Guess what? Press releases have never been exclusively for the press. My first job in the mid-1980s was on a Wall Street trading desk. Every day, I would come to work and watch the Dow Jones Telerate and Reuters screens as they displayed specialized financial data, economic information, and stock prices. The screens also displayed news feeds, and within these news feeds were press releases. For decades, financial market professionals have had access to company press releases distributed through Business Wire, PR Newswire, and other electronic press release distribution services. And they weren’t just for publicly traded corporations; any company’s release would appear in trading rooms within seconds.

I distinctly remember traders intently watching the newswires for any signs of market-moving events. Often the headline of a press release would cause frenzy: “Did you see? IBM is acquiring a software company!” “It’s on the wire; Boeing just got a 20-plane order from Singapore Airlines!” For years, markets often moved and stock prices rose and fell based on the press release content issued directly by companies, not on the news stories written minutes or hours later by reporters from newswire outlets like Reuters and Dow Jones (and later Bloomberg).

Press releases have also been available to professionals working within corporations, government agencies, and law firms, all of which have had access to raw press releases through services like those from NewsEdge, Dow Jones, and LexisNexis. These services have been delivering press releases to all kinds of professionals for competitive intelligence, research, discovery, and other purposes for many decades.

And since about 1995, the wide availability of the web has meant that press releases have been available for free to anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser.

As I tell this story to PR pros, I hear cries of “Hang on! We disagree! The role of public relations and the purpose of the press release as a tool are about communicating with the media.” For an example of this thinking, look to Steve Rubel, one of the most influential PR bloggers in the world. He responded to my ideas about press releases by writing a post on his blog, titled “Direct to Consumer Press Releases Suck.”

Let’s take a look at the objections of traditional PR folks. According to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA),¹ “Public relations is the professional discipline that ethically fosters mutually beneficial relationships among social entities.” In 1988, the governing body of the PRSA—its Assembly—formally adopted a definition of public relations that has become the most accepted and widely used: “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” Nowhere does this description mention the media. PR is about reaching your audience!

I think many PR professionals have a fear of the unknown. They don’t understand how to communicate directly with consumers and want to live in the past, when there was no choice but to use the media as a mouthpiece. I also think there’s a widely held view about the purity of the press release as a tool for the press. PR professionals don’t want to know that hundreds of millions of people have the power to read their releases directly. It’s easier to imagine a closed audience of a dozen reporters. But this argument is based on fear, not the facts; there is no good reason why organizations shouldn’t communicate directly with their audiences, without a media filter, via releases.

Obviously, the first word of the term press release throws off some people, particularly PR professionals. On my blog and on other sites, a semantic debate played out. The consensus of the dozens of professional communicators who weighed in was to call releases aimed at consumers news releases. This sounds good to me, so from this point on, I’ll refer to direct-to-consumer releases as news releases.

News Releases in a Web World

The media have been disintermediated. The web has changed the rules. Buyers read your news releases directly, and you need to be speaking their language. Today, savvy marketing and PR professionals use news releases to reach buyers directly. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, this is not to suggest that media relations are no longer important; mainstream media and the trade press must be part of an overall communications strategy. In some markets, mainstream media and the trade press remain critically important, and of course the media still derive some content from news releases. But your primary audience is no longer just a handful of journalists. Your audience is millions of people with Internet connections and access to search engines and RSS readers.

The New Rules of News Releases

Here, then, are the rules of this new direct-to-consumer medium.

• Don’t send news releases just when big news is happening; find good reasons to send them all the time.
• Instead of targeting a handful of journalists, create news releases that appeal directly to your buyers.
• Write releases that are replete with the keyword-rich language used by your buyers.
• Include offers that compel consumers to respond to your release in some way.
• Place links in releases to deliver potential customers to landing pages on your website.
• Link to related content on your site such as videos, blog posts, or e-books.
• Optimize news release delivery for searching and browsing.
• Point people to your news releases from your social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• Drive people into the sales process with news releases.

