Roxhill Media sells the homework behind a better pitch

Father’s Day arrives on the calendar with reassuring predictability. Getting a journalist to care about another gift suggestion is less dependable. Hotel Chocolat’s two-person in-house PR team had the products and the seasonal opportunities. What it lacked was spare time for the research, personalised emails and coverage tracking that turned each campaign into an administrative obstacle course.

Working with Roxhill, the team looked for journalists who had previously written Father’s Day gift guides. It used the platform’s Pinpoint keyword tracker to help judge when to approach them, prepared personalised outreach and scheduled messages ahead of the campaign. In Roxhill’s October 2025 account of the work, coverage rose from 17 pieces in 2024 to 59 in 2025: an increase of 247 percent.

That is a customer result reported by the supplier, rather than an experiment isolating the software’s contribution. Still, the sequence is instructive. Research the right people. Study their timing. Make the approach relevant. Track what lands. Roxhill has built a business around making those unglamorous jobs easier to perform together.

The London-based company sells media intelligence to communications professionals: a journalist database, media monitoring, spokespeople analytics and analysis prepared by people. Its company page reports more than 11,000 active users across over 1,850 teams. The attraction is practical. A press officer can move from finding a contact to explaining campaign performance without assembling the whole process from separate tools.

02The man who came back to the contact book

Founder and chief executive Alex Northcott had already worked on this problem. A former financial PR professional at JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, he created the journalist database Gorkana before returning with Roxhill. Companies House records Roxhill Media Limited’s incorporation on October 31, 2013; the company describes 2015 as the start of the business led by Northcott.

The distinction matters less than the accumulated experience. Financial communications involves specialist reporters, fast-moving subjects and people whose responsibilities change. Knowing that someone works at a newspaper tells a press officer remarkably little about whether that person will welcome a particular story. Roxhill’s emphasis on topics and journalists’ published work tackles that gap.

Today, the leadership also includes people with experience on the other side of the exchange. Head of brand Alessia Horwich previously worked as a commissioning editor on The Sunday Times travel section. Head of client service Debbie Potts came from a long career in communications consultancies. That mix gives the company a concrete claim to expertise: staff who have bought, used or supplied the information its software organises.

03A beat is more useful than an address

Roxhill’s database lets users search by topic, keyword or sector, examine journalist profiles and assemble media lists. The profiles bring together contact information, biographies, recent work, social feeds and pitching preferences. Alerts cover journalist moves and media requests. Its PR opportunities directory helps users identify recurring editorial slots rather than relying entirely on a breaking-news peg.

Consider a regional store opening. The useful question is who covers that locality and has a reason to write about the business. Animo PR, a Yorkshire communications agency, describes using Roxhill’s map tool to narrow its search geographically. In a March 2026 customer story, the agency also explains how journalist-move alerts reduced the chore of checking mastheads and social profiles.

Animo’s account supplies a plausible buying decision rather than a magical conversion story. The agency trialled databases looking for accuracy, reliability and ease of use. Consolidated profiles, a usable interface and a guided introduction helped Roxhill win its choice. Its previous process had become expensive in staff attention: information existed, but people had to keep finding and cross-checking it.

Hotel Chocolat’s experience adds a different failure point. Its previous monitoring provider had missed broadcast mentions, according to the Roxhill case study. The team wanted personal outreach without the burden of managing every message separately. Scheduling and personalisation addressed that tension. The buyer was paying to remove repetitive work while retaining editorial judgment.

“We could get started straight away and didn’t feel lost in the platform.”Animo PR, in Roxhill’s customer account

04The second customer is the person reading the report

Once a story appears, another audience takes over: the manager asking what the communications budget accomplished. Roxhill’s monitoring product gathers mentions, sorts coverage into Smart Folders and produces reports and newsletters. It offers sentiment analysis and assigns coverage salience ratings of A, AA or AAA to help users look beyond the number of mentions.

The distinction between counting and interpreting is commercially important. A passing reference and a substantial article may each count as one clip, yet do different jobs for a brand. Roxhill lets teams use custom metrics and organise reporting around their priorities. The resulting dashboard is useful only if those priorities were sensible to begin with; a beautifully presented count remains a count.

