Up until a few years ago, companies wrote press releases for two reasons:
1) To inform the media of a MAJOR NEWSWORTHY EVENT
2) To comply with SEC disclosure regulations and avoid accusations of insider trading
From a sales and marketing perspective, I am more interested in the first reason. Companies published press releases only when the event was likely to be picked up by journalist who would in turn create a media story for the masses. In other words, the success of the press release and the amount of people who were informed of the story was completely up to a middleman. In the age of Web 2.0 and advanced email marketing, you can eliminate the middleman. In the form of a press release, you finally have the freedom to target your real audience directly – your future and existing customers.
Some tips for making the most out of Press Releases:
1) Write as many releases as possible. Whenever you company releases a new product, hires a new executive, opens a new office, or even completes a successful sale, write about it.
2) Email press releases to your contacts, but don’t bombard them with irrelevant information. Think quality not quantity. Send people the information that you feel they will actually be interested in reading. Opening a new office in Atlanta is newsworthy to your contacts in that region, but is irrelevant to customers in Seattle. Sending everyone everything is not the answer and will only result in people deleting your press releases. Prove to your contacts that the news you send them is relevant to their interests and worth their time. Run reports in your CRM in order to target the right audience for specific press releases.
3) Manage your Press Releases in the form of an RSS feed and include this on your website. With newswire services such as PRWEB, you can add each new story to your RSS and it will automatically update your site. This tactic shows people new things are constantly happening at your company and also helps with your search engine optimization by demonstrating to search engines that your website is linked to other sites.
4) For each press release, determine your target audience and plan accordingly. Seems obvious, I know, but it is something that really must be stressed. Take your time planning which options to select in the newswire service you are using for publication. Pick your industry targets carefully. If you allow yourself a realistic budget, you can afford a higher frequency of press releases. The release of a minor software patch does not merit the same Press Release enhancements as the release of a brand new enterprise application. Don’t spend a lot of money on distributing this sort of minor story to a million news outlets because Journalists won’t care about your software patch. Save your money for the big stories.
One last thing to keep in mind – although you should reexamine how you view press releases in the world of web 2.0, don’t forget about their traditional uses. Having your story picked up by a journalist in a reputable news outlet will always be invaluable.
