Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 24—March 7th, 2006)
A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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Public Relations (Part 2): How to Write a Press Release
A big part of getting coverage in your industry is writing a press release that clearly and effectivelypresents your company and tells the story of your product or service—with an emphasis on clarity. Trade publication editors and writers get hundreds of press releases a week, and for your announcement to be picked up by these trade publications, your press release must clearly present your news announcement in a factual, persuasive way.
The first step in writing a press release is to write an outline. If your ad agency or PR firm is writing the release, this outline will give them sufficient content and detail. We’ll also cover the process for writing the release, if you’re the one who has to write it.
Answer the Big Questions
Start the process of sketching out the content and positioning of your press release by answering the important background questions on the news event you’re planning to announce. The answers to these questions will help you and your ad agency or PR firm write a better press release—and helps your PR rep do a better job when they follow up with their media contacts by phone, or e-mail.
Who is your company, where is it located, and what did it just do?
Start with the simplest questions: Briefly describe, in general, what your company does, where it’s based, and your news event. This brief thumbnail description of your company begins to position your company in the editor’s mind:
“Dyalogix, Inc., of Houston, TX, one of the largest suppliers of electronic building security systems for the banking industry, today announced the introduction of…”
“Tricon Systems, of San Jose, CA, supplier of smart-card verification hardware and services, announces the release of Version 8.0 of its popular…”
What is it most single important thing about our announcement that readers need to know?
Focus on the single most important fact that readers need to know about your company news announcement. For example, if you’re introducing a new product or service, what is its single most important and unique feature? In what way does your product make a dramatic improvement in some aspect of the potential customer’s business? If you’re announcing an upgrade to a product, state the most important aspect about the upgrade: Is it the first time this new feature has been introduced to the market? Is it now available at a lower cost? Is there no other feature like it available in competing products?
What are the main benefits to readers of your news announcement, and why are these important?
Once you’ve created the “news” of your announcement, fill in the reasons why this news is important to readers of the publications in your industry. DO NOT make the common mistake of recycling the sales copy benefits in your company’s product brochure. This will make your press release read like marketing copy, and marketing copy cannot be easily re-written into a business news feature.
Instead, talk through each of these reasons in a low-key way, as if you were a third-person observer. Here are three different examples:
“…by giving plant operators more immediate response than previous models, the Dymax 4000 switch controller saves up to 6% on bulk liquid materials cost, according to the company.”
“…the company’s new scoring system allows insurance underwriters to quickly and inexpensively screen large commercial property portfolios for their potential environmental risk, to select only those properties requiring further investigation, and minimizing the high cost of on-site environmental surveys.”
“…the new system generates higher injection pressure and provides more accurate control of very small volumes of fuel, allowing for better engine combustion and cleaner diesel engine operation.”
Describe each of the main benefits of your news announcement in a detached, factual manner. Conforming to this business news-writing style makes it easier for writers and editors to adapt your press release to their own publications. At the very least, even if your press release is not picked up for a feature article, producing it in virtually ready-to-print business news-writing style makes it very easy for a writer or editor to lift the text of your press release wholesale and publish it as a smaller piece in the “New Product News” section of their publication, which is often done for news announcements not deemed important enough to become standalone news articles.
What is the context of this announcement? How does it fit in with your industry, and your competitors?
Now, put your news announcement in perspective, by positioning it within the context of your industry, and your competition. How beneficial is your product improvement to the industry? Is it substantially better than, or different from, products offered by your competitors, and, from a strategic basis, how does this put your company ahead of your competition?
What you are looking for is a high-concept statement that will make editors stop and think about how your news announcement fits in with the changes occurring in the industry. As mentioned earlier, if you can link your news announcement to a significant market trend or other industry issue, here’s where to do it:
“…the company’s clean-burning diesel engine technology helps vehicle manufacturers meet increasingly strict Federal and state emissions standards.”
“…the system, now available for the first time to the insurance industry, puts powerful database risk screening capabilities within reach of every property transaction.”
“For long-range future technologies such as fuel cells, Hyperdrive technology is fully compatible and represents a natural evolutionary step…“
“Lenders may face increased potential environmental liability risk as a result of a recent federal appeals court ruling….”
