The New Rules of Marketing and PR
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news release live for as long as the content is appropriate, perhaps
for years. This is very important because most of the online news
sites do not maintain archives of news for more than a few months.
If potential customers look for the content of your news release the
week after it is distributed via a service, they will certainly find it on
Google News and the others. But they won’t find it if they do the
search next year unless the release is on your own site as a perma-
nent link so that it is indexed by Google.
The Importance of
Links in Your News Releases
Particularly because your releases may be delivered by feeds or on
news services and various sites other than your own, creating links
from your news releases to content on your Web site is very impor-
tant. These links, which might point to a specific offer or to a land-
ing page with more information, allow your buyers to move from the
news release to specific content on your Web site that will then drive
them into the sales process, as we saw in the previous chapter.
However, there is another enormous benefit to including links in
news releases. Each time your news release is posted on another site,
such as an online news site, the inbound link from the online news
site to your Web site helps to increase the search engine ranking of
your site, because the search engines use inbound links as one of the
important criteria for their page-ranking algorithms. So when your
news release has a link to your site and it is indexed somewhere on
the Web, you actually increase the ranking of the pages on your site!
Said another way, when your news release appears on a Web site
somewhere and there is a link in your news release that points to a
URL on your site, the search engines will increase the rankings of the
page where the URL is pointing. How cool is that? Sending a news
release that includes links increases your own Web site’s search en-
gine rankings.
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Focus on the Keywords
and Phrases Your Buyers Use
As I’ve suggested before, one thing successful publishers do that
Web marketers should emulate is understand the audience first and
then set about to satisfy their informational needs. A great way to
start thinking like a publisher and to create news releases that drive
action is to focus on your customers’ problems and then create and
deliver news releases accordingly. Use the words and phrases that
your buyers use. Think about how the people you want to reach are
searching, and develop news release content that includes those
words and phrases. You can get the information you need to do so by
thinking back to your buyer personas. Don’t be egotistical and write
only about your organization. What are your buyers’ problems?
What do they want to know? What words and phrases do they use to
describe these problems? I know, I’ve said this already several
times—that’s because it is very important.
CruiseCompete.com,
3
cited in the October 2006 issue of Kiplinger
as one of the 25 Best Travel Sites, helps people secure quotes for
cruises from multiple travel agencies, based on the dates and ports
specified. CruiseCompete.com is a great example of a company that
uses news releases to reach people based on the phrases that their
buyers are searching with. In October 2006, for example, during the
lead-up to the holiday season, the company issued a news release via
Market Wire with the headline “Cruise Lines Set Sail With Hot Holi-
day Vacation Prices.” Importantly, part of an early sentence in the re-
lease, “. . . some seven-night vacations can be booked for well under
$1,000 per person, including Thanksgiving cruises, Christmas
cruises and New Year’s cruises,” included three critical phrases. Not
only did this release’s mention of “Thanksgiving cruises,” “Christ-
mas cruises,” and “New Year’s cruises” generate traffic from users
How to Use News Releases to Reach Buyers Directly 173
3
http://www.cruisecompete.com/
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searching on these common phrases, it also helped guide searchers
into the sales cycle; each of the three phrases in the news release was
hyperlinked to a purpose-built landing page on the CruiseCom-
pete.com site that displayed the holiday cruise deals. Anyone who
clicked on the “Christmas cruises” link was taken directly to deals
for Christmas cruises.
4
What makes this case so exciting is that at the time I was writing
this in late October 2006, the CruiseCompete.com holiday cruise
news release was at the top of the Google News search results for the
phrases “Thanksgiving cruises,” “Christmas cruises,” and “New
Year’s cruises.” More importantly, the bump that the links in the
news release gave to the three landing pages helped those pages
reach the top of the Google Web search results lists. For example,
the CruiseCompete.com landing page for the phrase “Christmas
cruise” was ranked in the fourth position among 5,830,000 other
hits on Google.
