How Press Releases Can and Can’t Help Your Marketing
Press release marketing is part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. However, before you start writing and distributing press releases, it’s important to understand their marketing strengths and weaknesses. That way you can make sure your efforts are aligned with your goals.
They Can Build Credibility and Authority
A well-written press release can go a long way toward positioning you and your company as credible resources in your industry. Whether you’re announcing a new product or service, or you’re hosting an online event, when the information in your press release is well written and well positioned, you boost your authority. People begin to trust that you’re a resource. That’s the beginning of relationship building with your prospects and with the media.
They Can Drive Traffic to a Sales Page or an Opt-In Page
Press releases can also be quite effective tools to drive traffic to a specific page. For example, if you’re hosting an online event as a means to build your opt-in list, a press release announcing the event can contribute a significant amount of traffic to the registration and opt-in page. This naturally leads to conversions, so it’s a useful tool for achieving your sales and marketing goals.
They Can Build Awareness
Social media press releases have a wide reach and can go a long way toward building awareness for your company. And when you use a press release distribution service, you’ll find that you reach a number of media outlets, newswires, bloggers and other industry professionals. And that’s before the media actually picks up your release and covers it. A single press release can reach thousands of people you might otherwise never come into contact with.
They Can’t Really Help With SEO
So what can’t a press release do? Well, they used to be superior at helping business owners achieve high search engine page ranking. That is, until the search engines decided that people were gaming the system and writing press releases every time someone in the company sneezed. Google decided to stop giving any weight to press releases. However, the images in your release and the links to your website from your syndicated release both do help with SEO. It’s just not a great approach if your priority goal is to boost your page ranking.
Determine your goals for your press release marketing efforts first. Align your goals with your efforts. For example, if your goals are to build your email list, then hosting events and releasing free publications is a great way to attract subscribers, and using press releases can help with that goal. As you should with any marketing tactic and goal, make sure to put measurements into place so you can test and track your results. You’ll likely find that press release distribution is an effective marketing strategy.
