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

So, step one: determine who your audience is, who your competitors are, the current state of your market, and what you're doing that's so different. Then use that information to tell them why they 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

• Make your message crystal clear

• Surprise the reader, but don't sacrifice clarity for form. This isn't a beat poem

• 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, 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 fantasize.)

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).

Things that catch the eye but are likely to land your email in the spam bin:

• CAPS-LOCK SUBJECT LINES

• $$$, £££ or equivalent

• Excessive punctuation

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.

Some examples:

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 the 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 social proof and resources that journalists can use, you save them time as well as add context and colour to your narrative.

If you use a specialized 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. The type of content that's supported varies from provider to provider, but at the very least it should include things like tweet and YouTube video embeds. (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, or copy-paste your entire press release draft directly from Word.) 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 optimize your images for use on social media platforms, there are a few more things you can do.

Christopher S. Penn, Trust Insights

Social is now embedded in it fully and wholly. Most important: every piece of the new social media press release must be independently shareable.

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)

If you use Prezly to publish and distribute your press releases, you can move, crop and resize your content right in the story editor.

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 customizable 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 best press releases on a live site versus shooting them out via discrete email campaigns.

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?

Of course it's worth it.

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 great 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.

Watch free: How to pitch to anyone, from journalists to podcasts

Join us for the fourth episode of PR Roundtable to learn how you can successfully pitch just about anyone, with special guest Dmitry Dragilev.

Localize your press release announcement

Sure, most of the world is fluent in English, but that doesn't mean you should be lazy with your localization. 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.

For a great example of press release localization in action, watch our short interview with the Arab Image Foundation: How one non-profit shares multilingual stories to stay current locally and internationally.

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 would 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 when negotiating on exclusive content (more on that below).

And if you work across a bunch of territories, but they all speak English? That's no excuse not to localize details like currency, which can be a subconscious deterrent, as Nicole Yeardsley points out in our Wallsauce PR case study:

"I find that particularly with the US, they like to think you're a US company because, of course, we need to ship them a physical product and they want to know that they'll get it this week and not months from now."

Smart move, Nicole! You're nailing it 💅