How come it's so hard to get media coverage in the Nordic countries? We get asked that a lot, and it's true, it is harder than say for example in the UK, or Germany.
It has one very simple explanation and a lot of subtle ones. The simple explanation is the number of people who live here, 9 million in Sweden, 5,5 in Denmark, 5,3 in Finland and 4,7 in Norway. So compare this to the UK for example....62 million. Now translate this into number of media and you end up with 3-4 main national or regional newspapers, 3-4 additional business focused dailies, weeklies or monthlies and for IT and tech another 3-5....per market. Most international PR people knows that it can be hard to get any coverage in the major national or regional dailies business sections, but it's as hard to get coverage in the main IT titles because the wast area they have to cover. There are no specialist IT media in these markets, they are mainly split up in a couple of titles for consumer IT and a couple for B2B and then each of these magazines cover the entire range of IT, Internet and technology solutions.
At the same time a lot of international companies have the Nordic markets on their target list, this is a very technologically affluent region, people are well off so have money to spend. However interestingly enough even if you have, which many have not, a big budget to spend, you may not get as much coverage as you were hoping for. So is there any point doing PR here at all then? Of course there is! Our recommendation is to aim for quality not quantity. Think stories with news value and local angles rather than distributing product press releases and the journalists will be happy and you will get coverage that is worth a lot.