It still amazes me when I meet business owners who don’t use press releases to get the word out about their company. They remain such an effective tool, not using them is to your own detriment.
Here’s why.
1. You Reduce Prospect Paths
I consider press releases just another breadcrumb trail that leads potential business to your door. With a release distributed on dozens of sites, you automatically get dozens of possible places that people can find out about your brand. Why would you limit that?
2. Your Company Looks Dormant
People have come to expect at least a trickle of news coming from a given company. And they consider press releases official notice of that news.
If your company isn’t producing releases, it must not be doing anything impressive. At least, that’s how potential customers will perceive you.
3. Your Social Updates Will Be Imbalanced
I tell my clients and readers that a healthy balance of social media updates gets best results. You won’t attract followers if all you put out is self-promotion. Or links to other blogs. But including these — as well as press releases, thought-provoking questions, and one-on-one dialogue — makes your social profiles instantly more appealing.
4. You’re Missing a Highly-Trackable Resource
Into analytics? Then you should love press releases. Because your website analytics will tell you exactly how many read a given release, clicked the link back to your site and so much more.
You can also use your distribution dashboard to see what keywords people searched to find your release, where they’re located, and what they did with that release (read, clicked, shared). Not all PR and marketing tactics have this kind of detailed data, so use it where you can.
5. You’re Turning Journalists Off
It’s hard enough to get a journalist’s attention online, so it behooves you to do all you can to make it dead simple for them to write about your company.
An email pitch won’t cut it. If you include a link to your most recent press release, however, it’s easy for them to skim and pull the pertinent details they need to write an article. If they have to dig for it, your chance of a media mention shrinks to zero.
6. You Leave Search to Chance
If you’ve ever Googled your company name (c’mon, admit you have), you know there’s a mix of mentions of your brand. Most of those are probably positive, but there may be a few that are negative reviews or otherwise don’t make your brand look good.
Publishing press releases injects more of the content that you’re proud of into search results for your company name.
Now that you understand the pitfalls of not using press releases, what are you waiting for?
Photos: Sean MacEntee, Julia Manzerova, Yan Arief Purwanto
