The news release is no longer just the province of journalists, but also consumers and “influencers” who are looking for trusted sources of data to inform their purchase decisions.
These tips will help you reach the various audiences who are important to your brand, from reporter, to bloggers to the end buyer.
- Lead with your story, not your brand. News releases are all about the start of the storytelling process for the brand. Create interest with the story, and the brand will follow.
- Headlines must be short. Most all news is pushed in social. Keep below 120 characters with the most import content leading in the first 65 characters with spaces.
- Begin with the why - Why is this content important for an audience? Why is this story pertinent? Leading with the why encourage brands to first guide the reader into the story.
- Use subheadings. Subheads add additional background and context to the headline. They also allow the headline to be short.
- Use multimedia such as photos, videos, and graphics. Multimedia content increases both visibility and engagement with the content. A graphic can also tell it's own story, i.e. a pie chart.
- Keep to just 2 hyperlinks per news release. Objectively, a restrained backlink strategy helps with SEO as Google measures link relevancy. Subjectively, think like your audience... does this link's resource add depth to the story?
- Don’t write large blocks of text. A news release should read like a crisp email. Use bold, bullet points, and other tools to make the content easy to read and skim-able.
- Always have a call to action. Period. Place it "above the fold" - no lower than the third paragraph.