“We know that people have thought about traveling for the holi-
days,” says Heidi M. Allison-Shane,
5
a consultant working with
CruiseCompete.com. “We use the news releases to communicate
with consumers that now is the time to book, because there are dy-
namite prices and they will sell out.” Allison-Shane makes sure that
CruiseCompete includes the ideal phrases in each news release and
that each release has appropriate links to the site. This strategy
makes reaching potential customers a matter of “simply understand-
ing what people are likely to be searching on and then linking them
to the correct page on the site where we have the content that’s rele-
vant,” she says. “We try to be useful with the right content and to be
focused on what’s relevant for our consumers and to provide the
links that they need. This stuff is not difficult.”
The CruiseCompete.com news release program produces results
by increasing the Google rankings for the site. But the news releases
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Action Plan for Harnessing the Power of the New Rules
4
http://www.cruisecompete.com/specials/holiday/christmas_cruises/1
5
http://www.allisonandtaylor.com/
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also reach buyers directly as those buyers search on relevant phrases.
“Each time we send a targeted news release, we see a spike in the
Web traffic on the site,” Allison-Shane says.
As you craft your own phrases to use in your news releases, don’t
get trapped by your own jargon; think, speak, and write like your
customers do. Though you may have a well-developed lexicon for
your products and services, these words don’t necessarily mean much
to your potential customers. As you write news releases (or any other
form of Web content), focus on the words and phrases that your buy-
ers use. As a search engine marketing tool, news releases are only as
valuable as the keywords and phrases that are contained in them.
Include Appropriate
Social Media Tags
Many (but not all) news release distribution services provide a way
to include social media tags to make the news releases easy to find
on services like Technorati, DIGG, and del.icio.us. Use them! Social
media tags make your releases much easier to find. For example, the
Technorati search engine, which many people turn to for the latest
blog posts from around the world in categories that interest them,
also include news release content. So if I check out the “Marketing”
category on Technorati (which I frequently do), I will see not only
the latest blog posts that are tagged “Marketing” by the blogger but
also any news releases that are tagged “Marketing” by the organiza-
tion that issued the release. The key is that in an online world, you
must do everything you can to ensure that your news releases are
displayed and retrievable in as many relevant places as possible.
To make it easy to remember all the various tags and other features
(such as associated photos and audio feeds) of a well-executed news
release, Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications, created a
social media news release template.
6
“All news release content will
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www.pr-squared.com
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ultimately wind up on the Web,” he says. “So why not put it out in
such a way that makes it accessible to anybody who can use that
content? Both traditional and new-media journalists are used to
working in a hyperlinked environment and are used to people pro-
viding context through social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us
and buttons to add to DIGG. The template makes it easy to remem-
ber to do all of those things.” Defren’s template is an excellent tool to
use as you develop your news releases because it helps you get the
most out of all the available features that can make the release more
useful and easier to find.
If It’s Important Enough
to Tell the Media, Tell Your
Clients and Prospects, Too!
Many companies devote extensive resources to their PR and media
relations programs. Often, the results of these efforts are buried in a
difficult-to-find news section of the company Web site. Consider
rewriting your news releases in an easy-to-read paragraph or two and
make it a section of your e-mail newsletter for clients and prospects.
Or establish RSS feeds to deliver your news to anyone who’s inter-
ested. And don’t forget your employees—if they know about your
news, they can be your greatest evangelists.
One of the most cost-effective ways to reach buyers is to look for
ways to leverage the work you’re already doing by repurposing con-
tent for other audiences. Too often, organizations spend tons of
money on, say, a PR program that targets a handful of journalists but
fails to communicate the same information to other constituents. Or
a company’s advertising program designed to generate new sales may
drive people to a Web site that doesn’t match the message of the ads,
resulting in lost interest. Sadly, the failure to integrate sales, market-
ing, and communications—both online and offline—will always re-
sult in lost opportunities. Happily, the Web makes it a relatively
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simple task to integrate your news release program into your larger
online strategy.
