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When it comes to content, sometimes old school can be a good thing (namely, when it comes to old school rap or Throwback Thursday on Instagram). But when it comes to your company’s public relations strategy, being old school isn’t advantageous for your business or your brand. 

Ten years ago, people still relied on morning papers for news. Today, the vast majority of your company’s customers and prospects scan headlines on Twitter or see what’s trending in their Facebook feed.

People now have control over where, when, and how they consume information. As a result, public relations is no longer about feeding into a traditional news cycle; it’s about providing relevant content when, where, and how your prospects, influencers, and customers will consume it.

Sounds pretty hopeless, right? Wrong. While relationship-building still helps you get into popular publications, we now have the opportunity to quit playing the waiting game and generate our own buzz. By turning your PR strategy into an inbound one, you create opportunities that weren’t there before and carve out a place for your company, building meaningful mindshare with your target audiences in the process.

One of the most crucial updates to make to your PR strategy is to think of press releases as an opportunity to connect to the audiences you care about — including, but not limited to, reporters. 

What Is a Press Release / News Release?

Whether we call it a “press release,” a “press statement,” a “news release,” or a “media release,” we’re always talking about the same basic thing: an official announcement (written or recorded) that an organization issues to the news media and beyond.

Most press releases are succinct at just a page long. Two pages tops. Ultimately, companies want to provide enough information so that news outlets have sufficient material for publishing their own stories about whatever the company is announcing in the release.

And while it may be tempting to craft a press release that embellishes your company’s accomplishments or twists the facts to make a story sound more intriguing to the media, remember: Press releases live in the public domain, which means your customers and prospective customers can see them. So instead of thinking of a press release solely as a ticket to earning news coverage, you should also think of it as a valuable piece of marketing content.

When Should I Distribute a Press Release?

While there’s no cut-and-dried formula for when a press release should be written (and distributed), here’s a few reasons when it’s a good idea:

• New product launches
• Updates to existing products
• Opening a new office
• Introducing a new partnership
• Rebranding
• Promoting/hiring a new executive
• Receiving an award

A regular cadence of (meaningful) news can help a company stand out and build mindshare with journalists over time, so that’s where the press release (or news announcement) comes in. 

Press Releases Can Be a Viable Content Type

Many people think press releases have to be chock full of buzzwords and branded terms. Big data anyone? Five syllable words you have to look up on Thesaurus.com? Quotes from every executive on the planet that go on for pages? We’ve seen it all. Unfortunately, so have reporters — and they are not fans. 

So instead of stuffing your next release with jargon, take a page out of our book (okay, fine, ebook), The Newsworthy Guide to Inbound Public Relations, and brainstorm some creative approaches for your next announcement. Can you include new data? A remarkable graphic or video? A shareable SlideShare? If so, a creative angle will often help carry your content and increase the likelihood of social sharing. 

Even so, a press release can still be a really valuable medium for communicating news to your audiences. You just have to make it readable, relevant, and relatable.

We have crafted this comprehensive, easy-to-follow press release template complete with a promotional plan and considerations for your next announcement. We use these same guidelines when writing our releases here at HubSpot and created a faux, sample release to illustrate what content goes where and why.

How to Write a Press Release [With Example]

You’ve got your announcement in mind, and now it’s time to get it down in words to share with your community, industry, and followers. Take Catbrella Inc., a fictitious ad agency, which just gained its 10th Twitter follower after two years of paid social media efforts. To announce its achievement, Catbrella could issue a press release like the one we’ve dissected below.*

Sample Press Release:

*Disclaimer: HubSpot is entirely responsible for the silliness of this faux announcement. 

Rule 1: Make Your Headline Irresistible 

Just like writing the perfect blog post title, setting up your press release for success starts with your headline. You only have one line to work with, which can seem scary, but consider diction carefully to make your headline captivating.

Use action verbs, clear, understandable language, and keep your headline simple and short — fortune (and search engines) reward the brief, so keep your title to one line to clearly focus people’s attention on your topline message. 

Most importantly, make it interesting: Keep in mind that reporters get dozens, if not hundreds, of releases each day, so invest the time to write a compelling headline. It’s worth the time and effort on your part. 

Rule 2: Don’t Play Hard to Get

For reporters, analysts, influencers, or followers to be inclined to share your announcement, you have to tell them upfront why they should care.

The first paragraph of your release should cover the who, what, why, where, and how of your new launch, update, or development. Reporters don’t have a ton of time to sift through details and fluffy background information — they just need the facts that’ll help them tell your story to someone else from a position of authority. 

There shouldn’t be any new, crucial information covered after this section that the reader could potentially miss. 

Rule 3: Offer a Tempting Quotable 

Once you’ve set the scene, it’s time to bring your details to life with a quote that reporters can use for context around your announcement and help paint a picture of how your news affects the given industry, customer base, and landscape.

