Eight Steps for the Perfect Press Release
The world of media may have changed in recent years, but high quality press releases are still as important as ever.
Here’s the eight key steps you need to take to get your press release picked up by journalists, and to reach your target audience with your story.
1. Headlines
Keep it short. Journalists want the information, without ambiguous language. Try and use fewer than 88 characters, and 25 words is a good figure to aim for. Convey the who, what, why, where, when and how in the headline, with the who and what being the most important. Do not attempt to summarise the whole release, capture the crux of what you want to get across.
2. Multimedia
Consider using all available media to you, but do not flood the PR with images/video/infographics. Carefully select the salient information in any infographics and utilize images and video that either inform or resonate with the reader.
3. Length
Aim for approximately 400-600 words. Research shows that optimum reading time for press releases is around those figures, a longer press release does not increase the likelihood of longer reading time, in fact it has the opposite effect. A good phrase to keep in mind is: “Longer than a tweet, but shorter than War and Peace”.
4. Format
If you are struggling to include everything within 600 words, consider using bullet points, content sections and quotes to break up the content. When sending attachments, documents or information across to a journalist through email, you need to make sure that everything is as easy as possible to access, and there isn’t any unformatted text, images, graphs or videos.
Microsoft Word is the favoured medium for journalists, so it should be for you too.
5. Timing
Tuesday morning is a lag time, so a great opportunity to send a press release, while journalists aren’t being bombarded with other information. Window between Tues-Thurs is best. On a Monday, journalists are too busy and your press release will be pushed aside, and on Friday everything is winding down.
30% of copy is sent at 00, 15, 30 and 45, avoid this. Send at typically “wrong” times. When targeting specific countries recognize time zones.
6. Proofread
This one is very self-explanatory. Double or even triple check your work and ask a colleague to sub-edit it to streamline the content. Spelling, punctuation and grammar are vital to making your copy more readable, and thus more likely to be picked up and repurposed by journalists.
7. Newsworthiness
There are five main keys to look out for when thinking about what makes a story newsworthy.
Time – How current is the story, how long is its shelf life?
Proximity – Especially in the era of Covid, people want to know how close the story is to home
Human Interest – What emotions are conjured by the story? Is it an emotional story at all? What is the tone of the story?
Impact – How is it going to affect the eventual reader? How will their behaviour/circumstances be altered by what you have to say?
Relevancy – How can the information you are offering help the reader? What can they do because of what you are telling them?
8. Hyperlinks
Using hyperlinks is a great way to direct the reader to where you want them to go after reading your press release, so do not underestimate the effectiveness of hyperlinks used correctly.
Google recommends one to three unique links. Including too many links will only overwhelm the reader, so use them efficiently and position them at strategic points, without duplicates.
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