How to write and distribute a press release and a pitch for your business. It's my Silver Jubilee so I am writing one myself too
Today, I've been working on the press release because EastWest PR has reached 25 years, so it's our jubilee anniversary, and that's one not to be squandered from a PR point of view. It takes me back, because years and years ago, writing press releases was what we did and what I did as an agency day in, day out. I'm a little bit out of practice, to be honest because over the years, we've ended up working with other agencies to do that or I've had staff to do it, but I want it because this is my own story, and I've talked on our SPEAK|pr Masterclass about the importance of stories. It's my own story, so I'm really the best person to tell it.
Coming to the practicalities of writing a press release, first of all, we need to have some background information. As we all know, the media get lots of lots of press releases every day. What they're looking for is something special, something that's going to resonate with their readers, something that's going to make their own publications seem a cut above the others. They're not interested in hyperbole and opinion. They're interested in facts because their readers are interested. We as readers are interested in not the opinions of third parties, but of facts. When I write the press release for EastWest PR, I use the Headline Keyword Planner Tool to assess the quality of my headline. In the end, I managed to get a score of 66 on the Headline Planner with "PR is Even More Essential Now Than Ever Before." The headline that I needed to come up with in the end was that, "Now More Than Ever, EastWest PR is Absolutely Imperative." I apparently had enough power words in there and enough intrigue to get myself above the 40-50 mark which I was getting when I said, "EastWest Public Relations Hits 25-year Anniversary." My subtitle, then, is referencing the need and the fact that I've got 25 years of success in Asia. "The founder, Jim James, doesn't open offices in the UK." What I'm doing here is I'm trying to create a bit of intrigue. I'm working with a new business model where everybody now is a freelance contractor and that I no longer have the fixed infrastructure. So the headline needs to be something that is attention-seeking for the readers and SEO bots and at the same time is relevant. This is part of the art of the magic of the writing.
The next part is the writing of the press release itself, which isn't exactly as easy as it might seem. By and large, a press release shouldn't be more than about 700 words. In the opening paragraph, as we learned at school, it should really explain the entire story, so that whoever reads it in their email or on their phone can understand the entirety of it. We put a date and a location, the 17th of June, and I put in Singapore and Bath on the headline because I'm going to release it in two different locations. Because the 19th is the actual anniversary, I'm going to send it out two days beforehand so that if anyone's interested in an interview or a story with me, then we've got enough time.
The second paragraph is often called the standfirst, because that really is the "meat and potatoes" of the story or the press release that you are sending in that it is the reason why you're sending out your press release. In my case, I have the opening paragraph and the standfirst, and then the third paragraph to give a little bit more detail, and then in the fourth one, I have a quote from me which is articulating why I've come back to the UK, what opportunities I see, and briefly why I think this is newsworthy. The next paragraph will go on, if you have a partnership, to introduce more details, and the fifth paragraph would be a quote from your partner or a customer. The sixth and the seventh would give some industry context. What is the nature of this industry? What's the size? What's the growth? It should provide some statistics that make the story resonate and give the journalist who may not understand your industry a sense of why this is important to people other than you.
At the end of the final paragraph, which might tie up and give a conclusion to your press release, we put the media contacts. Normally, you just have the agency, or you put your own contact details. You can put both contact details, but there's not much point in having an agency contact details and your own contact details, because they might just go straight to you and part of the of operation that the agency will provide is to field those calls for you. It's often worth using an alias for your email address; in other words, not putting your actual email address, but for example, [email protected]. This will reduce the amount of spam that you're going to get, because once your press release goes online, if the media channels do issue your press release in its entirety, your email address will be picked up by the spam bots.
That's the first part, getting your press release written. However, it's not always the easiest thing to do. It then needs to be accompanied by some graphics and that could be, for example, a company logo, the photograph of the spokesperson, a product photograph, or an infographic that you developed. When you're laying out your press release, think about the corporate identity. Do you put your logo on the top left or the top right? Those are the standard places with the words Press Release on the opposing side. The attachments are not necessarily embedded because that can make the file size too high, but they are attached, not linked because the journalists don't want to be opening or may not open, in fact, the links for security reasons. What we can do is say that there are press attachments available, and explain what those are and where they might be. That is the first part.
The other thing I'm doing for my announcement is I am pitching the media to try and get some interviews. To accompany the press release, we also develop a pitch. This is if you want to have interviews with your spokesperson or yourself. The pitches are a different document, and would only be 150 to 200 words; in other words, just one to two paragraphs long. It's not too wordy, but it has to get to the point. It also has to have a catchy headline. My headline in this particular case is "How Jumping Out of An Aeroplane Led Me to Start A PR firm in Asia, and 25 years Later, What I've Learned About Public Relations." The headline actually talks about the first time that I worked in sales, and I was raising money as a young man to go on Operation Rally. I did a parachute jump to a sponsorship money and realized how much more lucrative that was than earning pounds by the hour.