Ideally, quotes will be from key stakeholders in your company including your executive team, project leads, or those directly impacted by your announcement. Quoting key figures and authorities underlines the importance of your development. The chosen quote should shape your narrative and emphasize the core of the announcement. Don’t ask everyone in your office for a comment or feel compelled to quote all 25 people included in the acquisition — pick one or two critical spokespeople and focus the quotes around their unique perspective. 

Rule 4: Provide Valuable Background Information

In this last paragraph, keep in mind that the reader already has all of the vital details and information they need to file a story or spread the word.

It can be tempting to provide superfluous facts and tidbits about your company or the development of your announcement — we sometimes think a piece of writing is lacking if it isn’t drawn-out and just shy of being a novella. However, a press release needs to be helpful and concise.

Offer details here that strengthen your narrative, like creative or noteworthy ways your company developed the project or announcement at hand. Or, when applicable, comment on future implications of your announcement. 

Rule 5: Make the “Who” and “What” Obvious 

Twitter is chock-full of reporters lamenting press releases or pitches that don’t clearly explain what the company does or what the announcement is actually about, so instead of being the butt of a joke, make your release incredibly easy to reference. 

Describe what your company does in clear, plain English, include a link to your company’s homepage early on, and make your boilerplate succinct and straightforward. If you cite data, include a reference link for the data source, and make sure every name in the release has an associated title and company as well.

To keep yourself honest on this front, ask a friend or colleague to read the release without context and ask if they can easily and readily explain why the announcement matters, what your company does, and why the executives included are quoted. If the answer to any of those questions is no, get back to the drawing board. 

The key to keeping your PR strategy new school is forgetting preconceived notions of what public relations is and instead focusing on creating highly remarkable content. Traditional press releases can still be really valuable when executed well, so instead of ditching releases as a tactic, give them a modern makeover to make them more useful for your marketing. 

Think about how you’ve used inbound methods to transform your marketing strategies to be more personalized, approachable, and build relationships. Those same principles apply to your PR strategy: Create content to craft your own story and use tactful outreach to get reporters and analysts familiar with your brand.

Tips for Publishing Press Releases

Writing a press release is really only half the battle. Once you’re finished with production, it’ll be time to focus on distribution.

Of course, we’re all familiar with the traditional distribution levers we can pull, which include publishing the press release on our website/blog, as well as sharing the press release with our followers/subscribers via social media and email. But for ensuring a press release gets the maximum amount of distribution possible, here are some tips you can follow.

1) Reach out to specific journalists.

Instead of blasting a press release out to every journalist you can find an email address for, focus on a few journalists who have experience covering your industry (and company, hopefully) and send them personalized messages. Connect the dots. Show why what you wrote connects to what they write.

2) Don’t be afraid to go offline.

Most journalists have mountains of emails (and press releases) to sort through. Try sending your release through snail mail or another offline channel to differentiate yourself.

3) Send the release to top journalists the day before.

Give journalists some time to craft a story around your press release by sending it to them — under embargo — the day before it officially goes live. (FYI “under embargo” just means they aren’t allowed to share the information in the press release until the time you specify.)

4) To avoid competition, don’t publish your release on the hour.

If you’re publishing your press release on a distribution service like PR Newswire or Business Wire, avoid publishing it on the hour (e.g., 1 p.m., or 3 p.m., or 5 p.m.). The reason? Most companies schedule their releases to go out on the hour, which means if your release goes out on the hour too, it’s more likely to get lost in the shuffle. Instead, try going with a more distinct time (e.g., 1:12 p.m., or 3:18 p.m., or 5:22 p.m.).

5) Share your media coverage.

If all goes according to plan, and your press release gets picked up by the media, your job still isn’t finished. To keep the buzz going, you can release a “second wave” of distribution by sharing the specific stories that news outlets write based on your press release.

What other best practices do you follow when writing press releases? Share your thoughts with us below, and don’t forget to download our free press release template here.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October 2013 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

 

You know what hurts? Spending roughly three weeks (or more) shepherding an email from ideation to deployment … only to realize later that an error made it all the way through to your customers’ inboxes.

I know this feeling all too well — I’ve made a few dingers myself over the years. And while none of the mishaps resulted in an apology email, they all still haunt me. Want an example? How about this subject line on behalf of The Home Depot: “New Lower Prices on Lightning.”

The lesson: Waiting until after approvals are finished to manually type in a variant subject line exponentially increases your risk of failure. (Side note: How cool would it be if The Home Depot actually sold lightning bolts?)

But many times it’s not just a contextual spelling or grammatical mistake that makes it through. Sometimes it’s the UX of a landing page, a broken link, or even just a backend issue.

At Grammarly, we’re committed to learning from our mistakes — especially the grammatical ones. That’s why we’ve put a bunch of proactive safety nets in place to help us keep tabs on email quality.

Want to learn more about these processes? We’ll walk you through them below.

6 Tips & Processes for Maintaining Email Quality

1) Aggressively integrate proofreading into your workflow.

