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 four 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 🍦

A bonus #5 step? Watch our interview with journalists Holly and Kelsey as they explain how they love – and hate – to be pitched.

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 2021 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 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, 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 optimize 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.

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 (Premium+ plans come with five 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

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.

Localize your press release

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.

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.

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 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 💅