Somewhere in Sydney right now, a journalist is scrolling through 200 unread pitches. Most are about a business turning ten, hiring a new GM or “launching an exciting new service”. And to be completely frank, almost all of them will get deleted.
If you run a service business, that’s probably what you picture when someone says “Digital PR”. You didn’t launch a rocket this morning, and you aren’t a celebrity chef. You clean carpets, lodge tax returns, or fix people’s backs. Why on earth would anyone put that in the paper?
Well, that journalist isn’t exactly hunting for exciting businesses. They’re hunting for stories, and plenty of the ones that make the cut come from businesses just like yours.
We’ve already made the case that every industry can suit digital PR. This post goes a step further. What do you actually do when there’s no obvious hook? When the phone isn’t ringing with reporters, and there’s no trend or news cycle to jump on?
You make your own news. Here’s how.
- Journalists don't cover businesses. They cover stories. You just need to find (or build) one.
- Your job data, your customers and your own weird day-to-day are PR gold.
- A survey, an index or a simple calculator can land national coverage for a service business.
- A strong opinion or a small experiment beats another "we've launched a new service" release every time.
- If you can't answer "why would a stranger care?", keep digging.
What makes a journalist hit reply?
Try this. Open news.com.au right now and scroll through the 10 most recent stories. We’d put money on it that not a single one of them is about a business doing business.
Instead, you’ll find people. A family priced out of their suburb. A tradie who found something bizarre in a ceiling. A new stat on how much Aussies are spending on groceries. Someone’s wedding going spectacularly wrong.
Here’s what that looks like in practice
Say you run a roofing business in Brisbane, and you’ve just finished a totally standard job: replacing the old tile roof on a 1980s brick home in the suburbs.
The flat pitch: “Brisbane roofer completes full roof replacement.” It’s all true, and it’s all about you. A journalist will skim it and move on.
The story pitch: “Most Aussies haven’t looked at their roof in a decade. Here’s what it’s costing them.” The owners only called when a leak appeared, and by then a small repair had turned into a full replacement. The roofer’s job records show that it’s quite common, with 80% of the roofs they replace being over 40 years old and having never been inspected.
Same boring job, and the business is still front and centre. The difference is that it now comes wrapped in a story, backed by your own data, and comes with an expert the journalist can quote: you.
That’s the role you want. You’re not the headline, you’re the source behind it. And the link back to your site comes with that role.
9 creative ways to make news when you don't have any
1. Dig into the data you already have
Your booking system, CRM and job logs are basically a research department you never knew you had. Pull out patterns, add a bit of context, and suddenly you’ve got a story nobody else can tell.
Examples:
- A pest control company maps callouts by suburb: "Brisbane's termite hotspots revealed"
- A pool maintenance business tracks which months green pools spike, and where.
- A mortgage broker crunches anonymised enquiries: "The average age of a first home buyer in our books is now..."
The one rule is to keep it pretty anonymous and keep it honest. A small sample is fine if you’re upfront about it.
Some of the most-covered brands in the world run on exactly this playbook:
- DoorDash dug into its Halloween orders for its annual candy trends report. It's a food delivery app talking about lollies, and it'll land in pretty much every "best Halloween candy" roundup going.
- Status Is Down tracks website outages. That's it. It went through its own outage data and found noon is the internet's unluckiest hour. It's perfectly on-brand, dead simple, and it can run again next year with fresh numbers.
- Luminate tracks music, TV and film consumption, and publishes a Midyear Report every year. Outlets like Variety cover it every time. Over the years, those reports have earned them more than 2,500 linking root domains.
See the pattern? None of these businesses are “newsworthy” in themselves. The data is.
2. Run a survey on something Aussies actually care about
No data of your own? Go and get some. A nationally representative survey of 1,000 to 2,000 Australians costs less than most people think.
And it doesn’t always need to be the public. Houzz interviews nearly 50 design professionals for its seasonal design trends report. It’s been doing it for years, and it gets press every time. If you’ve got a network of industry pros, clients or suppliers, you’ve already got a panel.
The trick is asking questions with a bit of tension in them.
Examples:
- A removalist: "1 in 3 Aussies have ended a friendship over helping someone move."
- A financial planner: "How much do Gen Z really think they need to retire?"
- A dog groomer: "Would you rather give up your partner or your pet for a month?"
3. Build an index or a league table
Journalists love a ranking. Especially one that lets every state and regional paper run its own version of the story.
Take Time Out’s World’s Coolest Neighbourhoods 2026. It’s 40 suburbs, a panel of editors and some criteria like food, nightlife and community. Three Aussie suburbs made the cut: New Farm in Brisbane (29th), North Hobart (32nd) and South Melbourne (39th). And we’re sure you saw it in the news.
That’s the magic. One list, and every outlet finds its own angle:
- The local paper made it about the suburb: "New Farm leads Australia".
