The Relevancy of a Press Release in the Digital World

When one takes a look at the various tactics in the world of marketing and PR over the last 50 years, few have gone through as much change as the press release. Once created on typewriters and mailed to reporters, the press release has remained paramount to the success of any good PR initiative and continues to remain highly relevant in today’s digital era. That being said, they have evolved into a complex item that can play a direct role in the success of online business through brand recognition and direct traffic as well as through search engine optimization initiatives.

When it comes to communicating the most important news and announcements about your company online, a press release is still regarded as one of the most effective ways to let everyone know what your business is doing. Not only does a press release give you a platform to dictate what information you share and when you share it, it also gives you the ability to reach a large variety of different websites by putting information out across the wire quickly and efficiently.

The biggest changes in online press releases have come in how they can effect a business’ SEO. More than ever before, a press release can make or break an online business, and making sure that your press release is done right can pay massive dividends. As the press release has evolved, there have also been major changes to the best practices involved in crafting one that is relevant to your audience and gets great results. Here are just a couple of aspects of an effective, relevant, press release that any good online business needs to keep in mind in the modern era of press releases:

Follow vs. No Follow

As most digital marketing professionals are aware, one of the core contributors to a good SEO ranking are the various links pointing to your website from other authoritative online publications. When you put a good release out across the wire, it’s likely to get picked up by a lot of websites that will repost your exact release and include a link back to you, so it’s important to note that these links will no longer all help your SEO efforts like they used to. Links from an online press release need to be marked as “rel=nofollow” so that they adhere to Google’s best practices.

This isn’t to say that links from a press release can’t still play a role in helping your business to build a better overall backlink profile. They can actually help by giving you a good balance of followed and nofollowed links, but when it comes to the link itself, it should only play a direct role in your referral traffic and link balance – not bolster keyword rankings. Any good search engine optimization strategy should take press releases in account as a way to build a more robust group of backlinks, but they shouldn’t be used as your main link building strategy to rank for keywords.

Including Visual Assets

Unlike back in the day when a press release sank or swim based on its written content, nowadays it can include engaging images, infographics or videos to help get across what is being said while helping to give any announcement added appeal. To take it one step further, if your press release is about the fact that your business has just released a new piece of multimedia content, it can be extremely powerful to include it right in your press release instead of simply including a link in the release that takes users to your content. This is a great way to get your graphic or video out there while galvanizing some exposure.

Including Social Media

Almost all online businesses now know the power that social media has in terms of both brand recognition and increasing online leads. It should be unsurprising to most then, that social media is crucial to increasing the circulation of any newsworthy topic that your business might be involved in by coupling your press releases with a social media push. Not only can it be used to share the fact that you have issued a press release about a specific topic, social media can be used to share elements of your press release as well, such as images, videos, or written content, to help get more impressions that could lead to more pickups and write-ups about what your business has done.

Social media should stir conversation and engage users, so start a dialogue about your announcement and ask related questions to your audience to provoke further insights from them. Don’t forget to take the time to think about what social platform you’re putting information out on so that you can make sure to tweak it appropriately for that specific channel.

Measure the Effects

Despite changing SEO standards, referral traffic is still the best way to measure the effectiveness of your press release. Particularly after recent studies have shown that impressions may not be an extremely accurate metric to measure how effective a release is, understanding tangible user behavior is particularly important. Focus less on how many outlets posted the releases, and instead consider how many leads it may have brought you through increases in direct and referral traffic. If you’re not seeing any positive ROI on the release, consider alternatives.

Learning from Tradition

One of the most important things to understand with adapting the press release to meet the needs of our digitally-driven world is that some things really shouldn’t be adapted. The essence of a press release and what it sets out to do is still the same as it was at very start of the industry. Content should be informative, easy-to-understand, and interesting. Focus on providing journalists with the information they need and offer your expertise to provide them with educational benefits. When sending to different outlets, think about who is going to care – relevancy is far more important than quantity. It is much more important that a release reach a few of the correct people than a lot of people who don’t care about what it says.

The Relevancy of a Press Release in the Digital World