‘Should I issue a press release?’ A modern look at the age-old question
by Mike Atkinson
As a professional communicator, one recurring question I hear more than any is, “Is this worth a press release announcement?”
Much like other aspects of communications, the role of press releases in spreading news to the media has changed over the years. While there’s still value in utilizing wire services for announcements, their purpose and results have evolved in the modern digital age.
To answer if your news warrants a release, you must first understand what you’re getting by issuing one.
Putting an announcement on the wire is a great way to validate an organization’s announcement and provide authenticity to the new. In fact, public companies are required to use a news wire for trading and earnings information.
Additionally, and perhaps the greatest value of issuing a release on the wire, is the boost to Search Engine Optimization (the process of improving traffic to a website through targeted keywords), which will put the release at the top of search engine results due to repeated syndication of the words in your release text and the reach provided by a wire service. For example, if your release mentions “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning,” multiple times, search engines will connect those words to your company, raising your company in results when individuals search for those terms in popular search engines. The more times your release is shared, the more times those words are picked up, therefore the higher it gets ranked in search engine results.
With an understanding of how a release can work for you, the next step is to familiarize yourself with the various options that exist for issuing an announcement.
A Look at Wire Services
Large-scale platforms carry the highest fees, but send the announcement for a fee via their wire service to reporters and editors at publications located in a selected distribution area and have the widest reach. These types of services, like Business Wire and PR Newswire, have well-established networks of media syndicates, which leads to a greater SEO benefit from more syndication.
There are several mid-tier platforms as well, that are less expensive, up-and-coming wire platforms that provide alternatives to the larger platforms. While they may not have the reach of a Business Wire or PR Newswire, they still offer some validation and SEO benefit.
If you don’t want to invest in using a paid wire service, there are free wire services available, such as PR Log. However, these provide a far more limited reach and SEO value.
So, Should You Issue a Release?
It’s important to consider the ROI of issuing an announcement. As mentioned previously, some wire services charge a steep fee for issuing an announcement. For longer releases, it can cost upwards of $1,000. Nobody wants to waste money, and there are times when posting the news to the company website or blog is just as well-received.
The first step in deciding whether to issue a release is to consider the appeal of the announcement you’re issuing. Is this something the general public (at least regionally) will care about? If yes, the announcement warrants going on the wire.
Examples of news announcements that may warrant a press release include:
Upcoming regionally and nationally focused events
Announcing a new customer or contract win
The acquisition of another company
Large-scale, unique research discoveries or report findings
The hiring of a new CEO or president at the company
A response or statement regarding a company crisis
A common announcement I’m asked about is general “new hire” or “executive appointment” news. This is an excellent example of an announcement that may not warrant a national news release, unless the new hire is at the CEO or president level. These types of announcements rarely drive significant media coverage, except for a few select outlets, and the demographic that already knows and cares about your business will benefit from it the most.
If the news won’t be seen as significant in your target geographical region, it may be worth exploring options outside of a wire service. National wire services target locally based syndicate media outlets across the country, so unless your news is geographically relevant to any city, state or region, it will likely not be picked up by most of those outlets. While the release may run on those sites, it often gets limited visibility and clickthrough.
Examples of news announcements that may not warrant a press release:
The opening of a new local office building (not company HQ)
The hiring of a new team member (non-executive level)
Announcing participation in a sponsored opportunity or activity (unless there’s a charitable component)
In these instances, issuing a blog post and manually pitching a select group of publications may make more of an impact with your news than issuing nationally on a wire service, simply because of the relevance to each publication.
Should you decide to move forward, the next step is identifying the best distribution circuit for your news release.
Choosing the Right Distribution Circuit
The first step in selecting the right circuit is ensuring you have a clear understanding of the purpose of your announcement.
What’s the end goal for issuing the release? Are you trying to get visibility and more general eyes on the news, or are you hoping for targeted higher-tier media coverage? Do you want to increase your website traffic, or are you trying to boost sales of a new solution?
Achieving each of these goals may require a different approach.
For example, if your goal is general awareness, SEO and visibility, issuing the release over a national distribution wire circuit may lead to the most overall impressions, give your company the largest SEO boost in search engines and ultimately lead more users to your website. However, only a percentage of that overall audience may be directly relevant to your business.
Conversely, if you’re hoping to influence decision-makers into making a business decision or trying to target them with a new solution, it might make sense to hyper-target a specific demographic or region with your announcement. Suppose you’re promoting a solution that can showcase your ability to pursue a state-level government contract. In that case, there’s often no need to target areas outside of the state at play.
It’s Been Issued—Now What?
Once you’ve decided to announce the wire, there are still steps to take that can ensure you made the right choice.
Monitoring and reporting are valuable tools – most wire services will share insight into how the release performed after it’s live. These reports often include information regarding potential impressions, link clicks, publications that ran the release and more. Attention to these insights can help you adjust your strategy for future releases.
Additionally, with any news release, it’s recommended to supplement wire outreach with personal, targeted media relations. The release should serve as an asset for your communications team to generate press coverage. Once an announcement is scheduled, consider sending embargoed pitches to reporters to give them early access and a heads-up that the announcement will be issued. This allows them to pre-load their story and get a jump on the news once it’s live. Follow up with those reporters once the announcement is live and pitch the news more broadly to increase day-of coverage.
Press releases can be valuable for raising awareness of your company’s news and have real SEO value, especially if issued broadly. That said, it’s important to decipher whether a release is worth the cost. Just because you can issue a release on a wire service doesn’t always mean you should.
This article originally appeared on Agility PR Solutions’ Bulldog Reporter.