You need to fundamentally change the way you use news releases. If you follow these specific strategies for leveraging this once-lowly medium by turning it into one of the most important direct marketing tools at your disposal, you will drive buyers straight to your company’s products and services at precisely the time that they are ready to buy.

In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll use these rules to develop a news release strategy.

If They Find You, They Will Come

Several years ago, I was preparing a keynote speech called “Shorten Your Sales Cycle: Marketing Programs That Deliver More Revenue Faster” for the Software Marketing Perspectives Conference & Expo. To be honest, I was kind of procrastinating. Facing a blank PowerPoint file, I decided to hit Google in search of inspiration.

I entered the phrase “accelerate sales cycle” to see if there was anything interesting I could use in my presentation. The highest-ranked listings for this phrase were from WebEx, a company that provides online collaboration services. What was most interesting to me was that the links pointed to news releases on the WebEx site. That’s right; at the top of the Google search results was a news release about a new WebEx product, and right there in the first sentence of the news release was the phrase I was looking for: “accelerate sales cycle.”

WebEx Launches WebEx Sales Center: Leader Expands Suite of Real-Time Collaborative Applications

Enhance Team Selling Process, Engage Prospects throughout Sales Cycle, and Enable Managers to Monitor and Measure Web Sales Operations

SAN JOSE, Calif.—WebEx Communications, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand collaborative applications, today launched WebEx Sales Center, a new service that helps companies accelerate sales cycles, increase win rates, and close more deals by leveraging online sales calls. . . .

Then I went over to Google News² and checked out the same phrase. Sure enough, WebEx also had the number-one listing on Google’s news search with a very recent news release: “Application Integration Industry Leader Optimizes Marketing and Sales Processes with WebEx Application Suite.” The news release, about a WebEx customer, had been sent through PR Newswire³ and had a direct web link to the WebEx site to provide additional information. WebEx also provided links in some news releases directly to free trial offers of its services. How cool is that?

“That is exactly our strategy,” says Colin Smith, director of public relations for WebEx. “Google and news keywords have really transformed the news release as a distribution vehicle. Our thinking is that, especially for companies that have an end-user appeal, news releases are a great channel.”

It’s certainly no accident that I found WebEx; I was searching on a phrase that Smith had optimized for search. His research had shown that buyers of the communications services that WebEx provides search on the phrase “accelerate sales cycle” (and also many others). So when I searched on that phrase, WebEx was at the top of the listings.

As a result, WebEx provided me with an excellent (and real) example of a company that had optimized the content of news releases to include relevant terms such as the one I was looking for. And WebEx has greatly benefited from its efforts. In addition to the consumers it already reaches online, the company added to its audience by getting the information to someone who tells other people about it (me!). I’ve used this example in speeches before well over 10,000 marketing and web content professionals and executive audiences, and it was also downloaded more than a million times as part of my New Rules of PR e-book. And now you’re reading it here, too.

“People are saying that press releases are dead,” Smith says. “But that’s not true for direct-to-consumer news releases.” As Smith has developed his news release strategy to reach buyers directly, he has had to refine his writing and PR skills for this evolving, but very much alive, medium. “I learned the very structured AP Style Guide way to write releases,” he says. “But that’s changed as keywords and phrases have suddenly become important and the scale and reach of the Internet have opened up end users as a channel.”

Smith doesn’t let keywords dominate how he writes, but he tries to be very aware of keywords and phrases and to insert key phrases, especially, into releases whenever he can. “We don’t think that a single keyword works, but phrases are great,” he says. “If people are doing a specific search, or one with company names that are in our release, then the goal is that they will find our news release.”

Driving Buyers into the Sales Process

Colin Smith is careful to include product information in the end-user-focused news releases he crafts for WebEx. “We try to think about what’s important to people,” he says. “We put free trial offers in the releases that are about the product.” About 80 percent of the releases that WebEx puts out are product or customer related. “WebEx is a great mix of real end-user stories,” he says. “People get why you need web meetings, so it is easy to tell the story using news releases.”

