Why Press Releases Are An Important Part Of Your Marketing Strategy

A true press release is a tool for a journalist to frame new information valuable to an audience. It must be timely, relevant to the audience, and impactful. Details must be delivered in a factual, neutral tone and include supportive quotes from key people within your organization. What a press release cannot do is advertise or offer empty hype.

Prepare a solid press release by putting yourself in the shoes of the journalists, all of whom have too little time to absorb and reframe too much information.

• Start by alerting them to your schedule using the phrases “Embargoed Until” (if you don’t want your press release posted immediately; use sparingly, if at all) or “For Immediate Release.”
• Write a short, factually accurate, compelling headline. 
• Keep your release short and avoid industry jargon. 
• Include verifiable facts and figures. 
• Provide meaningful quotes from executives with their complete names and titles. 
• Give the journalists the Who-What-When-Where-Why and How answers they need. 
• Use a pyramid news format, leading with vital information followed by short paragraphs providing increasingly detailed background. 
• End with clear, detailed contact information, including dates, hours, email addresses, and telephone numbers. 

A press release is part of an overall strategy to spark curiosity and drive awareness. It points to a specific, actual event or product. It should never appear to be thrown together ahead of an unexpected bit of corporate or organizational news. It should always lead to other marketing tools like a media advisory, branding opportunity, sales drive, or advertising campaign. 

To measure your return on investment (ROI) of a press release campaign, embed clickable links in the release. These links can go to your sales page, an outside tracking firm, or social media pages. Using a news distribution service can provide you statistics on where —and how many times— your press release is mentioned, published, or viewed.

To learn more about press releases, listen to the Dear Anna, A Marketing Podcast. You can also read the transcript below or connect with us to learn more about how we can help.

Dear Anna, A Marketing Podcast

Listen to the latest episode of Dear Anna, A Marketing Podcast to learn directly from Anna Anderson about why press releases are important and more. You can also read the transcript of the episode below. To get all of the new podcasts, follow Dear Anna, A Marketing Podcast on Spotify.

Transcript of Anna’s Core Values Interview with Dan Hawkes

Hi, I’m Anna Anderson, the host and CEO of Art Unlimited, a traditional and digital marketing agency. On today’s episode of Dear Anna The Marketing Broadcast, we’re going to be talking about the impact and expected ROI of press releases.

So one common question we receive from our customers and beyond is, “What constitutes a true press release? How do we make sure that what we’re going to publish on other platforms will actually get picked up?” So here are some of the big things we look at when saying, “Yes, this does constitute as a press release.”

Item number one, are you launching a new product? Or are you launching a new service? Definitely. Those two components are well worth a press release.

Next, are you celebrating an anniversary within your business? You need to celebrate that. You need to make sure the news gets out and what better way to do it than with a press release?

Have you announced a new initiative or strategy within your company? That would be idea number three.

The fourth item that definitely constitutes as press release worthy is has somebody within your company received a new skill certification? Graduated from a certain organization? Or have they reached a milestone in their career that is noteworthy; a certain period of time they have been with your company or they have achieved a status within not only your company, but possibly also within an organization they’re active within.

Those are some great tips that to us definitely warrant running a press release. So again, let’s run through those quickly.

• Are you launching a new product or service? 
• Are you celebrating an anniversary? 
• Have you announced a new strategy or initiative within your business?
• Has somebody in your company learned a new skill or graduated? Have they reached a new milestone?

There are five great ideas that truly will have traction when you run a press release.

So next, how do you make sure your press release is going to have the ability to truly be picked up by some of the larger publications that share news? When doing this, we always run through these questions.

1. Why is this press release important not just to you, but also why is it important to your audience? I think that’s most important! There’s so many things that are important to me as a business owner and you as a business owner; but why is it important to the audience?
2. What are some of the resources that need to be pulled in order to make this press release valuable to the individuals who are reading it?
3. Who are we focusing on?
4. Where will the press release be targeted? If it’s a geographic targeting, what content is needed?
5. Why are we doing it? And again, this rolls into what constitute of a good press release. The why and when.
6. When will this press release need to be not only created, but also released?
7. Is it an immediate press release or is it a press release such as an anniversary? You know it is coming so you can capture a lot of great quotes and additional resources. You can plan for it.

So the when and then who needs to be contacted from the press sources in order to make sure that if there’s any questions, they can get somebody quickly. 

So those are all the W’s again. What are they at a high level? Who, where, what, why and when and who to contact.

I hope this episode has been helpful for you.

Again, why do a press release? Because it gets your brand out there in front of your target consumers. It gives you quality backlinks. You’re going to see long term value from this type of strategy, and I can guarantee you’re going to hear some buzz about it.

If you have more questions about a press release and how to make sure it’s of high quality, feel free to ask questions through the Dear Anna podcast website again. Go to Dear Anna podcast dot com to submit those requests. I’m happy to answer more questions!

Thanks so much, everybody.