Many entrepreneurs pay a public relations company to issue a press release and expect wonders immediately after the fact. Their expectations include:
- Coverage in the most important press outlets
- Sales boost
- Traffic overflow
- SEO advantages (mainly backlinks)
What many of these business people fail to understand is that a press release is not a magic wand to charm the readers into buyers.
This doesn’t mean that issuing a press release is pointless, this doesn’t mean that only big companies can use this PR strategy to broadcast their news – it just means that to be effective press releases need to be tailored to best impact the desired audience.
How Effective Is Online Distribution?
Everything has a price. Free distribution services will never offer the coverage of a paid service.
- Open PR will take you to Google News, but that’s about all you’ll get.
- Low-budget services like PRLeap are worth the trouble only when you want some “basic” exposure in the search engines and some second tier industry outlets.
- PRWeb has some of the lowest fees in the industry for high media visibility (including Associated Press Distribution) and in my experience submissions via this outlet work best for small sized companies operating on a small PR budget.
- For even better exposure and visibly higher budgets GlobeNewswire could be an option, or if you don’t mind going through time consuming hoops and loops to understand how it works you could try BusinessWire, which is also a service recommended by Reuters.
In any case we cannot ignore the need of additional help from a professional PR consultant, who knows what is newsworthy and what not.
Who Is to Blame When a Press Release Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
There could be many factors, and I can only speak from personal experience.
As a general rule there are no real “guilty parts.” The media reacts to the needs of the public, so if news about a revolutionary cleaning product is given less importance than news about Britney Spears, this is just because the public is obviously more interested in the last, and not because the press release was bad.
There are, however two situations when either the PR or the client are to blame.
- A stubborn client who doesn’t understand that there is basically nothing newsworthy in his release and he wants the PR to distribute it at all cost.
- A PR who doesn’t care about his client’s needs and distributes the press release without advising whether this is timely, newsworthy, etc.
As PR professionals we cannot really change the way our customers see the world, but we can, and it is our duty to, always work in the best interest of our clients. The PR who distributes press releases that are obviously inferior does not act in the best interest of his client. This is not an ethical professional.
How to Identify the Ethical PR Adviser?
Without the actual “person” encounter it is hard to read people. Online you often have to trust your instincts and of course to do a basic research about the professional you want to hire. You could contact the companies listed in the portfolio of the PR agent you want to employ and ask for references or you could monitor the online reputation of that professional by performing a simple Google search – although in many cases PR professionals prefer to keep a low profile as many clients demand discretion.
There are some PR professionals who are new in the industry – but this doesn’t make their services less valuable. Employing a beginner is risky (lack of experience can be a factor in the failure of a PR campaign, but press releases are or should be just part of a PR campaign), but lack of experience is not synonym with unethical.
The professional who is committed to ethics will tell you from the start whether your release is newsworthy. He will also make a market survey to see if the public is ready for the news and he will choose the best distribution plan for you. When the release is not newsworthy, the PR advisor has the moral duty to inform you about the negative effects of publishing it. Among these:
- No one will pick up and/or cover the story
- The press release distribution method will prove too expensive
- There will be no obvious traffic and SEO advantages after the distribution
Not to Say that Press Releases Are Dead, But…
Understand that even the most newsworthy release might fail if it has to compete against more powerful and more popular news. In the end we are all at the mercy of “his highness the public.” A press release is just a PR tool – one of the many you have to plan in your budget. Press releases don’t work alone anymore, especially not online where the users are tired of being spammed with information they don’t request. You’ll need to expand your horizon and try to understand how the Web works. If you decide to use online PR ask your PR adviser to expand the means used to make your company and products known through all means that are fit for your industry and your target audiences. PR is an ongoing process and you’ll need to treat is as such.
None of these companies that you mention are in the publicity business, they do not send any press releases to journalists at all. You would use the companies that you mentioned in order to get backlinks to your website. If you want true publicity, you must use a service that actually contacts journalists. It is that simple.
You mean a service like yours? Don’t make me laugh. And you spam my site with your antagonistic comments and keywords in the signature, hoping that I will not delete your link? That’s even funnier.
Sorry, pal. Link deleted. Thank you for your effort though.
Thank you for this article, Mihaela. Very enlightening. For my business I deal quite a lot with the press, either giving interviews or information about certain subjects. I do this for free: in return I get their contact adresses 🙂
However, in the near future my business will set up other branches, and then it’s good to know how these agencies work.
Theo
As you see, Theo, some agencies even use spamming as an “effective” method. This gives a very bad name to my profession and it makes it even harder for many ethical PRs to do their job. I advise: always go with a reputable distribution service. For “personal” contacts with journalists go with a company with proven experience in this field, or try to make the ontacts yourself. It’s hard, but rewarding. 🙂
You’re right, Mihaela. Luckily, my business is specialised. There are only a handful of journalist that write about it, so by getting to know them personaly, I can cover the whole field. In my experience, many journalists are freelancers, always looking for new stories. This is no guarantee that they will write about everything I let them know, but they will at least listen to me.
My penny for the readers: search the news in your particular field, and look for recurring names. Then try to contact them. Even if they’re not interested in you right away, at least they start getting to know your name. That’s what I call: planting a seed! In time it will grow.
Theo
That’s very good advice, Theo. It is actually one of Pamil Visions’ “best practices” as well. I just didn’t discuss it in this article, as I plan a follow up. We often create industry specific, highly targeted contact lists for our customers and we include in these lists only contacts that gave us their permission to send them news. These are also contacts who are obviously interested in the topics we want them to cover. But building such lists is extremely time consuming and costly – only a client with a strong PR budget can afford the technique – although once you have the contacts the value starts to show.
About the press release distribution services I mentioned: free services don’t have a database large enough to afford to send the news to target specific journals and other news outlets. But BusinessWire; GlobalNewswire and PRWeb do send the news to newspapers and Associated Press and Reuters. If the topic is newsworthy and it actually gets published by Reuters and AP all major newspapers will publish the news as well. To “paraphrase” our first commenter: “it’s that simple.” 😉
Thanks for your brilliant comments, MIhaela. A task of mine is to research it. Hope for more your articles.
I found this article while I was searching for some PR company. Thank you for such a valuable article and comments!
Well, Jeff… I am glad that your quest for “some PR company” lead you here…
It is hard to get a press release put out to the internet effectively because of the spam factors.They are just a promotional tool that is on going process.
Thanks big for a post. Do not prompt what at you e-mail? Is pair questions. P.S. Your constant reader from Russia.