Because the web meetings story is compelling even for those who don’t know the product category, Smith also looks for ways to create a viral marketing buzz. For example, he pays attention to major events in the news where WebEx online collaboration would be useful. “We donated free service for limited use during the time that Boston traffic was snarled as a result of tunnel closures. We did the same thing for the New York City transit strike.” Smith knows that people are likely to consider WebEx services during this kind of unusual situation. Offering the service for free often creates loyal future users.

Direct-to-consumer news releases are an important component of the marketing mix at WebEx. “We do track metrics, and we can see how many people are going from the release to the free trial,” Smith says. The numbers are significant. But with such success, there’s also a danger. “We don’t want to abuse the news release channel,” Smith says, explaining that the company also has a media relations strategy, of which news releases are a part. “We want the news releases to be interesting for journalists but also to provide consumers with things to do, such as get the free trial.”

WebEx is successful in using news releases to appeal to both the journalists who write (and speak) about WebEx products and services, and also the consumers who are searching for what WebEx has to offer. WebEx and thousands of other organizations like it prove that a direct-to-consumer news release strategy can coexist within an organization that cares about media relations.

Since an earlier edition of this book was released, WebEx was acquired by Cisco Systems, a major networking and communications technology company.

Under the old rules, the only way to get published was to have your news release picked up by the media. We’ve come a long way. The web has turned all kinds of companies, nonprofits, political campaigns, individuals, and even churches and rock bands into just-in-time and just-right publishers. As publishers, these organizations create news releases that deliver useful information directly onto the screens of their buyers—no press involved!

Developing Your News Release Strategy

The most important thing to think about as you begin a news release program is, once again, the need to write for your buyers. You should consider what you learned through the buyer persona research part of your marketing and PR plan (described in Chapter 10) and develop an editorial calendar for news releases based on what buyers need to know. Implementing a news release strategy to reach buyers directly is like publishing an online news service—you are providing your buyers with information they need to find your organization online and then learn more about you.

Part of thinking like a publisher is remembering the critical importance of content. “Everything is content-driven in public relations,” says Brian Hennigan, marketing communications manager for dbaDIRECT, a data infrastructure management company. “I like using news releases to reach the market and my potential customers. With news releases, for a hundred bucks you can talk to the world.” Hennigan supplements his news releases with longer and more detailed white papers to get dbaDIRECT ideas into the market. “I write the news releases like news stories,” he says. “We look at the needs of the market and entrepreneurial trends as interesting, and we write to these trends.”

As you make this fundamental change in how you do news releases, you will probably find yourself wondering, at first, what to write about. The rule of thumb is: Big news is great, but don’t wait. Write about pretty much anything that your organization is doing.

• Have a new take on an old problem? Write a release.
• Serve a unique marketplace? Write a release.
• Have interesting information to share? Write a release.
• CEO speaking at a conference? Write a release.
• Win an award? Write a release.
• Add a product feature? Write a release.
• Win a new customer? Write a release.
• Publish a white paper? Write a release.
• Get out of bed this morning? Okay, maybe not—but now you’re thinking the right way!

Publishing News Releases through a Distribution Service

The best way to publish news releases so they are seen by your buyers is to simultaneously post a release to your own website and send it to one of the news release wires. The benefit of using a news release distribution service is that your release will be sent to the online news services, including Yahoo!, Google, Bing, and many others. Many news release distribution services reach trade and industry websites as well. In fact, you can often reach hundreds of websites with a single news release. The significant benefit of this approach is that your release will be indexed by the news search engines and vertical market sites, and then when somebody does a search for a word or phrase contained in your release, presto, that potential customer finds you. As an added bonus, people who have requested alerts about your industry from sites that index news releases will get an alert that something important—your news release—is available.

There are a number of options for wire distribution of news releases. I’ve included some of the U.S. news release distribution services here. Similar services exist in other countries, such as CanadaNewsWire⁴ serving the Canadian market and News2U in Japan. Take a look at the various services and compare them yourself.

