Professional communication includes distributing media releases. As a PR professional, you want your customers, media professionals and other key stakeholders to know about your new product, special event or important development among staff. To do this, you write a media release to be distributed through digital channels. What are digital media relations and the benefits of it for companies and organisations? What are the advantages of digital media relations? When is the right time to publish a media release? What else do you need to consider before you even start writing a media release?
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Digital media relations involve you communicating with your customers, media professionals and major stakeholders through PR portals, your own website, social media and emails. The objective here is to promote a company or organisation’s brand, products or services. Digital media relations play a significant role in modern PR and has some important advantages.
The biggest advantage of digital media relations is that both time and costs are kept in check. Marketing campaigns and anything else steered by marketing tend to be more cost intensive.
The reach digital media relations can provide you with is much greater. Media and public relations work lets you obtain reach and visibility for your own topics, products, and values. You attract attention from media professionals and stakeholders while guaranteeing all target groups can more easily find your topics with their search engines.
Finally, one more point and the most important of all: PR professionals can build strong relationships with the media and their players with good media and public relations work, placing their own topics and values upfront. This is because readers, for example, of trade media, will perceive reports about your own company from you more credibly, making them more worthwhile than an advertisement.
Before you even start writing a media release, you should be clear what its objective is going to be. What are you looking to achieve with it? Do you want to tell the trade media about a personal matter? Are you seeking more reach and raising awareness, or are you looking to increase sales of your products and services? Or do you wish to attract jobseekers to your own company?
The next question you need to answer is about your target groups. Who might be interested in what you want to say? The more precisely you define your target groups, the more specifically you can aim your media release and the more accurately you can tailor your distribution list to whom you wish to reach.
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Is the occasion or the topic really relevant for the media?
Figures that surprise journalists are a good reason to issue a media release. Check with your company if they have any stats suitable for a media release.
Prizes and awards are another excellent story to put in a media release. These stories highlight people and companies that have done something special or incredible. This is just what people want to read about in reports.
Anniversaries are joyful occasions. It can be the silver anniversary of a company, twenty years of a sporting event or the 50th season of a popular children’s programme. Take a look at your company to see what anniversaries are coming up soon.
As a rule, media releases about an executive appointment or new hire are usually exciting, because they are associated with hopes of positive changes. Tip: When including personal details in the media release, don’t forget a photo.
Such media releases are about new products ready to conquer the market. However, they do not always have to be about a product just released. Even the sale of a millionth pack of a popular pasta can be worth reporting.
Your company or organisation is hosting an awards ceremony or announcing a prize. So you are organising a festive event and wish to report it in your media release.
There is no ideal time to distribute a media release. Just like there is no perfect day of the week or best time of the day. Nonetheless, most media releases tend to go out between Tuesday and Thursday. A morning dispatch is generally more suitable for many editorial offices, but radio stations will need media material in the early morning hours between 3 and 7 am, and for financial reporting an announcement before the stock exchange opens can be favourable if the news is good. But when the timing of the news is not so critical, the media release can be distributed on Sunday or even during a holiday. These are periods when an editorial team often finds it difficult to get stories and they are grateful for new material. Always think about editorial deadlines and publication dates for your most influential media.
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Email still remains one of the most popular distribution channels. Before you email your media release, however, make sure your distribution list has been updated. Never send your media release indiscriminately to every possible recipient. Before each mailing, review the contacts on the distribution list and make sure the particular media release is relevant for them. Choose a subject that is worthy and exciting. Remember that journalists need facts and information, preferably as fast as possible and easy to read.
Besides sending media materials to the media, it makes sense to post them on your own website, too. You can provide different options for further processing with each media release, such as a PDF download, forwarding as an email or sharing on social media.
In addition, it is advisable to distribute your media release on your own social media channels. Social networks not only let you reach your own customers, but also many media professionals and multipliers, too.
You can also put your media release on a portal, where media representatives and other stakeholders can subscribe and read releases. The degree of professionalism among media portals differs, with some catering to a specific industry. They offer an additional opportunity to increase your web reach. One of them, with the widest reach in Germany, is Presseportal, a service from news aktuell with over 1 million visits a year.
When you distribute your media material to the media, they decide whether to include your story in their coverage. This is not so with ‘native ads’, where the publication of your media release in an editorial environment is guaranteed. The content is marked as an advertisement, but the design and style of native ads are adapted to the respective medium and optimised for search engines.
Building up a media distribution list takes a lot of time and effort, is resource intensive and requires constant maintenance and updating of media contacts. This is where outsourcing to external service providers like news aktuell can relieve you from such hard work.
If the occasion for your media release and what it covers are rather critical for the broader public, professional PR service providers such as news aktuell can offer quick help. news aktuell is a dpa subsidiary with access to a network that enjoys high reach and offers visibility for your media material. Its ots service sends your media releases directly to the editorial offices of news agencies such as KEYSTONE-SDA, the daily media, radio stations and even online media - and always to the right departments.
In addition, news aktuell provides you with all your media material bundled in its Presseportal dedicated newsroom. Presseportal.ch has the widest reach in all of Switzerland. This means more traffic for your media release, a higher ranking in search engines and thus more visibility.
renteria is news aktuell’s PR software with over 612,000 data records with international contacts. They are constantly updated by our in-house research team. Using renteria, you can create customised media distribution lists.
It has an integrated mailing tool that lets you easily distribute your PR material. You can also use the HTML editor to adapt your mailing layout individually to your corporate identity. Added features gives you the option of integrating CTA buttons, selecting an individual address or uploading files.
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