Writing a Press Release: The Lead
The lead paragraph, or “lead,” is the most important part of the body text of your press release. It boils down all of the essential facts of your news announcement into a concise paragraph containing all of the required Who/What/When/Where/Why information, fully summarizing the entire release.
The lead of a press release should be so self-contained that it would give a reader the gist of your news announcement, if it were to be lifted from the rest of the press release and printed by itself. In fact, lead paragraphs for press releases are intended for this purpose, allowing editors and writers to literally copy and paste the first paragraph of a release into one-paragraph news announcements for their publications.
To write your lead paragraph, combine the notes you’ve already jotted down in the four previous steps:
- Who/where is your company, and what it just did;
- The single most important fact about your news announcement;
- The main benefits of your announcement, and why/how these are important;
- The context of how your announcement fits with your industry and your competition (this is optional for a lead paragraph, but should be worked into the body of your press release)
Press release lead paragraph format: These essential facts can now be re-written by you, or by your PR firm, into a single press release lead paragraph that strings together the information above in the following order in the well-known “5W’s” format:
• Who/Where: “Company name, of city, state” from 1.) above;
• What: Brief background description of your company, from 1.) above;
• When: News action—“announces/has now introduced… ” etc. from 2.) above;
• Why: Single most important fact from 2.) above;
• How: Main benefits from 3.) above;
• (Optional): Context information, from 4.) above
Here is an example lead paragraph for a press release, with the “who/what/when/where/why” and factual news information combined into a concise lead paragraph for a press release:
“Environmental Risk Information and Imaging Services (ERIIS) of Alexandria, VA, an industry-leading supplier of property-specific environmental due-diligence information to the engineering, financial, legal, insurance, investment, and real estate markets, has introduced a new environmental information service and property scoring system that allows lenders, insurance underwriters and other holders of large real estate property portfolios to quickly and inexpensively screen multiple properties for environmental liability risk.”
By itself, the lead gives an editor or writer at a publication enough information about the new product to decide whether or not it’s of interest. The rest of the release tells the rest of the story and fills in the other essential product details, applications, and benefits.
If you’re writing your press releases for your company, link to PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com), to see thousands of examples of press releases for companies in a wide range of industries. Read press releases here for some good ideas and inspiration for writing your own company’s press releases.
Filling In the Details: The Body of Your Press Release
After your lead, the body of your press release tells the story of your news announcement by expanding the essential facts summarized in your lead paragraph. If your ad agency, PR firm or marketing consultant is writing your company’s press release, they can use your outline notes covered in the previous two sections as background material for writing the final release.
If you are writing your own press release, once you’ve written a solid lead paragraph, you will find that writing the rest of the release is essentially a process of expanding each of the key facts of your news announcement and arranging them in order of their importance.
The inverted pyramid: Like the “5W’s” rule used for writing the lead paragraph of your press release, the format of the body of your release borrows from the “inverted pyramid” newspaper writing style, where the most important fact is discussed in the first paragraph after the lead, the second-most important fact is covered next, and so on.
This writing format puts the most important content of your press release “up front” in the first few paragraphs. Just like it helps busy newspaper readers get the essential details of an article by reading the first few paragraphs, the inverted pyramid style gives busy editors and writers the most important pieces of information in your release quickly, as they decide whether or not to cover your story.
Expand the key facts you’ve sketched out for your press release: Start writing the body copy of your press release by expanding on each of the key facts—the statements, features, and benefits—you’ve already sketched out for your news announcement. Answering the following questions about each fact helps you generate the information you’ll need to fill in the body text of your press release:
• How does this fact add value to your existing product or service?
• How does this fact help potential users of your company’s product?
• How do current users benefit from this fact?
• Is this fact important to more than one type of user in your market? If so, who are these other users, and how do each of them benefit?
• How does this fact add value to your company?
• How does this fact make your product or service unique, or different from, your competitors’ products?
• How does this distinctiveness improve the industry or marketplace served by your product?
You’ll notice some of these questions are variations on the same “What are the benefits?” question, but each are posed in a slightly different way. Writing a specific answer to each of these questions helps you to write about the benefits of your news announcement in a factual way that goes beyond the promotionally-oriented language of your company’s sales copy, and helps you extract every important detail from each essential fact of your news announcement.
Since these are the same of questions that an editor or reporter at a trade publication would ask you about your announcement, answering them in your press release provides the editor or writer with all the detail they need to help them write their story in a way that’s interesting to their readers, increasing the odds your news announcement will be covered in their publication.
