Beachhut PR uses MediaHQ to deliver the best PR results to clients

“MediaHQ is always really dependable. When I’m faced with the challenge of finding out if my go-to journalists cover a topic, I can search the database and find out from their profile”
<div class="author">Stacey Connolly, Senior Account Manager – Beachhut PR</div>

Beachhut PR is a PR agency based in Dublin 2 with a global reach. Working with venture-backed technology companies, it aims to deliver the best branding, marketing and communications to clients in a global marketplace. Paul Hayes is the CEO and Founder of Beachhut PR and has extensive experience in technology communications. Beachhut PR offers full service media outreach with connections around the globe in locations including Dublin, London, New York, San Francisco, Europe and Asia-­Pacific. Their clients include N26, Intercom, SoftBank, Fiserv, Swappie, Scurri and Buymie among others.

Stacey Connolly is Senior Account Manager at Beachhut PR, where she started as a Senior Account Executive in 2016. Stacey has worked with some of the largest tech companies and emerging startups in Ireland, boosting their national and international profile with coverage from niche trade publications to high profile outlets, spanning web, print, TV, podcasts and radio. Stacey worked as a digital marketing consultant, helping clients to improve their social media activities and increase brand awareness before turning her hand to public relations.

MediaHQ is a media contacts database and press release distribution tool that PR and communications teams use on a daily basis to find media contacts, build media and pitch lists, send press releases and analyse results.

Beachhut PR has been a client of MediaHQ since 2017. In that time they have sent over 90 press releases, using MediaHQ for its extensive and up-to-date contacts database. Stacey and the team and Beachhut PR use MediaHQ in a slightly different to other clients in that they primarily send press releases through their own emails, but heavily rely on the database to find the right contacts to send their stories to.  

Expanding into new markets with MediaHQ

Starting as a small agency, Beachhut began in corporate PR using their own black book of journalists that they would contact regularly to share their clients’ stories with. Since using MediaHQ, Stacey and the team at Beachhut PR have expanded their coverage, built a professional and scalable outreach process across the media and formed media relations with journalists in different sectors of the Irish media.

Stacey uses the MediaHQ database for the everyday tasks of her role. These include finding the right journalists to share her client’s stories with, pitching to programmes and outlets and reaching out into new territories of the Irish media. The easy-to-use search engine and topic filters allow her to scan through the extensive MediaHQ database and find journalists who cover technology and business. From here, Stacey creates a media list of the contacts that she has chosen and sends out her press release. Targeting the right journalists with press releases allows Stacey to tap into niche audiences and get extensive coverage of her client’s stories.

“Since using MediaHQ, the agency has grown and we have moved into different verticals and sectors. MediaHQ has allowed us to tap into other journalists and sectors. In the past, we would have concentrated on technology and business journalists. We’re now starting to represent some e-sports and motoring companies so with MediaHQ, we are easily able to find and reach out to motoring journalists to cover their stories.”

What makes a story stand out?

If a story is going to be sent as a press release, it must be considered newsworthy. Beachhut PR have worked with creative people, innovative founders and real thought leaders over the years and have learned a thing or two about what makes a story worth sending. They have worked closely with journalists in that time to get powerful stories from various clients into the news. This gives the team at Beachhut PR unparalleled insight into what works as news and the kind of stories that journalists will give good coverage to. Instead of taking a client story at face value, Stacey likes to dig deeper, taking a deep dive into the data and information that a client provides to find the newsworthy angle of a story.

“It’s a teachable moment for clients when you can tell them what’s not going to strike the chord or what sounds a bit promotional or advertorial. The story they bring might not be editorial news so you have to teach people what makes a good story. If it’s a piece that sounds really good but we can see that they’re only just hitting the surface, we work together to go deeper and find the newsworthy aspect of the story.”

As Beachhut PR has broadened its clientele, its PR outreach has expanded into new sectors. With this comes the challenge of building connections with new journalists who are not on their regular press release lists. Instead of relying on scouring the internet, hoping to stumble across a journalist or two who may cover a story, Stacey uses the MediaHQ topic search, which provides over 300 topics to users, and praises the dependability of MediaHQ to steer her in the right direction. As Beachhut PR has historically taken on technology clients, when reaching out on behalf of new business clients, Stacey has had to quickly find the right journalists to target. She also uses lists that have been pre-curated by MediaHQ researchers to find the key journalists to target when it comes to expanding to a new sector.

“MediaHQ is always really dependable. When I’m faced with the challenge of finding out if my go to journalists cover a topic, I can search the database and find out from their profile. If I’m working with a new sector, there is always a list on MediaHQ for it.”

In Focus – How MediaHQ helps Beachhut PR:

• The searchable database allows them to search and locate the right contacts to build lists for clients in different sectors.
• Contact details are automatically updated on their media lists, meaning that Stacey doesn’t have to spend hours of grunt work keeping track of media movements.
• They search for organisations to find the right contacts in an outlet to reach out to for a story.