The Media Monitoring Advantage: The Secret to Winning Pitches, which saw Rollason joined by John Sharp, Cision Senior Insights Consultant.

While we encourage you to watch their full conversation (available on demand), if you’re short on time we’ve assembled some of the key takeaways from the discussion, including how PR pros can draw insight from their media monitoring platforms to level up their pitching game.

1. Share of Voice vs. Quality of Coverage

Media monitoring tools allow you to track your share of voice, but you’ll need to dig below those initial numbers for the full picture of how your brand is perceived. A high share of voice doesn’t necessarily equal positive coverage. This distinction, says Rollason, is “the difference between tracking and actually measuring what matters.”

Sentiment analysis can help PR pros see past the first layer of media coverage. Rollason illustrates this with a case study of a client whose brand held a 31% share of voice but overwhelmingly negative brand sentiment. At the same time, one of the client’s competitors had a 3% share of voice that was “actually smashing it on the narrative control front, and they've managed to place intended messaging about 80% of coverage.”

How can analysis like this help with pitching? Sharp offers this advice: Use a media monitoring platform to look at the themes within each journalist’s coverage, and create a ranked list of your brand’s most influential promoters and detractors in the media.

“[This is] essentially a heat map of where the strongest relationships and biggest challenges were,” he notes “They could see which themes drove positive coverage, which triggered negative sentiment, and which journalists were shaping these narratives.”

Key takeaway: Don’t just pitch journalists with general positive talking points for your brand; instead understand what’s behind any negative sentiment and address it specifically. Promoter voices may be useful in some cases, but shifting coverage requires pitches that tackle an issue head-on. “Put special care and attention to some of those detractor voices by really understanding what is driving that unfavorable sentiment," says Rollason.

2. Exploring White Space: Untapped Opportunities

Understanding the journalists can offer critical insight, but what about the journalists who don't? PR monitoring can help identify "white space" – those reporters writing about your competitors or sector but not yet covering your organization.

"We don't just want to look at who's covering you. We want to look at who's covering your competitors and peers positively,” Sharp says. “Those journalists may be your next biggest advocates."

Sharp explained this further through an example of a company using media monitoring to track favorable competitor coverage while filtering out mentions of their own brand. This revealed high-visibility journalists with a clear interest in a brand’s sector, but not yet covering that specific organization.

By analyzing the themes in competitor coverage, a PR team can "produce topics, angles, strategies that would resonate with those journalists, giving a roadmap for outreach," Sharp explains.

Armed with this intelligence, it’s possible to then approach journalists "with highly relevant, tailored pitches referencing articles they'd written, offering complimentary data or experts." This analysis is a good way to turn cold outreach into warmer introductions and increase their chances of coverage.

Key takeaway: Use competitive monitoring to build a target list for outreach. Reference journalists’ previous work in your pitches and position your brand as a credible source for topics you know they already care about.

3. Measuring Your Success: Beyond Vanity Metrics

Pitching to secure media placement is important; however, not all coverage is equal. "Volume and reach of coverage matter,” says Sharp, “but looking at these metrics alone doesn’t tell the full story."

For a clearer picture on if your pitching strategy is working, Sharp recommended building a qualitative measurement framework that goes beyond simply counting placements. Try implementing the following media monitoring tips:

• Sentiment tracking: Monitor how your targeted pitch strategies affect coverage tone. By comparing coverage before and after implementing your strategy, you can see whether doubling down on your brand's top promoters and shifting the narrative with detractors actually improves coverage sentiment over time.
• Authority scoring: Not every media mention carries the same weight. Sharp suggests tracking high-impact placements by looking at headline coverage, if a spokesperson is cited, or if a non-headline story carried several mentions within. This exercise will help identify which pitches generate the most authoritative coverage.
• Message pull-through: Do your key messages appear in coverage of your brand? By defining the themes that are important, then monitoring for them alongside brand mentions, you can track not only the conversation that's important overall, but the subset of coverage that is most valuable (i.e. where you brand is featured).

Key takeaway: Media monitoring can help you move beyond simply counting mentions to knowing their deeper impact and how they affect your brand. Rollason describes it as “giving you understanding at scale.” In other words, media monitoring is a step toward seeing the real value of your pitching efforts, while allowing you to refine your approach based on what efforts are leading to quality coverage.

Final Thoughts

Today’s journalists are busier than ever before, and reaching them requires more advanced PR pitching strategies. As Rollason says, successful pitches “demonstrate a clear understanding of journalist’s beats and interests” rather than mass, generic outreach.

Media monitoring provides the data to craft relevant, targeted pitches that resonate with reporters – and when paired with an all-in-one AI-driven PR tool like CisionOne, which includes a database of thousands of verified journalists, you’ll be in a position to better understand your industry and land stories that move the needle for your brand.

Want to see how CisionOne works? Get in touch and speak to one of our experts today.