You want your story to get as much coverage as possible, so you need to make sure your press release is delivering what your target journalists are looking for.
Journalists are inundated with press releases, and they are time-poor. They don’t read every press release they get sent (sorry) instead, they make snap decisions about which to read and which to cover.
I’ve written a few posts about press releases, what works best and what doesn’t based on 20 years of being on the receiving end (links at the bottom).
Among my top tips are to target your press release appropriately, get to the point quickly and stick to the facts – no unsubstantiated marketing speak like ‘leading’ and ‘unique’.
But for this post, I asked some of my B2B journalist friends and former colleagues for their press release dos and don’ts.
Here is what they had to say:
Sophia Furber, reporter, S&P Global Market Intelligence:
Us financial journalists need to back up our stories with numbers, so if you are pitching to the business media, then include useful data points in your press release.
How big was X’s investment/loan? How great do you think Y market opportunity is? How much capital was raised? Which company was bought, and for how much money?
You get the picture.
Including this information in the email header or the opening lines of the press release will get my attention and help me make a quick decision about how newsworthy the story is.
Go easy on the jargon and corporate speak. If you include a quote from the CEO in the press release that sounds like it was generated by a robot, then it’s more than likely that it’s not going to end up in any media coverage.
And lastly, if you are offering up comments on a topic that is in the news (say, a big government announcement or a high-profile bankruptcy) from your CEO or another expert source in your company… actually have an opinion!
Continue reading “B2B journalists’ top tips for press releases”
