How guaranteed PR placement actually works — the four steps from brief to live link.
From a single onboarding brief to a published story in Forbes, TechCrunch, Wired, or Inc. — in 8.7 days on average. No retainers. No monthly minimums. No chasing reporters who never reply. This is the playbook we run for 1,840+ brands, audited quarterly at a 93.4% placement rate by CoverageBook.
From your inbox to a live tier-1 link in 8.7 days, in four moves.
Every campaign runs the same four-move playbook. Brief in. Angles out. Journalists pitched. Live link tracked. What changes is the vertical, the angle, and the reporter. Below is exactly what happens inside each move — and what your team does versus what ours does.
-
01Day 0 · You
The Brief — a 14-question intake, not a discovery call.
You fill out a single onboarding form: company one-liner, the announcement or story peg, three proof points, the audience you want to reach, and the two or three outlets that matter most. A senior strategist — never a junior associate — reviews it within four business hours and either greenlights the campaign or schedules a 20-minute coverage audit to sharpen the angle. Average brief-to-pitch time: 26 hours.
- 14 questions, ~9 minutes to complete.
- Strategy review in <4 business hours.
- Optional coverage audit if the story needs reframing.
-
02Day 1 · Get On My Space
AI-matched angles, ranked by reporter appetite.
Our matching engine takes your brief, your funding stage, and your category, then scores it against 2,800+ journalist contact histories — what each reporter has actually covered in the last 90 days, the beats they've moved off, and the tone of their recent bylines. You receive three ranked angle proposals, each tied to a named reporter and a specific outlet. Pick one, or remix two.
- 3 ranked angle proposals per campaign.
- Each angle tied to a named journalist and outlet.
- Beat-fit scored against 90 days of byline history.
-
03Day 2–6 · Pre-warmed
The pitch — sent from a journalist who already knows the reporter.
Pitches go out from one of our 12 in-house former journalists — people who used to sit on the other side of the inbox at TechCrunch, Forbes, and Bloomberg. Every contact in our network is a pre-warmed relationship refreshed weekly, not a scraped media list. Reply rate across 12,400+ campaigns: 38.2%, against a 4.1% industry baseline.
- 12 former journalists on staff doing the pitching.
- Pre-warmed relationships, refreshed every Friday.
- 38.2% reply rate vs. 4.1% industry average.
-
04Day 7–14 · Live
The dashboard — a live link, not a PDF recap.
Once a story is queued, drafted, or published, you see it the moment our system sees it. The dashboard surfaces open rates, reply rates, draft-in-progress flags, and the live URL with full UTM and DR data. Average time-to-publication across the last 1,000 campaigns: 8.7 days. If no tier-1 placement lands in 30 days, the flat $2,400 fee is refunded in full — no negotiation, no "let me check with my manager."
- Real-time open / reply / draft / live-link tracking.
- 8.7-day average time-to-publication.
- Guaranteed tier-1 placement or full refund in 30 days.
The network and the numbers behind the mechanism.
Book a 20-minute coverage audit — leave with a placement plan, not a sales pitch.
A senior strategist reviews your story, names the three outlets most likely to bite this week, and tells you whether you're a fit for a $2,400 flat-fee campaign. No deck. No follow-up sequence. No "let me loop in my VP."