If your goal is to get PR for your company, and to look at press releases as a way to market your company, you simply cannot judge a PR campaign on one or two press releases. No PR firm is going to sign a contract and issue one or two press releases, because they know that is not a PR campaign. A PR campaign contains a series of press releases to the media in which you use different approaches, different hooks, to engage the media. By doing this, you will eventually have success.
If you were to dedicate yourself to between six and ten well-written press releases with an assortment of hooks and angles for your company, you WILL receive media coverage, and that media coverage WILL exceed your press release costs by at least a factor of ten.
If you are committed to it, and you are doing it right, you WILL get media coverage. We have never seen an instance where it hasn’t happened.
If you are having difficulty, you need to have a no-cost discussion with one of our editors about varying your approach, including different hooks and angles. There are lots of opportunities for press releases to work but it is also easy to be lulled into a one-dimensional approach to PR in which you believe you’re trying something new but you’re really not. It only takes between one and three influential places to pick up your press release to make a huge difference for your company, including trade publications, a writeup on a specialized website, or an influential blog. We are not talking about a situation where you’re getting 40 or 50 stories about your company. You can achieve major PR success with just a few quality pickups. If your news is not out there, you’re not going to make it.
If you’re judging PR on a single press release, we don’t want to take your money in the first place. Because in all likelihood, it’s not going to be business-transformative for you. We’d rather see someone commit to doing four press releases over the next year to see if it’s going to work for them. And even that is a little bit short-sighted. We’ve just never seen an instance where PR can’t be effective for a business that sticks to a formula of issuing a series of press releases with varied hooks.
If you visit the Customer Success Stories on our website here, you can view the experience of fellow business owners. In nearly all cases, their press releases were not breaking news. How did they do it? In one word: persistence.