After 10 years in the world of PR, we like to think we know what makes a great press release – not because of our own ideas of what makes a good story, but because of what our thousands of clients with their hundreds of thousands of press releases have proved to work.

Here are the top 4 things you can learn to do right now to get your news noticed, tap into social and build your brand legacy.

1. How to write a great headline ❣️

2. What assets to include 🍑

3. How to get extra eyes on your story 👀

4. How to sweeten the deal 🍦

1. How to write a great headline ❣️

The headline is the first thing a journalist sees and it has one job: get them to read more. Make it good, or they may not read any further.

First off, determine who your audience is, who your competitors are, the current state of your market and what you're doing that's different. Then use that information to tell me why I should care about your news. (Spoiler: if you have to explain it, it's too convoluted.)

Some things you can do to make a great headline:

• Write it as if it were a headline and ask yourself, "Would I read this?"

• Ask "Why should anyone care?" until you have a solid answer

• Tailor the headline to your audience

• Entice the imagination and surprise the reader

• Play with your grammar (punctuation, active vs passive voice...)

And it doesn't hurt to add some personality to it, a bit of flare. Do you think Han Solo makes generations swoon because his scripted lines are all factually correct? Of course not. It's all down to entertainment and bravado, timing and charm. (Ok, it might also have something to do with Harrison Ford's face, but we can't all have Harrison Ford's face marketing our products, so it's best not to fantasise.)

Other things that catch the eye are surprising statements (!), startling statistics (!!) and celebrity namedrops (just make sure it's someone your audience will have heard of).

So while we can't all be Han, we can take an extra 15 minutes to brainstorm a few creative alternatives to the standard "Company X releases Product Y" one-liner snoozefest before hitting "send". You scoundrel.

2. What assets to include 🍑

Did you know that multimedia press releases get up to 9.7x as many views as those using text alone? Ragan knew it in 2011, when including images within your press release doubled the chance of it getting noticed; video quadrupled it. There's little comparable data published more recently because including media in your press release in the year 2020 shouldn't even be a question.

And yet, the majority of press releases go out as barebones text. Why?

With cameraphones and stock imagery abound, there's no logical reason to exclude images, videos or other multimedia from your press releases, when including them will set you apart from all the other stories flooding journos' inboxes.

If possible, embed a gallery within your press release, particularly if you're launching a new product or presenting a story that looks great visually. This will give the reader an immediate idea of the story you're telling without them having to read through reams of text, and arms them with a good selection of imagery to use in their coverage.

Embed quotes and tweets

Got a relevant tweet? Great – embed it. Someone raved about your business on YouTube? Stick it in. Got your latest product shot raking in likes on Instagram? In it goes.

Remember, your job is to make it as simple as possible for other people to tell your story.

By embedding evidence journalists can use you are saving them time while adding context and colour to your narrative.

If you use a specialised campaign client, the interface will often have an option to introduce html into the body of your story, making it possible to embed supported content, which varies from provider to provider but should include support for things like tweets and YouTube videos. (We simplified it a bit in Prezly so you can just copy-paste the URL of whatever you want to embed and the system does it automatically for you.) Worst case scenario, even with plain text you will be able to copy in a link.

Make your news social media friendly

Images and videos become extra powerful when it comes to sharing your press release on social media, since social networks will automatically generate a preview based on the content embedded within your press release. Having an attention-grabbing, vibrant image front and centre in your story is an easy way to increase your chances of engagement.

If you want to go a step further and optimise your images for use on social media platforms, there are a few more things you can do.

Include images in different resolutions and sizes

While these differ across platforms and you could spend several days cropping images to all the suggested sizes (overeager sharers might find this social media cheatsheet useful), it's generally a good idea to include:

• A landscape image (around 1200 x 628 pixels)

• A square image (1080 x 1080 pixels; think Instagram)

• If you're operating in food or creative industries – interior design, cosmetics, fashion, DIY, kid-friendly projects, crafts and hobbies – it's a good idea to include a long portrait image for easy sharing on Pinterest (236 pixels wide)

Prezly gives you total control on how you use images and other media to tell your story, giving you the tools to easily move, crop and resize your content right in the story editor.

⚠️ A word of warning ⚠️

Be very careful when including images, videos and really any attachments in your campaigns. Email clients can interpret bulky email attachments as spam and filter them out of the recipient inbox, rendering your carefully executed press release all but invisible.

Better practice is to host your media somewhere reliable and embed it in your email so that it takes up very little space. (Psst... If you're using Prezly, we take care of all that for you, so all you have to do is insert the image/video/audio file/tweet – or whatever you like – hit send and we do the rest 😉)

The press release examples below are a masterclass in how different industries can use multimedia to wow the beholder. Notice that each one uses a bold, vibrant hero image at the very top of the story, follows with less than 100 words of flavour text and then immediately rewards the reader with more visual stimuli. Each of these releases was created in Prezly, which makes it possible to embed galleries, videos and more in your campaigns without making emails too heavy for your contact's inbox.

3. How to get extra eyes on your story 👀

As in, set up a newsroom for your brand or project and use it to house your backlog of news, contacts and media assets. You can do this in myriad different ways, whatever your budget, from dedicating a part of your normal site to news updates, to setting up a free blog account through Wordpress or Wix, to using a dedicated piece of newsroom software. (You'll forgive us for being biased towards that last option, since customisable newsrooms come as standard with Prezly subscriptions.)