- The nationals made it about the country: Nine rounded up all three Aussie entries.
- Other outlets picked the state rivalry, the "surprising" winner or the travel angle.
Same data, a dozen different headlines, and a link back to Time Out in nearly every one.
You don’t need to be Time Out to pull this off. Mash up free public data from the ABS, BOM, the ATO or your local council (or your own job data), then rank it. For example, a driving school’s take on “Australia’s most dangerous roundabouts”, from state crash data.
A good index lands a big national hit, then keeps picking up local coverage for weeks as regional outlets find their town on the list.
4. Make a tool people will actually use
Calculators, quizzes and checkers are link magnets. Publish once, and journalists keep referencing them long after launch.
- A conveyancer: a "true cost of buying a home" calculator for each state, stamp duty and all.
- A bookkeeper: "How much can you earn from your side hustle before the ATO comes knocking?"
- A wedding planner: a guest-list cost calculator. Every extra cousin comes with a price tag.
5. Share the weird stuff from the job
You’ve seen things. Your team has definitely seen things. Let’s say, the snake in the dishwasher, or the bloke who tried to fix his own wiring with sticky tape and optimism.
To you, that’s a Tuesday. To a lifestyle editor, that’s a story people will send to their group chat with “omg this is SO you”.
- A cleaning company: "The grossest things we've found in Airbnbs."
- A locksmith: the most ridiculous places Aussies hide their spare key.
- A plumber: "What Aussies flush that they really, really shouldn't."
Keep it cheeky, keep it anonymous, and it doubles as great social content. One good “you’ll never guess what we found” video can do more for your brand than a year of “meet the team” posts.
6. Run a small experiment
You don’t need a Super Bowl budget for a stunt. You need a question and a way to test it.
- An electrician measures how much power the appliances on standby in an average home use in a month, then works out what that adds to a household's yearly bill.
- A recruitment agency sends 100 identical CVs with different names or ages, then reports who got callbacks.
- A mechanic gets quotes for the same job from 20 workshops, and shares how much prices varied.
7. Pick a fight (politely)
A strong opinion gives journalists something to write about, and it gives readers something to argue about. Win-win.
- A financial adviser: "Stop telling young Aussies to buy property."
- A personal trainer: "10,000 steps is a marketing number. Here's what actually matters."
- A home builder: "Open-plan living was a mistake. Aussies want their walls back."
Just make sure you can back it up. A hot take with nothing behind it is just a hot mess.
8. Put a human in the story
Sometimes the story isn’t the business. It’s the person behind it, or the people you help.
- The accountant who retrained after 20 years as a chef.
- The cleaning business that only hires women returning to work after a break.
- The NDIS provider whose client just ran their first marathon (with permission, of course).
These stories suit local papers, radio and podcasts, and they build trust in a way a stat never can.
9. Turn your client wins into case studies journalists want
Most case studies sit on a website’s “Our Work” page, and nobody reads them. Which is a shame, because tucked inside a lot of them is normally a pretty decent story.
The trick is flipping it around. A case study says “look how great we are”. A PR story says “look what happened to this person”, with your business as the expert who helped make it happen.
Say you run a small IT support business, and you’ve just helped a family-run pharmacy get back on its feet after a cyberattack locked up every computer in the shop. On your website, that’s “Client: local pharmacy. Service: data recovery.”
Pitched as a story, it’s a family business that couldn’t fill scripts for three days, and a look at why more and more small Aussie businesses are becoming targets. You’re the expert explaining what went wrong and how others can protect themselves.
A few rules to make it work:
- Get permission first. Always. And ideally get the client on board to chat to a journo themselves. Real people make real stories.
- Lead with numbers. How much did they save? How long did it take? What changed? A before-and-after figure gives the journo their headline.
- Zoom out. One client's win is nice. One client's win that shows a bigger Aussie trend is news.
- Bring pictures. Before-and-after photos, or a shot of the client in their shop or home, make it far easier to run.
The "would anyone care?" test
Before you hit send on any pitch, run it past these five questions. If you can’t tick at least two or three, go back to the drawing board.
- Would a stranger care? Not your mum. Not your best client. A random person scrolling on the bus.
- Is there a number? A stat, a ranking or a dollar figure makes a headline write itself.
- Is there a surprise? If the answer is "well, obviously", it's not a story.
- Is your business the source, not the subject? You should appear in the story, but the story shouldn't be about you.
So, is your business really "not newsworthy"?
Probably not. It just hasn’t found its story yet.
The businesses that get coverage aren’t always the most exciting ones. They’re the ones willing to dig into their data, ask a cheeky question or share an opinion. None of that needs a big budget. It just needs a bit of creativity and someone who knows what journalists are after.
Got a hunch there’s a story hiding in your business? We’d love to help you dig it up. Let’s chat.
