The average founder-led DTC brand in the UK thinks earned media is for companies with a polished press kit, a London agency on retainer, and a head of comms. It is not. Press coverage is one of the highest-ROI acquisition channels available to a small brand, and the work required to get it is well within the reach of a team of three people who know what they are doing.
I placed Liquiproof in Vogue, The Guardian, Men's Health, and dozens of vertical publications across six years, with no PR agency and no media background. I did not have connections. I had an understanding of what a journalist actually needs and the discipline to deliver it faster than everyone else pitching them. The brands I work with now that get the most consistent press coverage are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the clearest angles.
What follows is the earned media system we teach every sprint client in their first 90 days. Four plays, a pitching framework, and how to extract the maximum value from every placement you get. If you are generating more than £500K in revenue and you are not running at least one of these plays consistently, you are leaving a compounding asset on the table.
Why press still moves the needle for DTC brands
Paid search and social are getting more expensive and more crowded every quarter. A feature in Stylist, The Evening Standard, or a category vertical like The Drinks Business or Cosmetics Business does three things simultaneously that paid media cannot. It builds credibility with customers who find you through completely separate channels. It generates a backlink that improves your organic search position for months, sometimes years, after the article runs. And it sends a burst of qualified, high-intent traffic from people who trust the publication enough to read it regularly.
The credibility lift is the piece most founders underestimate. A customer who finds you through a Refinery29 feature, or a mention in a Waitrose Food newsletter, arrives with far lower objections than one clicking through from a Meta ad. They have already been told by a source they trust that this brand is worth their attention. Conversion rates from editorial referral traffic are typically two to three times higher than cold paid traffic.
Press also matters before a customer ever visits your website. In the DTC space, you are being evaluated across multiple touchpoints before someone places an order. They google you, check your reviews, look for mentions. A press hit is social proof at the awareness stage, before your flows and your product page have had a chance to do any work. Brands with visible press coverage in relevant titles consistently see lower cart abandonment rates and higher email open rates, because the trust baseline is higher.
What editors and journalists actually want
Journalists are not waiting to be impressed by your brand. They are solving their own problem, which is finding a credible, specific, timely angle that fits their publication's editorial calendar and resonates with their audience. The moment you understand that, everything about how you pitch changes.
The mistake most founders make is leading with the brand. "We launched a premium functional drinks range made from adaptogenic herbs". An editor at a lifestyle title hears that 40 times a week. What they want is a peg, a reason why this story is relevant right now for their specific readers. "UK interest in adaptogens is up 340% since 2022 and three of the biggest misconceptions driving the category are still widely published" gives them something to build a headline around. One is a product launch. The other is a story.
Timeliness is the single biggest unlock in earned media. Attach your angle to a trend, a season, a news hook, or a consumer behaviour shift backed by data. Match it to what that publication has been covering in the last six weeks. Read three recent issues before you write a single word of a pitch. The editor should be able to immediately picture the headline they would write from your email. If they can't, the email gets deleted.
The four earned media plays that work for DTC brands
Not every play works for every brand at every stage. Start with the one that matches where you are. Most sprint clients begin with Play 2 or Play 3 because the time investment is low and the feedback loop is fast.
The founder story pitch
Founders are intrinsically interesting to journalists in a way that products rarely are. An editor cannot pitch their audience on "here is a nice functional drink." They can pitch them on "this founder quit a corporate job, lost £40K on her first production run, reformulated twice, and has just landed in 600 Waitrose stores." The origin story, the failure, the pivot, the insight that changed everything. These are publishable angles that no product description can replicate.
The founder story pitch works best for lifestyle, entrepreneurship, and business publications, but it can be adapted for category titles too. Structure it as a human interest angle first, with the product as the outcome rather than the subject. Approach editors at Evening Standard, The Sunday Times Style, Business Insider, or your category trade titles. One long-form founder profile, placed correctly, can drive more qualified traffic than six months of paid social spend at a brand under £1M.
Data-led press releases
If you have data from your own customers, it is publishable. Survey 400 to 600 of your customers on a topic relevant to your category and share the findings with a two-paragraph press release and a data visualisation. Journalists use proprietary data constantly because it makes their piece original and citable. "68% of UK wellness shoppers say they have abandoned a supplement brand in the last 12 months due to confusing labelling" is a publishable finding. A new product announcement is not.
The investment is a Typeform survey, a few hours of analysis, and a clear write-up. The returns, in the form of backlinks from publications that would otherwise never cover you, are significant. Brands that run one data study per quarter consistently see organic search improvements that compound over 12 to 18 months. The first placement is the hardest. After that, editors remember you as a brand that generates useful data.
Reactive PR through journalist platforms
HARO (Help a Reporter Out), now operating as Connectively, and Qwoted send daily emails from journalists who need expert sources for specific articles they are already writing. You sign up as a source, monitor the digests, and respond to queries in your area of expertise. A well-crafted 100-word response that gives a journalist exactly what they need, delivered within two to three hours of the request going live, gets placed regularly. The publications range from niche trade titles to national broadsheets and major consumer websites.
