Press Releases: The Gift That Keeps Giving

Using the Press Release to Your Advantage

So you have just finished writing a very exciting press release about something important happening in your company, how can you best use that press release to your advantage? To exhausted reporters, press releases are a dime a dozen and can often be overlooked. While sending your press release to news desks, as always, is important, we have a few ways that you can use that press release to optimize its potential at getting you new clients and getting your company’s name “out there.”

Social Media

The Internet is now one of the most powerful tools for businesses’ of all sizes. Social Media is a powerful resource for you because it is economical and could potentially reach thousands of people. Facebook, Twitter, and blogs are examples of current common social media outlets you should be utilizing when posting information from your press release. All of which are FREE!! Don’t know what to write if you were to start a blog? That press release you just wrote of course! While professional social media posts should be free of profanity and the like, they are a quite informal, so feel at liberty to go do things a bit out-of-the-ordinary.

Keeping a blog up can be a somewhat challenging if you aren’t used to doing it every day/week/month. (We are in the PR business and it’s hard for us!) Sometimes you may not feel like you have much to report, so you can take the press release, for example, and break it down into segments to submit each week (or whatever interval you choose). Another great idea is to find five solid pieces of information you can expound on and submit one each week.

SEO Bait

Once you have gone through all of the trouble to set up your social media accounts and to carefully write your posts, it would be a crying shame if no one read it, now wouldn’t it? When writing your blog or posts, incorporate keywords regarding your business and the nature of the announcement to optimize search engine optimization (the order in which links show up in a Google search for example).

Make Friends

By finding other blogs and websites that cover some of the same ground your blog does and linking to them, you can strike up a relationship and they can help you by linking back to your website.

A Feature Story To Call Your Own

That’s right, you can write your own feature story and submit it to news agencies, along with your press release. If you don’t have the writing abilities to do it yourself, hire a writer or maybe you have a college student in your family that you could pay a few bucks to help you out (most college students in their late Sophomore year and on should have completed intro-college level English writing classes and then some). Take the information from your press release and craft an eye-catching story fit for newspapers and magazines, then submit them to the publishers yourself.

Start distributing your story to your local newspapers and expand out from there to include trade magazines that deal with the same topics your business does. Beware of submitting the same story to competing publications, though!

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