Marketing is an essential tool for any business owner. Whether they want to increase sales, gain customer loyalty, or bring awareness to their business, effective marketing will help to create long-term success.
Today we will be showing you 6 easy steps on how to write a successful press release for your client. Once you understand these simple steps, you’ll be able to implement this effective tool into their marketing plan with little effort but significant gains; read on to learn more.
What Is a Press Release?
A press release is a marketing tool used by businesses across the world. It is a short newsworthy article that shares information about a business or person. The more relevant the press release is to the business or person and what is going on in the world, the better.
A press release can help any business reach a much wider audience than traditional marketing on sites such as Facebook or Google. There are many benefits to publishing a press release, which includes:
- gaining more awareness
- increasing SEO
- managing a businesses image
- creating relationships with an audience or customers
Now that you understand what a press release is and how it can benefit your client, let’s start writing.
Step 1: Know the Best Time to Publish Your Press Release
Knowing the best time to publish a press release is essential for making the most impact. You want to ensure that your topic is relevant to your client’s business and what is going on in the world around you. Nobody wants to spend their time reading an irrelevant news article. These will just go ignored and receive little to no attention, which is not what we want.
You want your audience to resonate with the content. This is where step number 2 comes into play.
Step 2: Know Your Customers & Audience
The biggest thing you will have to understand when creating a marketing plan is that, in most cases, your audience is not everyone. This is why you need to hone into who your audience is; you can do this by considering the following factors such as:
- where does your audience or customer live?
- what is the estimated age range of your audience or customers?
- do you appeal to a specific gender?
When you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll end up appealing to no one. Keep that quote in mind when you are thinking about the content you’ll be writing about and how you believe your audience or customers will appeal to it.
Step 3: Create an Eye-catching Headline and News Worthy Content
I am sure there have been news articles that have made you take a double take because of how exciting and eye-catching the headline was. That is an aspect that you need to capture in your headline.
Let’s move on to the most critical part of the release, your content. This is where you will write out the article while keeping in mind all of the steps we have previously gone over. It’s not enough to write down a simple story. You need to make it read so well that your audience wants to continue to read it and ultimately go through with your call to action at the end to either share with someone or contact your client.
Step 4: Make the Release Easy to Understand and Gain Information From
In this step, we drive home how important a great piece of writing is for the release. Your press release needs to be somewhat short and to the point. There is no room for run-on sentences and dragged out ideas or stories. You want to think of getting your story across in a way that is easy to understand and not overwhelming to read.
Step 5: Add in Quotes From the Business Owner to Back-Up Information and Claims
An extra way to beef up your content is to include quotes from the business owner. Again staying relevant on the topic at hand is essential to back up your claims and information. It’s also a great way to get your audience to feel connected to your client or the story.
Step 6: Always Add the Contact Information for Your Business
At the end of every press release, you need to add the contact information for your client’s business. This is a call to action, also known as CTA. It gives the readers a clear action to call for a service or more information about your client’s business.
Without this information, readers might not want to take the extra step to search around the internet for contact information. This will leave your client out of quality interactions and decrease the success of the press release.
Example of an Effective Press Release
Here at Web Daytona, we pride ourselves on helping our clients with all aspects of marketing, including writing effective press releases. Here is an example of one successful press release that we created for our client SB Tree Service. Below we will break down how we have applied each step into making this very successful piece.
Step 1: Hurricane season for the southern states runs from June to November, with the peak season from mid-August to October. Therefore uploading this press release in August is extremely relevant to many people living in the south in the midst of hurricane season.
Step 2: Before writing this content, we understood who our audience is. We determined them to be people living in the southern states, going through hurricane season, and perhaps own land and might need a tree removal service to remove trees before they damage their property during a devastating hurricane.
Step 3: We have an eye-catching headline that will help to peak interest in our audience and customers. Our body content is equally relevant and newsworthy.
Step 4: The release is easy to understand and can be skimmed through quickly while still gaining valuable information. The story is short and to the point and does not over complicate the topic.
Step 5: There are at least 4 relevant quotes from the company manager that have been spread throughout the writing. These quotes add dimension to the story and give us an insight into the first-hand experience manager Angel had with hurricane relief in Texas and Louisiana.
Step 6: At the end of the article, there is contact information to get in touch with the company if you need their services and hurricane relief.
Now that you know to write an effective press release, it’s time to level up your client’s marketing plan. By following our 6 easy steps, you’ll be able to reap all of the benefits of publishing an effective press release.