A Selection of the Larger U.S. News Release Distribution Services

• Business Wire: businesswire.com
• GlobeNewswire: globenewswire.com
• PR Newswire: prnewswire.com
• PRWeb: prweb.com

To get your news releases to appear on the online news services, including Google News, you just have to purchase a basic news release coverage area offered by a news release distribution service. Coverage is based on geographical distribution of your release to reporters. Because I am located near Boston, Massachusetts, the cheapest distribution with some services for me is the Boston region. The services also have many value-added options for you to consider, such as national distribution. But what is important to know is that most news release distribution services include distribution to online media such as Google News in any geographical distribution. So as you make your choice, remember that when your purpose for sending news releases is to reach buyers via search engines and vertical sites, maximizing the newsroom and geographical reach offered by a service is less important than ensuring that your releases are included on major online news sites.

Reach Even More Interested Buyers with RSS Feeds

Many news release distribution services also offer RSS feeds of their news releases, which they make available to other sites, blogs, journalists, and individuals. This means that each time you publish a news release with the service, the news release is seen by potentially thousands of people who have subscribed to the RSS content feeds in your market category (as offered by the distribution service).

So if you tag your release as being important for the automotive industry, your news release will be delivered to anyone (or any site) that has subscribed to the news release distribution service’s automotive RSS feed. And online news services such as Google News have RSS feed capability, too, allowing people to receive feeds based on keywords and phrases. Each time your release includes a word or phrase of importance to someone who has saved it as part of his or her alerts, a link to your news releases will appear via email or RSS feed in near real time in the future.

Simultaneously Publish Your News Releases to Your Website

Post your news releases to an appropriate and readily findable section of your website. Many organizations have a media room or press section of their website, which is ideal (see Chapter 19 for details on how to create your online newsroom). You should keep the news release live for as long as the content is appropriate, perhaps for years. This is very important because most of the online news sites do not maintain archives of news for more than a few months. If potential customers look for the content of your news release the week after it is distributed via a service, they will certainly find it on Google News and the others. But they won’t find it if they do the search next year unless the release is on your own site as a permanent link so that it is indexed by Google.

The Importance of Links in Your News Releases

Particularly because your releases may be delivered by feeds or on news services and various sites other than your own, creating links from your news releases to content on your website is very important. These links, which might point to a specific offer or to a landing page with more information, allow your buyers to move from the news release to specific content on your website that will then drive them into the sales process, as we saw in the previous chapter.

However, there is another enormous benefit to including links in news releases. Each time your news release is posted on another site, such as an online news site, the inbound link from the online news site to your website helps to increase the search engine ranking of your site, because the search engines use inbound links as one of the important criteria for their page-ranking algorithms. So when your news release has a link to your site and it is indexed somewhere on the web, you actually increase the ranking of the pages on your site! Said another way, when your news release appears on a website somewhere and there is a link in your news release that points to a URL on your site, the search engines will increase the rankings of the page where the URL is pointing. Sending a news release that includes links increases your own website’s search engine rankings.

The news release distribution services also provide a way to include social media tags to make the news releases easy to find on services like Twitter, Facebook, and others. Use them! Social media tags make your releases much simpler to locate.

Focus on the Keywords and Phrases Your Buyers Use

As I’ve suggested before, one thing successful publishers do that web marketers should emulate is to understand the audience first and then set about satisfying their informational needs. A great way to start thinking like a publisher and to create news releases that drive action is to focus on your customers’ problems and then create and deliver news releases accordingly. Use the words and phrases that your buyers use. Think about how the people you want to reach are searching, and develop news release content that includes those words and phrases. You can get the information you need to do so by thinking back to your buyer personas. Don’t be egotistical and write only about your organization. What are your buyers’ problems? What do they want to know? What words and phrases do they use to describe these problems? I know, I’ve said this already several times—that’s because it is very important.