This is the fastest path to consistent backlinks and mentions for a brand with no existing press relationships. The discipline required is simply reading the digest every morning and responding quickly when a relevant query appears. Build a bank of expert commentary on your category topics so you can adapt and send in minutes rather than hours. Brands that treat this as a daily habit for six months typically accumulate 15 to 40 placements in that period, with a meaningful uplift in domain authority and organic rankings.
Gift guide and roundup pitching
Gift guides, best-of roundups, and category features are the structural backbone of lifestyle editorial. Most publications run them four to six times per year, and editors are actively looking for products to fill them. Christmas gift guides begin being compiled in September. January wellness roundups start being pitched in November. Mother's Day features go out for pitching in January. The calendar is predictable and the opportunity is consistent.
The pitch is simple: identify the publications and the specific editors who run these features in your category, send a targeted pitch six to eight weeks before the relevant date, offer to send a sample for review, and make the copy-paste information, the RRP, the stockist link, one clean image, and a one-line description, immediately available in the email. Editors want to say yes when the pitch is easy to action. The conversion rate from sample to placement is high because the editor has space to fill and your job is just to make it as easy as possible to fill it with your product.
How to write a pitch that gets a response
The average pitch that lands in an editor's inbox is four paragraphs long, talks about the brand for three of them, and ends with "let me know if you'd like to find out more." It gets deleted without a reply. Editors at major publications receive hundreds of pitches per week. The ones that get responses are short, specific, and make the editor's job easier.
A pitch that works is two paragraphs and a subject line. The subject line should be specific to the publication and the section: "Gift guide idea: premium adaptogenic drinks for Men's Health readers" outperforms "partnership opportunity with [Brand Name]" every time. Match the language of the title you are pitching. Paragraph one is the angle and the timeliness hook, the reason this story matters to their readers right now. Paragraph two is the specific offer: a product sample, an exclusive data point, a 15-minute founder interview, or a pre-drafted Q&A they can edit and publish quickly. End with a single, clear action.
Do not pitch mass. Build a list of 30 to 50 journalists who cover your exact category, follow them on X, and read what they are actively working on. Many journalists post on social about stories they are researching, which is an invitation to pitch. Personalise every email to reference something specific that journalist has recently published. "I read your piece on the overcrowded energy drink market last month and I think there is a follow-up story in what the independent brands are doing differently with formulation" gets opened. "Hi, I wanted to share news about our brand" does not.
Follow up once, five to seven working days after the first email, with a single line: "Just wanted to check this landed, happy to send a sample if useful." One follow-up is fine. Two is the upper limit. After that, move on and pitch the next person on your list. The goal is a contact book of 50 relevant journalists and a steady cadence of pitching, not a single bet on one editor at one publication.
Building your media list without spending money
A media database like Cision or MuckRack costs £3,000 to £10,000 per year. You do not need it at this stage. Start with the publications your ideal customers actually read, not the ones you want to be featured in for ego reasons. Search the name of a competitor brand or a specific product in your category on Google News. See which publications have covered it in the last 12 months. That list is your starting point.
Find the journalist who wrote each piece. Click through to their author page and you will typically find an email, a Twitter or X handle, and a list of their recent work. Follow them, note the topics they return to, and build a spreadsheet with their name, publication, beat, contact email, and notes on recent coverage. Most journalist email addresses follow a predictable format once you know one from that outlet: firstname.lastname@[publication].co.uk or firstnamelastname@[publication].com. Tools like Hunter.io verify these for free up to a monthly limit.
Prioritise quality over volume. One warm relationship with a journalist who covers your category consistently is worth more than a thousand cold emails. Engage with their work genuinely before you pitch. Comment on their articles, share their pieces, respond to their posts on social. When you eventually pitch, they will recognise your name and your open rate will be significantly higher than it would be from a cold approach.
Making the most of every placement you get
Most founders get a press hit, share it on Instagram Stories, and move on. That is leaving 90% of the value on the table. A single well-placed article is an asset with a lifespan of months if you use it properly.
Email your list within 48 hours of the placement going live. "As seen in [publication]" is consistently one of the highest-performing subject lines in welcome sequences. Add the publication logo to your homepage and to your paid media creative, specifically your Meta prospecting ads, where social proof from trusted editorial brands measurably improves click rates. Create a press page on your website and keep it updated, because new journalists will Google your brand before replying to a pitch and a well-maintained press page signals that you are a credible operator worth their time.
Each placement is also a door opener for the next one. When you pitch a second publication, lead with the fact that you were recently featured in the first. "We were featured in [X] last month, which drove significant interest from their wellness audience. I think there is a similar angle that would resonate with your readers at [Y]." Social proof works on editors too. A brand that has been covered by reputable titles is easier to pitch to the next one than a brand with no press history.
Add coverage quotes to your email flows. A post-purchase email that includes "As featured in Stylist: the [product] that [result]" reinforces the purchase decision at the exact moment it matters most. Coverage quotes in your abandoned cart flow, placed after the product description, can lift recovery rates by 6 to 12 percentage points because they provide third-party validation at the point of hesitation. Press coverage is a conversion asset, not just a vanity metric.