Spokespeople analytics makes this more specific. Designed for fields including banking, asset management, law and higher education, it tracks individual experts, departments and specialisms. Teams can compare their spokespeople’s visibility with a chosen competitive group, inspect themes attracting coverage and find journalists writing about relevant subjects. For a university press office or a law firm, the individual expert can be the story.

Bespoke Insights adds human analysis to the software. Roxhill offers curated briefings, reputation analysis, competitor reviews and reports intended for senior leadership. This is also a service business: analysts interpret material and prepare recommendations around a client’s needs. Buyers can therefore pay for research capacity as well as access to a platform.

05What the subscription actually buys

Roxhill’s current pricing page organises an integrated database-and-monitoring subscription into Core, Boutique, Enterprise and Premium bands, charged through a total annual fee. Database access starts with one login in Core, moves to three in Boutique and five in Enterprise, with a custom allocation for Premium. Distribution appears in the database offering from Boutique upward.

The monitoring bands also vary by workspaces, Smart Folders, newsletters and spokespeople. Historical search appears from Boutique; Enterprise includes the spokespeople platform and dedicated support. Premium adds insights analysis and reports. Extra logins and selected services can be purchased separately. The buying question is therefore partly organisational: how many people, brands and reporting routines need a home?

There is a public price reference with a specific scope. Roxhill’s G-Cloud 14 listing on the UK Digital Marketplace advertises its media database service at £6,450 to £25,000 per instance per year. That procurement listing is not a universal quotation for the present integrated suite. A team should obtain a written price for its actual configuration rather than treating the bottom of that range as an all-inclusive promise.

For a small team, the sensible comparison is the annual bill against research and reporting time saved, plus the value of better-targeted opportunities. A freelancer pitching occasionally may use too little of the system to justify it. An agency supporting several clients has more repeated work to spread the cost over. Neither arithmetic guarantees coverage; the journalist still decides.

06Software with a room full of journalists attached

Roxhill’s customer range stretches from agencies such as Animo PR and Raptor PR to corporate teams. It publicly names organisations including Goldman Sachs, eBay and Barclays, while Hotel Chocolat demonstrates the consumer-brand use case. These buyers share a task rather than an industry: they need to understand the press, make relevant approaches and report their results.

The business also runs journalist Q&As, webinars, networking events and speed-pitching sessions. Its On the Rox podcast gets specific about editorial needs. August 2026 episodes included This is Money business news editor Angharad Carrick on pitching quotes and The Independent’s Jacob Stolworthy on culture interview slots. This is product education delivered through the people who receive the pitches.

That makes the events programme more than an agreeable calendar extra. Journalists can explain preferences that a directory field cannot fully capture, and users can take those lessons back to their next campaign. Roxhill’s stated values emphasise accuracy, transparency and human connections. Its careers page turns the people theme into concrete benefits, including enhanced family leave, private medical cover and birthday leave.

The competitive set includes Cision, Meltwater, Muck Rack and Prowly. Databases and monitoring alone do not separate Roxhill from that market. Its case rests on the combination of topic-led research, access to journalist expertise, support and reporting within a connected workflow. A buyer should test that combination against the actual outlets and territories it needs, rather than deciding from a headline database count.

07Copy the sequence, keep the judgment

The most transferable lesson in the Hotel Chocolat story is to work backwards from previous coverage. Find the people who already write the relevant kind of article, examine when that work appears and prepare an approach that fits. Keep the personal detail in the pitch. Use software to handle the surrounding repetition. Those habits are available even to teams that never buy Roxhill.

Choose measures before the campaign begins, too. In its account of Battenhall’s work for an NHS maternal mental health text service, Roxhill describes the agency identifying BBC London journalist Tolu Adeoye through her relevant previous reporting. The lesson is suitability: a sensitive subject called for someone with experience covering it. The placement needed to reach people who could use the service.

The limits follow directly from that process. An accurate address cannot rescue an irrelevant proposal. Monitoring metrics cannot by themselves establish sales or changes in public opinion. A spokespeople comparison becomes misleading if the chosen peers or topics are wrong. And a seasonal strategy needs room to change when the news agenda moves.

Roxhill’s proposition is strongest where media relations is sustained work: repeated research, repeated outreach and repeated scrutiny of the results. Its software gives that work a structure, and its people help users understand the press they are approaching. The final act remains wonderfully resistant to automation: give a journalist something worth knowing.