Press Releases – The Questions(s)
Historically press releases have been used only to announce major events and mark historical corporate milestones. They were considered pretty big events and were primarily used to draw favorable publicity to a company. Creating press releases were expensive and time consuming and typically required either an internal PR organization or a contract with an external publicist. They were used in the marketing and sales process as a way of validating company momentum. The most obvious example is announcing a sale which would be used by a savvy sales person to tell potential Customer A that Customer B (usually a competitor) analyzed our product and came to the conclusion that it was best. You, Customer A, should do the same or Company B will use our product to kick your butt.
The advent of the web and search engine technology has radically changed the way press releases are created and used. Now, a savvy marketer can create a press release in about 15 minutes and release it for free to be picked up by all of the major search engines which will put it in front of interested people in a matter of seconds if they enter the right set of key words. In addition to driving traffic, this press release can generate backlinks to your site which in turn will increase its importance and visibility which makes it more likely to be found by even more interested parties. If done properly over time you generate a self perpetrating cycle that will really drive your business.
Knowing this but not having a background in public relations I had the following questions about the best way to use press releases to market my companies:
- Why use major paid press release companies and when they can be done for free?
- What is the best major PR company?
- What is the best free PR outlet?
- Does it make sense to release a PR through multiple outlets?
- How much traffic will a press release drive?
- How many back links will a press release generate?
- How to optimize the press release to create maximum traffic and backlinks?
So like any good engineer I did weeks worth of research and designed a batch of test using my two companies Connexius and iSupport Services to answer these questions. The very first release went out yesterday which can be found “hereâ€. I am going to release a series of blogs over the next month that hopefully will answer these questions and more so that you do not have to go through the same effort.