Here’s one more thing that you may never have considered: Hav-
ing a regular editorial calendar that includes a series of news releases
also means your company is “busy.” When people go to your online
media room and find a lack of news releases, they often assume that
you are not moving forward or that you have nothing to contribute
to the industry. In the new world of marketing, consistent, high-
quality news release content brands a company or a nonprofit as a
busy market player, an active expert in the industry, and a trusted re-
source to turn to.
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15
The Online Media
Room: Your Front
Door for Much
More Than
the Media
T
he online media room (sometimes called a press room or press
page) is the part of your organization’s Web site that you create
specifically for the media. In some organizations this page is simply a
list of news releases with contact information for the organization’s
PR person. But many companies and nonprofits have elaborate on-
line media rooms with a great deal of information available in many
different formats: audio, video, photos, news releases, background
information, financial data, and much more. A close cousin to the
online media room is the online Investor Relations room that many
public companies maintain, although I won’t be covering IR sites in
the book.
Before I give you ideas on how to create a valuable online media
room of your own, I want you to consider something that is vitally
important: all kinds of people visit your online media room, not just
journalists. Stop and really let that soak in for a moment. Your buyers
are snooping around your organization by visiting the media pages
on your Web site. Your current customers, partners, investors, suppli-
ers, and employees all visit those pages. Why is that? Based on casual
research I’ve done (I often speak with people who are responsible for
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their organizations’ online media rooms about visitor statistics), I’m
convinced that when people want to know what’s current about an or-
ganization, they go to an online media room.
Visitors expect that the main pages of a Web site are basically
static (i.e., they do not update often), but they also expect that the
news releases and media-targeted pages on a site will reveal the very
latest about a company. For many companies, the news release sec-
tion is one of the most frequently visited parts of the Web site.
Check out your own Web site statistics; you may be amazed at how
many visitors are already reading your news releases and other me-
dia pages online.
So I want you to do something that many traditional PR people
think is nuts. I want you to design your online media room for your
buyers. By building a media room that targets buyers, you will not
only enhance those pages as a powerful marketing tool, you will also
make a better media site for journalists. I’ve reviewed hundreds of on-
line media rooms, and the best ones are built with buyers in mind.
This approach may sound a bit radical, but believe me, it works.
Your Online Media Room as
(Free) Search Engine Optimization
When news releases are posted on your site, search engine crawlers
will find the content, index it, and rank it based on words, phrases,
and other factors. Because news release pages update more often
than any other part of a typical organization’s Web site, search engine
algorithms (tuned to pay attention to pages that update frequently)
tend to rank news release pages among the highest on your site,
driving traffic there first.
“There’s no question that a well organized media room often has
higher search results and drives more traffic because of the way the
search engines work,” says Dee Rambeau,
1
founder and managing
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partner of The Fuel Team, a provider of online tools for professional
business communicators. “A news release dynamically builds out a
new set of content in your online media room, with each news release
generating its own indexable page, which the search engines all cap-
ture. Google and the other search engines love fresh content that re-
lates back to similar content on the other pages of the site. Aggressive
companies take advantage of this by sending news releases frequently
to get high rankings from the search engines. Frequency has a great
deal to do with search engine rankings—if you do ten news releases,
that’s great, twenty is better, and one hundred is better still.”
Best Practices for
Online Media Rooms
An online media room is an important part of any organization’s
Web site and a critical aspect of an effective media relations strategy.
When done well, an online media room will turn journalists who are
just browsing into interested writers who will highlight your organi-
zation positively in their stories. And more importantly, an online
media room can move your buyers into and through the sales
process, resulting in more business for your organization and con-
tributing to meeting your organization’s real goals of revenue and
customer retention. I’ve noticed as I’ve checked out hundreds of on-
line media rooms that most fail to deliver compelling content. Sure,
they may look pretty, but often the design and graphics, not the con-
tent that journalists (and your buyers) require, are in the forefront.
Here, then, is a list of tips that will help your online media room
work as effectively as some of the best ones I’ve seen.
You Control the Content
One important consideration that many marketing and PR people
overlook when considering the benefits of an online media room is
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