This is number one for a reason. It’s your first, middle, and last line of defense. At Grammarly, we use both our product and a human copy editor to be doubly sure nothing slips through.

To give you a better sense of just how careful we our, check out our high-level workflow:

1. Ideation/Planning
2. Copywriting
3. Proofreading
4. Design
5. Proofreading
6. QA (Quality Assurance)
7. Proofreading

We rely on both software and a human editor for a few reasons. For one, we’re firm believers in “eating our own dog food.” Our team of world-class linguists are constantly iterating our product to ensure it’s something we can get behind. But we’re also firm believers in the power of context, which is why we have a full-time or freelance proofreader run through all of our email copy to ensure that no stone is left unturned. 

The outcome? Quality content that feels really human. 

2) Create efficient and actionable customer feedback loops.

After you send, keep your eyes and ears out for qualitative feedback. These days, it’s fairly easy to set up a loop via Slack (or Hipchat, etc.) that makes real-time user feedback actionable for your organization. Here’s how we do it:

• Scenario A: Deploy Emails > User Engages > User Provides Comments on Social Media (positive or negative)
• How we solve for it: Our social media team helps us monitor company mentions on Twitter for several hours after a large campaign goes live.

If a user is having a buggy experience with the product landing page, for example, then we work with our social media manager right away to develop a fast, helpful response. If the problem appears to be a corner-case or temporary issue, we alert the product team right away.

• Scenario B: Deploy Emails > User Engages > User Replies Directly to Our Email > Reply Automatically Creates a Zendesk Ticket > Customer Support Team Manages Tickets
• How we solve for it: The secret sauce for feasible automation here was ensuring that any replies to our marketing campaigns automatically create Zendesk tickets. Our support team autonomously handles the cases they can solve themselves or have a known resolution for. Anything qualitative is shared via a #Marketing-Replies Slack channel that the email team monitors along with the support team. This process facilitates not only quick resolutions but also assistance with copywriting for responses that may need extra nuance.

The biggest piece of advice here is to look for feedback and the heartbeat of every single large send. This feedback may not affect your team directly, but by tracking it and relaying it to appropriate teams, you’ll increase your value — and that should do wonders to strengthen the company perception of the email team. You’ll also learn about phrases that may not resonate with your audience so that you can refine your style over time.

3) Balance autonomy and redundancy.

The most important part of your final approval process is a system of checks and balances.

Try to keep it as lean but potent as possible. Have one main stakeholder checking all the variables, and specialists ensuring quality for their niches. Here’s what this process might look like across teams:

• Coder and/or Designer: Checks email rendering across clients (we use Litmus), implements all links, tracking, alt tags, etc., and loads the HTML into the email platform.
• QA Team: Tests all the above variables across possible use cases in production (i.e., they deploy from the email platform).
• Main Project Manager: Checks all of the above before deployment — at least at a high level — and ensures final versions are sent to any necessary stakeholders (your boss, legal team, proofreader, etc.). The project manager is likely to be your email marketing person.
• Proofreader: Gives final approval of creative. Ideally, the final test send should not be the first time your proofreader is seeing the copy.

One additional piece of advice: Don’t put the final QA check solely on the project manager. And if you are the project manager, don’t cut corners in the interest of efficiency. Nowadays, with the ever-shifting variables to optimize for in email marketing, there are just too many things that can go wrong.

4) Choose a cadence for revisiting and auditing automated emails.

This one’s short and sweet: Don’t set it and forget it. Revisit your life cycle creative like it’s your core product. Shoot to revisit your life cycle at a cadence that makes sense and use a good decision framework for business impact and UX.

At minimum, don’t go longer than a year without revisiting live creative.

5) Review samples thoroughly for dynamic emails.

Another short one: If you’re sending out personalized emails with a lot of dynamic content, then make sure you preview multiple variations ahead of a deployment.

Grammarly’s weekly statistics emails are 1:1 and have over 25 unique data slots. There is no way we can preview all variations during our QA. However, we do have a test list of employees that we use to eyeball all of these touch points before hitting send.

6) Don’t let a robot do all the writing. 

There are a lot of cool third-party technologies in the email world today. And while we’ve seen our fair share of demos, we try not to rely too much on automation for copywriting. 

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t perform meaningful experiments to identify new ways to optimize your email copy. But allowing machine learning to take the wheel entirely could jeopardize the quality and consistency of your email strategy. After all, these automated tools usually optimize individual email campaigns, but aren’t able to think about the entire customer journey.

In short: Evaluate these tools with extreme caution. While having a robot spit out 100 subject lines for you sounds great, you should always check to make sure that the outcome reflects your brand’s message and voice. 

But don’t let this perspective scare you away completely, though. There is likely a hybrid process that still allows for steps one through five above to be baked in for quality control. You should vet these opportunities yourself and make an informed decision. But if you start selling lightning instead of lighting, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

What are you best tips and tricks for ensuring email quality? Share them with us in the comments section below.