Thursday 10 January 2013

The Press Release



This post is a follow up on a question regarding the Press Release services we offer at AXSES and the services and strategies we use to get the best results.

Yes! We do all the work leading up to the PR, including the release writing and the follow up. There is a lot of blogging and publishing that has to be in place before we will send out a Press Release. After the release is published, there is more work to promote it and make it effective.

Before the Press event, we need to be sure we have a suitable video to be featured in the PR. We need blogs, website landing pages and special reports. All of these are created, published and promoted prior to the press event.
We write the PR, create the videos and articles and tweak the websites, blogs and online collateral. In many cases we build magazine style documents. 

These also get published separately to places that we know count like SlideShare, Scribd etc. We market those places by making sure they are picked up in online directories (pinged) and by creating announcements and promotions for them.

In some cases we will create online photogalleries on sites like TripNtale eg; http://bit.ly/apartmentforrentstlucia and, as you might have guessed, we promote these also. There is much to be gained by helping these sites get known, so we will do tweets and announcements for these in the same way that we promote the PR.

We work with PRWeb to distribute the release out to journalists and the media. PRWeb is, in our opinion, the best online and offline combination, and we like that it is true multimedia release. 

We always include a video, an image and a quote, as well as a PDF attachment that covers more details that will interest certain journalists.
It's a lot of work but we have been told our PR is above average in pick-up and distribution. It all adds up. 

Once the PR is out, we monitor it and write about the places and angles on the media that is featuring the release or the video.  We do more promotions on the big named sites that carry our feature and we look for angles that are unique. 

In the case of Poinsettia and Ladera, CBS picked us up in their MoneyWatch. We turned that into a secondary promotion: "Affordable Caribbean Holidays featured by CBS MoneyWatch."

The PR on the launch of the Mobile Travel Calendar application was picked up by several high profile technology sites such as Silicon Valley and The Network Journal. We promoted these separately with pings, tweets and posts to various networks across the Internet.

As you can see, we put a lot of effort into making video marketing work for our clients.

NOTE RE PRWEB

PRWeb claims that it is the world's number one news release service1, with an unprecedented ability to reach journalists, bloggers and potential customers.  Each PRWEB release is optimized to get the best organic search results. The release also goes to premium online outlets, and is sent directly to journalists and bloggers.

The PRWeb release will go out to

Search Engines

Major Search Engines

Across the Web

Web Distribution

Associated Press Distribution

Associated Press Distribution

Media Digests

Business News Digests
Health and Medical Digests
Hospitality and Travel
Information Technology

The Press Release will be displayed on about 50,000 PRWeb user pages on the Internet. These are pages that are measured by PRWeb. In addition, many more will not be measured. A pickup will be to numerous sites that are not measured and are not part of the PR network. These sites in turn can be picked up by many more and the total displays of the release will be in the order of 5-10 times the reported number.


CASE STUDY: TAKE AWAYS
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TAKE AWAY  Mobile Travel Calendar PR Followup.

If you do your own Press Release, it's a good idea to promote the folks who carry your story.

In order to get more traffic and create more buzz, we track who has picked up the release. Where we find a top media  pickup or an unusual one, we will post that as a story (or several stories) across the Internet.

In this case Silicon Valley, CBS MoneyWatch and The Network Journal were 3 pickups we chose to make a story on. The story was short. It might be just tweets to say "Wall Street is talking about WhatsOninBarbados." We may post that story to many, many sites with various news worthy angles relative to their own clientele and market.

The post PR reporting and follow up creates backlinks to our feature on pickup sites (eg: Silicon Valley) which makes it rank on search engines and creates additional visitors to it. That way more people learn about our featured client or release.

It all adds credibility to our news.




TAKE AWAY ON FOCUS re St. Lucia Holidays

Some were asking how we re-focus a story about a hotel or tourism event to make it newsworthy. See the take away below. Hope this helps.
When you are writing a PR, don't talk about what a wonderful service or special offer etc. Talk about a NEW service - release a NEW video and always feature how it is different from others and from what you did before.
In the Ladera campaign we originally featured the idea of saving money. Who cares? Everyone does that.  Changing it to "Publishing/Launching" a new video about new ways to save on exotic holidays worked.

x

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