CruiseCompete,⁵ cited by Kiplinger as one of the 25 best travel sites, helps people secure quotes for cruises from multiple travel agencies, based on the dates and ports specified. CruiseCompete is a great example of a company that uses news releases to reach people based on the phrases that their buyers are searching with. For example, during the lead-up to the holiday season, the company issued a news release via Marketwired with the headline “Cruise Lines Set Sail with Hot Holiday Vacation Prices.” Importantly, part of an early sentence in the release, “some seven-night vacations can be booked for well under $1,000 per person, including Thanksgiving cruises, Christmas cruises, and New Year’s cruises,” included three critical phrases. Not only did this release’s mention of “Thanksgiving cruises,” “Christmas cruises,” and “New Year’s cruises” generate traffic from users searching on these common phrases, but it also helped guide searchers into the sales cycle; each of the three phrases in the news release was hyperlinked to a purpose-built landing page on the CruiseCompete site that displayed the holiday cruise deals. Anyone who clicked on the “Christmas cruises” link was taken directly to deals for Christmas cruises.

What makes this case so exciting is that at the time I was writing this, the CruiseCompete holiday cruise news release was at the top of the Google News search results for the phrases “Thanksgiving cruises,” “Christmas cruises,” and “New Year’s cruises.” More important, the bump that the links in the news release gave to the three landing pages helped those pages reach the top of the Google web search results lists. For example, the CruiseCompete landing page for the phrase “Christmas cruises” was ranked in the fourth position among 5,830,000 other hits on Google.

“We know that people have thought about traveling for the holidays,” says Heidi M. Allison-Shane, a consultant working with CruiseCompete. “We use the news releases to communicate with consumers that now is the time to book, because there are dynamite prices and they will sell out.” Allison-Shane makes sure that CruiseCompete includes the ideal phrases in each news release and that each release has appropriate links to the site. This strategy makes reaching potential customers a matter of “simply understanding what people are likely to be searching on and then linking them to the correct page on the site where we have the content that’s relevant,” she says. “We try to be useful with the right content and to be focused on what’s relevant for our consumers and to provide the links that they need. This stuff is not difficult.”

The CruiseCompete news release program produces results by increasing the Google rankings for the site. But the news releases also reach buyers directly as those buyers search on relevant phrases. “Each time we send a targeted news release, we see a spike in the web traffic on the site,” Allison-Shane says.

As you craft your own phrases to use in your news releases, don’t get trapped by your own jargon; think, speak, and write like your customers do. Though you may have a well-developed lexicon for your products and services, these words don’t necessarily mean much to your potential customers. As you write news releases (or any other form of web content), focus on the words and phrases that your buyers use. As a search engine marketing tool, news releases are only as valuable as the keywords and phrases that are contained in them.

If It’s Important Enough to Tell the Media, Tell Your Clients and Prospects, Too!

Many companies devote extensive resources to their PR and media relations programs. Often, the results of these efforts are buried in a difficult-to-find news section of the company website. Consider rewriting your news releases in an easy-to-read paragraph or two and making them a section of your email newsletter for clients and prospects. Or establish RSS feeds to deliver your news to anyone who is interested. And don’t forget your employees—if they know about your news, they can be your greatest evangelists.

One of the most cost-effective ways to reach buyers is to look for ways to leverage the work you’re already doing by repurposing content for other audiences. Too often, organizations spend tons of money on, say, a PR program that targets a handful of journalists but fails to communicate the same information to other constituents. Or a company’s advertising program designed to generate new sales may drive people to a website that doesn’t match the message of the ads, resulting in lost interest. Sadly, failure to integrate sales, marketing, and communications—both online and offline—will always result in lost opportunities. Happily, the web makes it a relatively simple task to integrate your news release program into your larger online strategy.

Here’s one more thing that you may never have considered: Having a regular editorial calendar that includes a series of news releases also means your company is busy. When people go to your online media room and find a lack of news releases, they often assume that you are not moving forward or that you have nothing to contribute to the industry. In the new world of marketing, consistent, high-quality news release content brands a company or a nonprofit as a busy market player, an active expert in the industry, and a trusted resource to turn to.