4 reasons to choose Prezly vs a wire service
There are tons of wire services out there, and they all promise you one thing: Pay us $$$ and we’ll get your story covered everywhere you want. Sound too good to be true? Well… it is.
Wire services rarely deliver what they promise.
Journalists are busy, active people. The ones that make it don’t sit around watching the wire and waiting for a good story to drop into their laps. They’re actively using social media and search engines to draw together stories their audience will love.
Here are a few reasons why you might want to think twice before spending hundreds on a service that can’t deliver.
Reason #1: Every press release published on the wire makes it less effective
We often try to ignore this tough truth, but it makes sense. There’s only a limited number of journalists available, each with limited space in their publication. Every time you pay money to distribute via the wire, you aren’t buying their attention – you’re diluting it between the hundreds of other unknowns vying for coverage.
The odds of you getting your news seen plummets.
Prezly gives you all the tools to make your story stand out. By using a smaller number of media contacts that are a great fit for your news and working on building those relationships, your odds of earning coverage instantly go up. And with segmentation and personalization built-in, we make it easy for you to reach your audience.
Want to see how you can use Prezly to nurture those relationships? We have a guide for that.
We now really understand our stakeholders. It's no longer one-way communication, it's a dialogue.
Reason #2: The wire is a gamble. Instead, have confidence in your skills
It’s pretty dangerous to rely so completely on another company to deliver the results you need, particularly when they have zero interest in promoting your story. Even more so if you don’t fully understand how they can make good on the promised results.
Prezly gives you the tools to start building out your relationships with the people that can give you access to your audience. These are the people you need to be targeting – not some faceless journalist who might pick up your story once and then never actually speak to you. That’s not a sustainable comms strategy.
By focusing on fewer contacts that are actually relevant to your niche and working to develop those connections, your PR efforts will compound and deliver results again and again. These are the reciprocal relationships that you’ll carry with you not just now, but throughout your entire career. That’s infinitely more valuable than a flash in the pan.
Reason #3: Personalization, not amplification gets you attention
On a wire service, everyone gets exactly the same press release, in the same format, with the same assets. So how can you cut through the clutter of a journalist’s inbox if you can’t tailor your story for her audience? Why should her readers care? What can a YouTuber do with a text-only press release?
Will that journalist recognise your name?
Or will they just see yet another wire release crammed into their already heaving inbox?
Targeting is absolutely vital to any PR communications. You need to research the people you’re contacting, segment them by their readership (after all, their audience is your audience), tag them with the type of content they like. Only then can you effectively send out stories that will matter to them.
If you include a nice feature video and some appealing inserts, journalists are much more inclined to take a look at your press release and get that information to the reader.
Reason 4: Coverage is not the end-goal
If you’ve ever submitted a story to the wire, you will have seen certain syndicating sites take your press release and republish it in its entirety. It’s easy to see this as a win, another item you can log in your report to c-suite. But those are just empty calories.
Ask yourself, does your audience read those sites? Will this post really influence their behaviour and thinking?
Coverage is not the end-goal, it doesn’t provide the ROI. Only when people start changing their behaviour, start coming to your website, start acting will it make a difference.
Buying coverage doesn’t move the needle. You need to earn it.
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Contacts
Whether you’re running internal comms in-house or managing PR at a big agency, we have the tools you need to deliver the right story to each contact, every time.
Stories
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Campaigns
Get better results by sending targeted campaigns to your most important contacts and seeing how they engage with your content.
Coverage
Prezly links each news piece with an author, outlet and story, so you can get performance data and report in just a few clicks.