OK, You’ve Sent out A Press Release. What’s Next?
By Mark Willaman, Co-Founder Newsworthy.ai
You spent hours writing your press release and getting approvals from company stakeholders. It was tough but worth it — the press release is very good and you can’t wait to share your news with the world. So you distribute the release over a newswire, like Newsworthy.ai, where it gets distributed to hundreds of websites, shows up on Google News, etc., etc.
Now what?
Unfortunately, many companies stop here and do nothing else — especially when they aren’t represented by a public relations or marketing agency.
Here are 5 things you should do after you’ve distributed your press release to make more people aware of your news — and compared to the time it took to write the release, these activities are easy and take very little time!
- Post the release to your own website and include the press release in your company newsletter or other customer/prospect communications.
- Treat your press release like all other marketing content. Share it on all of your social media channels with appropriate hashtags. And don’t forget to tag/mention relevant people and companies, to increase engagement.
A critical, but often overlooked, component to press release success is image selection. Having the wrong size or wrong type of image impacts how your shared press release looks on social media — and can hurt engagement. Most newswires allow you to include several images in your news release, typically a company logo and/or a ‘news’ image but they’re not always social friendly.
Newsworthy.ai has a nifty integration with Unsplash, making it super easy to search for and include social media-ready images in your news releases. Here are some examples:
3. After sharing on your company’s social platforms, ask company team members who are on social to individually share the press release. This can make a huge difference in your reach! There’s power in numbers. Also, ask the team to “like” the shares from your company channels.
4. Get a few ‘influencers’ to share the release. If you have relationships with online influencers, ask them to help you share the press release. On Newsworthy.ai, you can hire influencers to help share your news, using the Influencer Marketplace. There are many micro-influencers that will share your content for a reasonable fee.
5. Send a few pitches to journalists. Don’t have a PR agency? No problem, you can still do some media outreach. Keep it simple. Send a personalized email ‘pitch’ to a handful of carefully selected reporters at industry trades, and business periodicals. Other pitching tips:
- Make sure to write an attention-grabbing email subject line.
- Keep your pitch to 2–4 sentences with statistics (if applicable), a tie-in to current events, and reasons why the journalist’s readers should care about your news.
- Include a link to your news release.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with the media outlet ad that you’ve read articles written by the journalist.
- Include sufficient details to help the journalist make a quick decision.
- Provide contact information, links to referenced information, and perhaps an offer to interview a customer that relates to your news.
This article from JustReachOut provides some sample pitch templates.
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