I segue from a personal story, and I have the picture of me jumping out of the plane attached, into sharing that once I had realized that sponsorship was good, I then managed to get sponsorship from a company that gave goods away and got them into the local media with me saying how this local camping store had given me a discount on its equipment. That leads into my going to Asia because I went to Asia on Operation Rally and then I went back after university to start the agency. Now I'm back, and I'd like to talk about the the journey of starting companies in Singapore, China, and India. You can see that the narrative of all of this is contained in 150 words and in there I say, "Here are the three angles of the story. One is as an entrepreneur, the second is the about public relations, and the third is about Asia." I tie those together by saying, "Entrepreneurs will be interested in this story. Other agency owners will be interested in this story, and businesses in Britain will be interested in the story, bcause Asia represents a great opportunity. And I'm available on Zoom on Skype, by phone, or by email to talk with that media."
It's important to have your two documents together and again, with my pitch, I have the photographs ready to go. Then it's about distribution. Press releases, you can tee up and get ready, and on these different services, you can select the free version or the paid, and you can also choose to add in scheduling and so on. I was just trying today Issuewire. They'll let you send out a press release for free and then after that, it's $21 per release. It seems to be in mainly US outlets. They say they've got 150+ media outlets. Another one is Prowly, and they're giving a free trial, so I tried that, logged in, and they let you log in and find the media but in order to see the media contact details, you have to upgrade and pay $210 a month. These are good if you've got an agency, but if you're on your own and don't have that much volume, you have to start thinking about it. There's one called Pressrush, and that's $49 a month or $490 per year. If you're in the UK, there are quite a few as well. I've just put my press release out on Prfire.co.uk, and they'll publish that for free but to a limited distribution after 48 hours. If you want to pay ￡60, they will give you a better and more speedy distribution. The other one is Journalism co.uk. For ￡60 pounds plus VAT, they'll deliver your press release to over 18,000 email recipients, and they'll tweet it to 15,000 followers and share it with 24,000 comms professionals on LinkedIn. The issue is they may or may not be relevant for your business, but that's a scattergun approach.
What I'm outlining here for you is that you create two different documents. One is the press release, which goes to a general audience, and that may be what we call tier one media and tier two media. The tier one media then deserve a pitch, and those are the media that actually you're hoping to get interviewed by. Those will be your top three, five, maybe 10 media where you take the effort to research what the journalists have written before. Each pitch then is uniquely written for that journalist, because you need to angle your story according to their editorial emphasis.
On a phone call yesterday with this Chinese journalist from CGTN and CCTV who was interviewing a client of ours today, she said it's very good now. In the past, she had a beat, and she was only allowed to cover stories where she could go and visit the person she was interviewing or someone in the same timezone. But she said since COVID, they now have a global remit, so the impact of COVID has been that they've been liberated from their beats, and now, journalists like Xia who lives in London can cover stories all over the world. She was interested in my Singapore context. It's really important to spend some time, if you're getting ready to send out press releases, to work on the facts and the figures so that your press release has got some detail. Make sure that you've got good quality photographs, infographics, and diagrams, because that is what the journalists will use to assemble the story. And as I've mentioned before, in the report by Cision on the State of the Media, the journalists have almost no time at all, and while they may be getting up to 100 pitches per week, majority of what they're sent is irrelevant. In other words, in order to move out of the 100 and be in the top 10 that they might write about in a week, we need our pitches to be accurate, informative, and well supported with other information so that journalists can take what they like, fashion that into the narrative that suits their readers, so they don't have to go online and do the searching and the formatting and making the color and the pictures look presentable. That's our job and, of course, this is why over half of the content on the internet and in media now is provided by agencies and by customers and clients because actually, we're all providing the, if you like, labor and the raw materials for the media to come together and to publish the stories.
There are a number of different outlets that you can use. Some are free, and some are paid for, and some have freemium models. We need a blend, actually. There is no right or wrong. It's about the scale of your public relations and about the scale of your business. If you want to go to the next level up, there are companies like Cision that have phenomenal dashboards, media contacts, media histories, and they also do the reporting. You can purchase their services on a one-time basis or an ongoing basis. They become very flexible at this time for their pricing.
This takes us on to the next part, which is the monitoring. It's one thing to send out a press release, but it's another one to know where it's all appeared. This is where tools like Cision have integrated into their suite the media monitoring. Otherwise, you're going to need to go to some monitoring services, and I'll cover those soon and probably over the next few days as I start to see the coverage from my own releases, and then I'll be able to share with you what's been effective and what has not been effective. Media monitoring from companies like Meltwater, for example, will enable you to see the reach of your of your press release. Your own individual pitches will need to be monitored and followed up. The media are extremely busy, of course. They've got better things to do than to wait for interesting articles to come as a result of interviewing us. So ideally, if we can, we've got the email and the phone number so we can follow up with them to see what they like, if there's anything else we can offer them, and also to schedule a time that may or may not be now, but maybe sometime in the future when our story is of interest to them.
In summary, press releases form the bread and butter of the public relations work. They are the preferred medium of choice for journalists. It's easy for them to file and easy for them to read. It's essential, therefore, to learn how to write press releases, or to outsource that using that one of the journalists or freelance writers that there are on sites like Upwork so that the central tenant of your public relations activities is to issue out cogent and well-researched press releases, accompanied by compelling pitches.
This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.