On June 11, 2026, tio.ch published an article asking a question every Swiss household has googled at some point: what does a legally employed cleaner actually cost? The headline: “Collaboratrice domestica ‘legale’. Quanto costa davvero?”

The piece cited our client Clino.ch twice as its data source. Once for the profile of who actually does this work in Switzerland, and once for the argument about what undeclared work does to a worker’s pension.

There was no press release. No media database blast. No paid placement and no follow-up chase. The entire campaign was one two-sentence LinkedIn message and one email with raw data. Total elapsed time from first contact to published article: ten days.

This post breaks down exactly how it happened, why it worked, and how to run the same play for your own brand. Nothing here requires an agency, which is precisely why I’m comfortable publishing it. Most teams simply won’t do the unglamorous parts.

The Client: Clino, a Swiss SaaS in a Trust-Heavy Niche

Clino automates the paperwork that comes with employing someone in your own home in Switzerland: cleaners, nannies, caregivers. Employment contract, payroll, AHV (social insurance) registration, accident insurance, payslips. Flat CHF 19.90 per month.

The marketing problem is the classic early-stage one. The product is solid and the content is deep, but the domain is young. And in a niche where you’re asking households to trust you with payroll and social insurance, authority isn’t a nice-to-have. It is the product. Established competitors have a decade of media coverage behind them. Clino had none.

The brief: earn the first real media citations in Switzerland, with no budget for paid placements and no appetite for stunts.

The Asset: A 2026 Canton Wage Map

Clino sits on something most small companies don’t realize they have: data that journalists can’t get anywhere else. Aggregating wage benchmarks across all 26 cantons produced a 2026 wage map for domestic cleaners in Switzerland. The headline findings:

• National average: CHF 36.50 per hour for a legally employed cleaner.
• A 28.4% gap inside one small country. Cheapest canton: Jura at CHF 31.31. Most expensive: Nidwalden at CHF 40.21.
• A 16.5% language-region gap. German-speaking cantons average CHF 37.72, French- and Italian-speaking cantons CHF 32.63. In Switzerland this divide is so familiar it has a name, the Röstigraben.
• The legality math. Employing the same person legally instead of undeclared costs roughly 22.6% more, about CHF 1,100 per year for a typical three-hours-a-week arrangement.

Notice what makes this pitchable. Every newsroom in the country has a built-in regional angle: here is YOUR canton’s number. And the bottom line is counterintuitive: going legal costs far less than most households assume. The tio.ch piece later worked it out at about CHF 91 per month and compared it to the price of a Netflix and Spotify subscription. That framing was the journalist’s own, and it’s better than anything we would have scripted.

The Pitch: Two Sentences, in the Journalist’s Language

We didn’t build a media list. We looked for journalists who had already written about domestic work, and found one at tio.ch with a recent piece about domestic workers in Ticino.

The first message went out on LinkedIn, in Italian, on June 1. Two sentences. The first referenced their specific article. The second offered the 2026 canton wage map, with the Ticino numbers, in case it was useful for an update. No attachment, no deck, no request for a call.

The reply came the same day: interesting, send it over by email.

On June 5 we emailed three things: the canton map, a short summary focused on Ticino, and the raw data. The journalist thanked us on June 6. The article ran on June 11.

The Result: Cited Twice in Ticino’s Biggest News Portal

tio.ch (Ticinonline) is the biggest news portal in Italian-speaking Switzerland. The article drew on Clino’s data on two fronts: who actually does this work (97% women according to federal statistics, mostly part-time, often for several households at once) and what it really costs, including the pension argument: undeclared work doesn’t make costs disappear, it shifts them into the future, onto the worker’s old age and ultimately the taxpayer.

“Il portale Clino.ch” is named twice in the body of the article as the source.

For a young brand in a trust-driven niche, that is the win. A region’s leading news outlet just told its readers that Clino is the place that knows this market. It seeds brand searches, gives every sales page real social proof (an “as seen in” strip went live on clino.ch the same day), and starts the relationship flywheel: that journalist now knows there’s a data desk that answers fast and delivers clean numbers.

Why This Worked: Five Lessons

1. Match the journalist’s language. The message was written in Italian for an Italian-language newsroom. In multilingual markets nearly every brand pitches the dominant language and ignores the rest. Italian-speaking Switzerland is structurally underpitched, which means a relevant offer stands out immediately.

2. Lead with THEIR region’s numbers. The offer wasn’t “our national study”. It was “the Ticino numbers, in case they’re useful for an update”. A journalist doesn’t care about your data. They care about their readers’ version of your data.

3. Two sentences beat a press release. The first message proved we’d read their work and made one specific offer. That’s all. It reads like a tip from a knowledgeable reader, not like marketing, because at that moment it isn’t marketing. It’s help.

4. Deliver raw data, fast. When a journalist says yes, the clock starts. Send the actual numbers, not a designed PDF with your logo on every slide. Let them find their own angle. The Netflix comparison came from the newsroom, and it carried the story.

5. Selection over volume. One pitch, one placement. Not because the copy was magic, but because the recipient had already proven they cover this exact beat. Ten minutes of reading their recent work is worth more than a thousand-contact media database.

How to Run the Same Play for Your Brand

Step 1: Build one citable asset from data you already have. Internal records, aggregated and anonymized, or public data cross-referenced in a new way. Add a short methodology note so a journalist can defend it. This should take days, not months.

Step 2: Find the journalists already on the beat. Search the news for your topic and list the 5 to 10 reporters who covered it in the last 12 months, per language region if your market has them. A Google News search beats any paid database here.

Step 3: Send two sentences. Reference one specific piece they wrote, then offer your data localized to their patch. Their language, always. No attachments, no asks.

Step 4: When invited, deliver within 48 hours. Raw data plus a short regional summary. Speed is the whole game once a journalist shows interest.

Step 5: Say thank you and ask for nothing. Log the interaction, keep the data fresh, and come back in a month with the next angle. Authority compounds; one citation becomes a press page, a press page becomes a reason for the next journalist to trust you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Salva Jovells is the founder of Presslei, a reactive PR agency that has analyzed 5,272+ real media placements to identify what earns coverage and what doesn’t. Before launching Presslei, he managed digital PR and SEO strategy across 12 international markets, learning that the brands willing to move fastest on breaking stories consistently outperform those with bigger budgets but slower processes. Presslei’s PR Power Pack delivers 8-14 top-tier placements in 30-45 days. Learn more about how we work.

About the Author

Salvador Jovells

Founder of Presslei. 12+ years in ecommerce SEO across international markets. After a decade of link buying for Hockerty and Sumissura, I reverse-engineered 5,272 earned media placements and founded a reactive PR agency that builds authority through data-driven stories journalists actually want to publish. Based in Zurich.