Content Marketing Today

How to Make 33,000 Online Impressions with Your News Release!

Reach Way Beyond the Traditional Press Corps

When you limit the potential audience for your news release to just the press — and perhaps just the local press, you are ignoring tens of thousands of interested readers. These days, you can and should paint on a much broader canvas. In fact, you must reach beyond the traditional press outlets to all of the new influencers (to borrow Paul Gillin’s term) and to prospective customers as well. This much broader audience may very well care about the news you have a share. We took this newer approach. That’s how we made 33,000 impressions — and got 553 journalists and prospective customers to read about the launch of our e-book.

How did we do it? We took advantage of a very affordable tool, PR Web, which has a vast reach into the ranks of the press and beyond the two ultimate customers. You might think that’s expensive and difficult to do. But it’s not.

We used PR Web to let the world know about our e-book, Get Content. Get customers. Our public relations expert, Samantha Scott, helped us to craft a news release, which she then submitted to PR Web. We designed the release to pique the interest of a broad audience, who might be interested in our topic of content marketing. It’s important not to think of “press” releases, but rather of “news” releases. Why? Because you are thinking about much broader audience than the traditional press corps. You are reaching out to the new media including bloggers and other online pundits. Perhaps, most importantly, you are also reaching out to prospects who may read your news on any number of news related websites.

Of course, it’s a numbers game. Although we made 33,000 impressions, a relatively small number of individuals, 553, actually read the release. But what’s more exciting from our perspective is that 81 individuals actually downloaded our e-book. And though we don’t know for sure, it’s highly likely that most of those actually read all or part of the e-book. If we had relied on a traditional press release sent to a very narrow audience, very few press folks would have downloaded our e-book.

Although you may want to hire a talented PR professional such as Samantha Scott, you can also do all this on your own with lots of help from the PR Web web site. The PR Web folks walk you through everything you need to do to crank out a successful news release. They also provide a number of case studies to show you exactly what works and why.

You do need to think differently about public relations in the Internet era. The good news is that you can generate online buzz for your product or service, much less expensively than you could in the old-fashioned way. By all means, maintain strong personal relationships with your press contacts, but begin to reach well beyond the reporters and editors that you already know.