By Mark Maupin, Right Now Marketing Group, LLC
Press releases are clearly defined as a tool for communicating a specific message concerning your business. The press release is your tool for letting the world know about special newsworthy events, policy changes, awards, advancements, etc. Good news about your firm draws consumer attention & can enhance your status in your industry; but the benefits of good press don’t stop there…
When a professionally written release is properly distributed – it not only gets the direct attention of a broad audience of consumers – it helps to build up a reputation for your firm (and your website) as being an authoritative source on your area of expertise. When you issue a press release online, you are able to add very specific and focused keywords that relate to your business and your service/distribution area. When the PR goes out, these keywords are “crawled” (or reviewed) by automatic programming from popular search engines like Google. As these reviews occur, the search engine begins to recognize your company as being attached to a wealth of information & news on the various topics (services) that you cover. On top of that, the keywords and related terms within each of your press releases will provide direct live links to your firm’s website.
Now comes the good part. As your firm is recognized as an authoritative source – you start to gain Google’s respect and become more important to them. Here’s why: Google (and their competitors) want to be known as search engines that give the public what they want; that means providing the most relevant results for the billions of searches that take place each day. Let’s say your company is considered an authority on widgets in Southfield Michigan – when a consumer goes online looking for widgets in Southfield Michigan – the search engines will point to you; getting you in front of potential clients and making the search engine look like the hero.
So, what goes into a press release, you wonder. The answer is fairly simple, but still requires a great deal of consideration and experience. A good press release should first grab the reader’s (and search engines’) attention with a well-conceived title. Then there is the body of the release – which tells the who, why, what, when, where & how – concerning your company‘s news. The body is followed up by a boilerplate (which is your firm’s pitch telling why you are the best at what you do), and finally – your business contact information (allowing an immediate connection).
Constructing and issuing a press release is a fairly straight-forward process for the experienced, but comes with a huge learning curve for the novice. The structure for the release has to fit certain requirements in order to be published on popular news distribution sites (like eMailWire or PRBuzz). Each of these fee-based distribution services has stringent editorial controls that must be passed before a press release is accepted. Their rules have to be adhered to in order to gain access to their audiences of thousands of reporters and writers (who can advance your story by further disseminating your report and writing related articles).
Now you have a clearer picture of the process of utilizing a press release to get your company recognized, but keep in mind that this is not a just add water solution; it will require some degree of creativity to develop newsworthy stories, skills to properly format them for distribution, a roughly $100 (per news site) cash outlay for distribution and quite a bit of patience and time – to do it over and over again – while your site climbs through the search engine ranks… Or, you can just call a pro (Right Now Marketing) and put the task in their experienced hands while you get back to running your business.
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