No matter what industry you’re in, and no matter how small or big your company is, you can benefit from a well written and professionally distributed press release.
A press release is a newsworthy item about yourself and your company.
If you are a launching a new product, expanding your offices, or bringing another esteemed executive into your corporation, this an effective method of letting the media know about it.
Goldman McCormick Public Relations also highly recommends that companies and individuals utilize the power of a news release to bring their work with nonprofits and other worthy charities to the public’s attention.
We also recommend that your press release shouldn’t be longer than one page and should be just long enough to cover the six basic elements: who, what, when, where, why and how. The answers to these six questions should be mentioned in order of their importance to the story.
A press release should not be used to hype your company or express personal opinions. A release is merely presenting the information, and showing why it’s relevant to that publication, in hopes that they’ll write about it.
A press release can boost your company’s visibility. This is especially important for small businesses and individuals; however, even the most established companies regularly use them.
Press releases can establish you as an industry expert. With today’s online press releases, the media is no longer the only audience for which you’re writing. 80 million people get their news online every day. Many of these people are your clients and customers.
Goldman McCormick Public Relations can write a comprehensive press release about you, your book, or your company and distribute it to thousands of journalists & BNB Publications.
Three Things That Make Your Press Release Stand Out
Good, clean writing with a simplistic message.
Writing with clarity and for readability tops the list. There’s a lot of advice online about writing for press releases, such as how formal or informal the document should read; but time and time again, the releases that perform well are those that are written so that the reader can easily understand them.
Headlines and subheads matter.
Headlines for press releases, just like the headline of a blog post or the subject line of an email, should draw a reader in and invite them to read more. A common question is, “Should we write headlines for search engines or people?” The answer: people. People are the intended audiences; search engines are just one means to help them find your content. If it makes sense in context, sure add your keywords to the headline, but don’t write a headline just to fit in your keywords.
Hyperlinks.
A well optimized release will hyperlink keywords.
Should You Opt for a Video Press Release?
Video holds advantages over text press releases, AdWeek reports. Eighty percent of viewers will watch an entire video release, while just 20 percent read an entire text release. In addition, video releases have an average half-life of about 40 days, compared to nine days for text releases.
Three ways to optimize you can optimize your video release
Make multimedia easy to reshare.
Embed images in releases to be displayed on popular websites, such as Yahoo!, with links to full-size files for easy reposting.
Get creative with video.
Bring your news to life by embedding video directly within the releases. Videos should be short, compelling and share-worthy.
Embed content with crossover appeal.
When creating multimedia content, think about content that will serve multiple purposes in different forums. If your most loyal online advocates are entrenched in YouTube, then it certainly makes sense to include video in news releases that can be repurposed on your YouTube channel as well.