Full disclosure: I used to be a journalist. Still am from time to time. This is why I still get dozens of press releases every day in my inbox even even though my day job is Writer-in-chief at Articulate Marketing.
It could be worse. Some of my friends who are still fighting in the press trenches are bombarded with hundreds of the things every day. I admit that some of them are useful but you very quickly develop the ability of scanning emails at a glance and binning the majority.
There’s clearly something wrong. As one former colleague of mine put it “PR companies pretend to be excited and journalists pretend to be interested.” I think the basic problem is that all the press releases I receive are still stuck in the analogue era.
There’s no intelligent design in press releases. They evolved in true Darwinian fashion to suit distribution channels which no-one uses any more. When was the last time you sent a press release by post or fax? A couple of bits of A4 is precisely the wrong format for the digital age.
Simply pasting digital versions of the ‘couple of bits of paper’ into an email doesn’t solve the problem. In fact it totally misses the point. I’m not even going to get started on the quality of the actual writing – this is about the format and delivery mechanism.
Let’s look at a couple of effective ways of disseminating information online to see if there’s anything we can use to improve press releases.
- First, email newsletters. The good ones, such as the BBC daily news bulletin, are specifically designed for email. They kick off with strong subject lines, brief summaries, small but evocative pictures and – this is the key bit – links back to the full text which is stored on a website. They are designed to be scanned and they are designed to hook the reader into finding out more.
- Second, opt-in marketing emails. I’m not talking about unwanted spam but emails when someone chooses to receive more information from a company. A good example is Ontracks, a company that sells Hornby and Scalextric online. Their monthly newsletter is welcomed by 11,000 previous customers and generates 5% of their sales revenue. How do they know? Because they track it – each and every link and click.
Why not take the same approach to emailed press releases?
I was reminded of this when I received the following press release from Cambridge Consultants (a cool research company):
In order to fill the large gap in the market for cost and performance sensitive ASIC processors, Cambridge Consultants has developed XAP4, a brand new 16-bit RISC microprocessor IP core. XAP4 is aimed at ASIC designers who currently use larger and more expensive 32-bit processor cores and where an advanced 16-bit core would offer both optimal performance and a reduction in cost.
To see the full story please see
http://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/news_en159.shtml
The subject matter is quite technical but the principle is clear and would work for most kinds of press releases. The brevity of the summary forces them to concentrate on the key points (”optimal performance and a reduction in cost” to my mind) without any waffle.
From my perspective as a reader it is an efficient use of my time. I can scan this in a couple of seconds and decide if it is going to be useful to me. If it is, the call to action is very clear and I can go to the website. Once on the landing page I can easily find contact details and other PR collateral.
From Cambridge Consultant’s perspective, it lets them track the performance of different press releases very accurately. How many PR companies can boast this about their press releases?
This approach also has the merit of making it easier to track the READERSHIP of the email rather than the DISTRIBUTION. You can send out a million press releases but if no-one reads them, you might as well not have bothered. However, Cambridge Consultants can track the number of people clicking through to the webpage and see what percentage of recipients are actually following up on the story.
Data-driven PR: now that would be a first!
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