Write these answers out in a narrative form, as if you were telling them to someone sitting next to you. As you fill in the detail, each fact becomes a paragraph of its own. When you read each finished paragraph, certain important points may jump out—a key aspect of your news announcement, or a major reader benefit that an editor or writer should see. These should be moved to the head of each paragraph and reworded to make them into the lead sentences for each paragraph.
After you’ve expanded each of the essential facts, organize them in your release, from most-important to least-important fact, after your lead paragraph.
Next, read your entire press release with “new eyes,” as if you knew nothing about your company or product, and you were an editor or writer reading it for the very first time, by asking these questions:
• Do I get the gist of the announcement from reading most of the lead paragraph, and the first sentence in each of the first few paragraphs?
• Does it answer the most commonly-asked questions a reader would be likely to ask about the announcement?
• Have I made it easy for a busy reader to understand, by minimizing unnecessary technical jargon, marketing buzzwords, and other barriers to readability?
• Have I “walked the reader” through my announcement, clearly presenting each essential fact, eliminating all doubt that any key fact has been omitted, or not explained well enough?
Writing Style Tips for Press Releases
Whether you are writing your own company’s press releases, or assigning this task to your outside ad agency or PR firm, here are some additional pointers on press release presentation style:
• Write for publication: The more you can make your press release read as if it were a news article, the higher the chance it will attract the notice of the editors and writers who cover your industry. The most effective press releases are written in a dry, factual style, as if the writer of the release was an outsider assigned to report the news your company is announcing. Your press release should read so much like a news article that an editor or writer could lift entire paragraphs from it wholesale and use it in their publications, as many do;
• It’s news, not hype: Banish all marketing hype, buzzwords, and unnecessary technical jargon from your press releases. Marketing managers and their PR firms fall into the habit of stringing together marketing buzz-phrases into meaningless, shopworn boilerplate. Editors grow tired of reading press releases from “growth-oriented” companies whose products are “industry compliant,” and that provide a “complete solution.” Nothing dooms a company’s news announcement more than a press release peppered with wall-to-wall marketing buzzwords.
Writing Your Press Release Headline
The headline is the most important part of your press release. Like a headline to a news story, it is a concise summary of your company’s news announcement. When used in a press release, your headline helps the editor or writer at the publication make a quick, yes-or-no decision on whether your announcement falls in their area of interest, and if they should take a closer look.
If you’re writing your own press release, write its headline after you’ve written your press release. This way, you’ll be better able to distill your news announcement into the single best sentence that describes it, using the fewest words possible.
The most common way to write a headline for your press release is to join the “who/what” parts of your news announcement, as in who is the company, and what has it done:
• Tyrell Corp. Adds New Imaging System to its VyComp Metallurgical Inspection System
• Metacortex Announces Windows NT 15.0 Compatibility to its TM Supply Chain Management System
Another option is to substitute your product or service for the “who,” and then combine it with the “what” that describes it:
• New Cell Phone Accessory Lets Users Make and Receive Wireless Calls from Wired Home Phone Systems
• New Fuel Cell System Adds Low-Cost Backup Power Options for the Utility Industry
While the “who/what” method of headline writing is the one used most often in press releases, you can develop some very interesting and eye-catching headlines by picking out and forming different combinations of any two (and sometimes three) of the “who/what/why/how” parts of your press release. Whichever way you go, the most effective headline is usually the shortest one that best summarizes the content of your news announcement.
Other Press Release Elements
To put your press release into final form, add the following elements:
Contact heading and date: Place the following text above the headline of your press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: [Current date here]
Contact: [Your name and title, or PR firm contact name and title] [Contact phone number and e-mail]
Put the name and phone number of the person responsible for speaking to the media about this announcement. This is usually the PR rep, if your ad agency or PR firm is handling PR for your company; or it’s you if you’re handling your company’s PR effort. The date of your release tells editors and writers how current your announcement is, and serves as a kind of “date stamp” for older press releases posted in the “News” link on your company’s Web site.
Contact closing paragraph: As the last paragraph of your press release, let editors and writers know where they can call or e-mail to get more detail on your announcement:
“For more information on ______________ , call [name, title] of [company/PR firm] at [phone number and e-mail].”
