Is the Press Release Dead?

Of course not.  The business and trade press are a particularly valid link to your buyers.  In fact, you should be issuing more press releases today, not less — and you should not only be making your information available to editors, but simultaneously to relevant bloggers and social media networks.  Generating news means that your company is busy, growing, evolving; whereas a lack of news can put you in the stale, uninteresting category.

What should you ‘talk’ about?  Your releases should be about anything that’s newswothy.  And you don’t need to wait for earth-shaking events, complete with third-party endorsements — just talk about anything that you think would interest your customers. You’d like to comment about your industry or high-level strategic issues surrounding your product or service.  Great.  Have a new product?  Great.  Your product meets a new industry requirement?  Great.  Your CEO is speaking at an event.  Great.  You’ve won a new customer.  Great.  You solved a problem for a customer.  Really great!  You get the point: it’s all relevant.

And don’t forget to provide links within your press release — ideally to a landing page for an informative white paper, e-book, etc.  And, if the prospect fills out the form on the landing page but they do not yet qualify for your “hot lead” category (which would immediately find its way to your sales force), be sure to include these people in your e-nurturing campaigns.  They have raised their hand; they are a valid sales lead.

Once you’ve developed the release you need to distribute it using services such as PRNewswire or BusinessWire, any number of free distribution portals such as pressreleasepoint.com, any relevant trade media/blogger lists you have developed, and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to expand your universe.  Your goal today is to not only get your news into the known areas of influence, but to intensify your search engine results and your social media presence.  

Next, publish your press release to your web site — ideally in the press room or news section of the site.  Once the press release is posted to your site, search engine crawlers will find it, index it, and rank it – primarily based upon keywords and phrases.  You should also create your own RSS feeds of your news stories:  ideally using standard, off-the-shelf RSS feed generators so that interested visitors will be able to subscribe to your press release feed directly.

So hold the postmortems.  The press release is more ‘alive’ than ever.