What a consistent earned media effort looks like
Sprint client example
A UK functional drinks brand we worked with had never pitched press before starting the sprint. In 90 days, running HARO responses as a daily habit, sending one data-led press release, and systematically pitching January wellness roundups, they secured 11 placements including mentions in Cosmopolitan, The Independent, and three specialist health titles.
Domain authority increased from 14 to 22 in that period. Organic sessions grew 34%. Email list size increased by 1,100 subscribers directly attributable to coverage-driven traffic. Total time investment: roughly four hours per week across the team. Total cost: product samples and the founder's time.
The cadence that works for most founder-led brands is one proactive pitch per week, daily HARO monitoring and response when relevant, one data study per quarter, and a seasonal gift guide push three times a year. That is not a heavy programme. It is a consistent one, and consistency is what makes earned media compound over time.
The brands that generate the most press coverage are not doing anything dramatically complicated. They have clear angles, they pitch consistently, they follow up once, and they use every placement they get to open the next door. That is the whole system. Most of it can be run by a founder or a part-time marketing manager with no prior PR experience and no agency support.
Start building your media presence this week
The free scorecard takes three minutes and covers earned media alongside email, conversion rate, and paid media. It will show you where your biggest growth constraint is right now and whether press is the lever you should be pulling first.
If you want someone to audit your current brand positioning and build a 90-day earned media plan with you, the Brand Growth Audit covers your full acquisition stack with a prioritised action plan. Three days, Loom walkthrough, written report.
Frequently asked questions
Do DTC brands really need a PR agency to get press coverage?
No. A PR agency retainer costs between £2,500 and £8,000 per month for entry-level DTC clients, and the results are rarely proportionate. Most press coverage for founder-led brands comes from a clear angle, a well-targeted pitch, and a quick response to journalist requests, all of which a founder or small team can do in-house. Agencies add value at scale or in specialist categories, but for a brand doing under £2M in revenue, the time investment in learning how to pitch is almost always worth more than the retainer fee.
What is HARO and how does it work for DTC brands?
HARO (Help a Reporter Out), now operating as Connectively, sends daily email digests from journalists who need expert sources for specific articles. You register as a source and monitor the digests for queries in your area of expertise. When you find a relevant query, you respond with a concise, specific answer in the journalist's requested format. Well-crafted responses sent within two to three hours of the query appearing are placed regularly in everything from national broadsheets to category trade titles. It is the single fastest path to consistent backlinks and mentions for a DTC brand with no existing press relationships.
What makes a good pitch email to a journalist?
A good pitch is two paragraphs. The first paragraph leads with the angle and the timeliness hook, a reason why this story is relevant right now for their specific audience. The second paragraph is the offer: a product sample, an exclusive data point, a 20-minute founder interview, or a draft Q&A they can edit and publish quickly. The subject line should be specific to the publication and the section, not generic. Most pitches fail because they lead with the brand story rather than the editorial angle. The editor's question is always: what can I write a headline with? Answer that first.
How do gift guide features work and how do I get into them?
Gift guide features are curated roundups run by lifestyle, health, beauty, and drinks publications, typically at Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Fathers' Day. Editors begin compiling them six to ten weeks in advance and actively seek products to include. The process is straightforward: identify the publications and editors that cover your category, send a targeted pitch four to eight weeks before the relevant occasion, offer to send a sample for review, and make the copy-paste information (RRP, stockist link, one-line description) immediately available. Conversion rate from sample to placement is high because editors need products to fill these features.
How do I build a targeted media list from scratch?
Start with the publications your ideal customers actually read, not the ones you want to be in for ego reasons. Search the name of a competitor brand or a product in your category on Google News and see which publications have covered it recently. That list is your starting point. Find the journalist who wrote each piece, follow them on X or LinkedIn, and note what they cover regularly. Build a spreadsheet of 30 to 50 journalists with their name, publication, beat, contact email, and notes on recent coverage. Pitch relevantly and personally, not by mass mail-out. One relationship with a journalist who covers your category consistently is worth more than 500 cold pitches.
What should I do with press coverage once I get it?
Email your list within 48 hours: 'As seen in [publication]' is one of the highest-performing subject lines in welcome sequences. Add the publication logo to your homepage hero section and to your paid media creative. Create a press page on your website and keep it updated as coverage accumulates, because new journalists will Google you before replying to your pitch and a press page signals credibility. Share the coverage on social, use it as a door-opener for future pitches to other publications, and add the quote or mention to your email flows where relevant. Each piece of coverage is an asset with a shelf life of months, not days.
About the author
Caner Veli founded and exited Liquiproof, scaling from zero to 3,000+ retailers globally in under 6 years. He now runs Purposeful Profits, a focused growth consultancy for founder-led DTC and CPG brands. 12 named sprint clients. 518% average growth. 27x highest ROAS. Read more about Caner →