The time when a busy editor is working against a same-day publication deadline and wants to cover your news announcement always seems to be the time when they’ve lost your contact information, so make sure to include it as the last paragraph of your press release.
Backgrounder: At the bottom of your press release, and set in small type, print a single paragraph that gives writers and editors a brief, general description of your company, its background, the markets and industries it serves, and any other information that fills in the details on your company and its product line.
Length of press release: Generally, a press release should fill just one side of a letter-size page (about 500 words). Any longer than this, and it’s likely that only the first page will be read.
Quoting company executives in press releases: When quoting executives for company news announcements, many PR firms literally fabricate quotes from company executives in the press release. Editors and writers can always spot a ghost-written quote, so this is always a mistake, because it weakens the credibility of your company’s news announcement.
If you need a quote for your press release, have your PR rep conduct a brief interview of the company executive in charge of the topic covered by your news release, asking for his or her comments on the announcement, just as a reporter would. This gives your press release the authenticity it needs, and communicates the executive’s sense of enthusiasm and excitement on the news announcement in your press release.
Next week, we’ll cover keys to developing media contact lists, and executing B2B and trade media PR announcements. . .
Reader Comments
Responding to last week’s TMN on PR, Tate Hoxworth (tate@tatehoxworth.com) writes:
Eric:
Just saw your article in the latest BMA newsletter regarding B2B PR, and I'd be surprised if you didn't expect some backlash from the PR agency community...
First, if your definition of B2B public relations includes only media relations, then please refer to it as media relations (which constitutes a fraction of a comprehensive PR program). I hope and pray the readers of your article understand that the practice of B2B public relations constitutes much more than your weak definition of making industry news via press releases. Your narrow perspective is an insult to the profession. PR offers so much more -- messaging that supports the company's direction (which sales generally can't stick to, by the way), internal communications, community relations, local or state government relations, web content that optimizes search engine results -- the list could go on.
Second, you assume that every reader's objective is to increase product sales -- a highly presumptuous premise that I'm sure made the article immediately irrelevant to many readers. What if sales are great but the company's community image stinks? What if a company is battling local authorities who threaten to legislate the company out of business? What if a trade editor writes an article about a company's position that hasn't been communicated internally? All of this -- and much more -- is PR's responsibility.
To be sure, if an agency sells $5k per month in services for merely writing press releases and making phone calls -- and calls it PR -- I agree, they should be fired. Good PR firms see the profession as much more than that.
Thanks for listening.
Tate Hoxworth
www.tatehoxworth.com
Tate:
Thanks for your comments. While you are correct when you say that the role of PR does extend to areas beyond serving a company’s sales and marketing function, in the real world of B2B marketing most companies rarely experience the “Tylenol Scare” type crisis event requiring the high-level PR skills and practices you describe.
In most B2B companies, most PR activities focus on the unglamorous job of getting the company coverage for its new product announcements, with the goal of generating sales response—that is, inquiries and new business leads. This is what most B2B marketers actually spend their time on when they’re executing PR programs, especially at small and mid-sized companies. These companies generally don’t have the resources to use PR to employ “messaging that supports the company’s direction”—they just want to get their products announced and, maybe, their story ideas picked up by the trade pubs in their field every once in a while.
Yes, once in a blue moon there may be a crisis—i.e., an accident, a product defect or recall, community issue, etc.—where the company must respond, and quickly. I think the best way for a company to handle these situations from the PR standpoint is to simply tell the truth, take the appropriate action to solve the problem, and publicize the facts. A company’s intent—i.e., whether or not it plays it straight with the public, and its direct action in these situations, are more important influences on the final outcome of the crisis. If the company’s “community image stinks,” then it’s likely there’s a concrete reason for this, and any PR-based effort to improve the company’s image will appear disingenuous, absent the application of direct action by the company to change the conditions that led to its poor image in the first place.
Also, I don’t think it’s presumptuous or irrelevant to stress that the purpose of PR programs should be to increase a company’s sales—either directly, through product press, or indirectly, through related coverage. I think much of the recent talk we hear about the need to “defend” the role of marketing, by improving its “relevancy,” “measurability,” and “ROI” is a result of marketers losing sight of this purpose.
Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@realmarkets.net
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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.
For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:
http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html
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For more information on the new BMA Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Building and Certification (MSA/B/C) training and professional development program, visit http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com