Having a newsroom gives you the power to control at least some of the narrative around your brand, establishes a history for your venture and gives people – journalists, bloggers and customers alike – a source of truth for your business. This is incredibly important at a time when most of what people read about your enterprise comes from third-party sources like social media posts and review sites.

Put simply, your newsroom is your brand's legacy online. But there are other benefits to hosting your press releases on a live site versus shooting them out via discrete email campaigns.

Isabell Cordes, gamigo group

“Our coverage increased exponentially after we implemented our Prezly newsroom properly and set it up on our website.”

Read Case Study

Why you need a newsroom in 2020

Typing up a press release and sending it to your treasured contacts has some obvious drawbacks:

• If your contact misses the email, they miss the story

• Whenever you have an update or correction to add in, you have to send it as an amendment in yet another email to your contacts, making controlling your narrative difficult

• Every time you want to share your story or pitch it to someone new, you have to fiddle with copying the press release across, tweaking formatting, attaching assets and so on

Our clients don't suffer from any of these problems for one simple reason: every Prezly account comes with at least one online newsroom (Expert+ plans come with unlimited newsrooms as standard).

Setting up an online newsroom and using it to house your brand's latest stories makes it easy for you to:

• Keep information current

• Provide additional resources and company context

• Share and reshare your stories with a single URL

• Set up public stories, private stories and schedule embargoes

Plus a bonus benefit many PR people like to keep hush-hush:

• An online newsroom means more eyes on your story because it shows up on Google

Matt Suckley, Phoenix Games

“Prezly makes it so easy to host press releases in a newsroom and have it be not only a one-time thing, but something that you can repurpose and create new pitches around constantly.”

Read Case Study

What to include in your media centre

It's also a good idea to include a link to some further assets relevant to your news, company or product in every press release campaign you send out – in other words, to the media centre of your newsroom. After all, is there anything worse than opening up that big piece of coverage you've been anticipating all week only to find they published your CEO's 2016 Facebook profile pic? Nobody wants that.

Far better is to remove any potential for miscommunication by linking every press release to your media centre, which at the very minimum should include:

🌓 Light and dark versions of your logo – transparent background, .png or .svg file type; nothing smaller than 200 pixels across and strictly no .jpgs

💁‍♀️ High-resolution, professional photos of your management team – including anyone likely to be featured in news coverage (original photograph files are best as these will be of the highest quality; this is particularly important when targeting print publications, which are unlikely to accept images less than 2000 pixels wide and 300 dpi resolution)

👕 High-resolution product shots – this is also a nice opportunity to get a shot of your logo in action, on your office wall, a t-shirt, your product – something a bit more interesting that adds context to your brand

🎥 Videos if at all possible – cut these into soundbites and social-media-friendly lengths (that means 30 seconds max) and close the shot with a call-to-action or url

Remember, your aim here is to arm journalists, bloggers and influencers with the resources they need to present your news in the best possible light.

4. How to sweeten the deal 🍦

Ok, I'm going to get this out of the way upfront because I know you don't want to hear it: you need to make multiple versions of your press release.

Is it time-consuming to write more than one version of each press release? Sure. But is it totally worth it?

Yes of course it's worth it. Why would I even ask otherwise.

This comes hand in hand with knowing your audience. What interests this person? What's their beat? What audience does their story need to appeal to? What are they going to need?

The more familiar you are with your contacts, the more likely you are to know when a story will resonate with them. (This is one of the many reasons we champion smaller, targeted campaigns over mass-mailing strangers through bought media lists – with the latter, that relationship just isn't there.) When you're thinking about how to write a press release, content, form and style is all very well and good – but none of it will mean squat if you haven't tailored it to your very niche audience.

Localise your press release

Sure, most of the world is fluent in English, but that doesn't mean you should be lazy with your localisation. If you have more than one office or a remote workforce, it shouldn't be too difficult to get your story translated.

If there are several languages you hit up frequently – say, the bulk of your audience is split between Belgium and Mexico – take the opportunity to set up your newsroom in French, Spanish and Dutch so that people can toggle between them. Prezly makes multi-language newsrooms easy to set up, but you can do it manually too through whatever hosting service you use.

In short, remove whatever barriers stand between your story and your reader.

And it shouldn't stop at language.

Take the time to research how your announcement affects the city, region, country, continent you're emailing – in short, is there a special reason why a person in a particular place should be interested in your news? This also gives you the advantage of getting more than one angle of your story covered, which is especially handy for handing out exclusive content.

Thomas De Meûter, then PR Manager at Audi

“We now really understand our stakeholders. It's no longer one-way communication, it's a dialogue.”

Read Case Study

Offer exclusive information, images & opportunities

While some mass content creators will be happy to copy-paste your press release into a fresh post and call it a job well done, professional journalists and bloggers will want to tell a unique story with your input, and it's this latter group that is invaluable to your brand identity. (You can reach the former audience through bought media lists and newswires, and while this sort of straightforward coverage is still a win, it results in a lot of replicated content that readers may be less inclined to trust.)

One way to sweeten the deal for any journalists giving your story the side-eye is to offer them something unique – a piece of information no one else knows, exclusive product shots, an interview with whoever's involved. Something that will help them make their story different from the next site over.

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