Press releases as a marketing strategy for your business, give you a pretty good bang for you buck.
Its an area that businesses tend to neglect, and I ask you, why would you not use all available methods at your disposal to get your message out to the masses.
If you’ve never written one before and your not sure how to tackle it, here’s a quick cheat sheet for creating a press release:
Firstly you need to list your contact information all the regular stuff, your name, company, position, email address, website address, telephone, and what ever other forms of contact you wish to use.
Now give a little history, a quick summary bio of the business and or yourself…use common sense here and tailor it to suit your market thrust.
Cover the necessities, whats your unique value, your experience in your field of expertise, give your credentials if necessary, build social proof into your commentary….in other words sell yourself/business/brand/product/service!
Now to the real meat….what’s the focus of your press release?
Is it breaking news from the business, a new service, a free training, a book launch, new products soon to be released?….whatever the message is, write a clear benefits driven statement to entice the readers to learn more, make sure to include a little history, give your market an understanding of “the why” you’re doing this, make them part of the story.
Now give them the mighty C2A (call to action)
If you leave them dangling with the information and don’t tell them what to do next, you have completely wasted your time and theirs….shame….shame….shame.
People clearly aren’t stupid, but they can’t read minds either! It may be obvious to you what you want them to do, but to them it was a nice story….ho humm…next page.
Tell them exactly what you need from them now..”go to this link and get your free book”, “phone us to book your free consultation” “register here for your copy of the soon to be released…” I know you get what I mean….oh yeah…just one more thing.
Don’t forget to give them a deadline, people will always put off till tomorrow what they can’t be bothered dealing with today!
So the bottom line is, press releases can really help to boost your business profile, and don’t just think in the traditional format, newspapers, tv, radio.
With the major impact of social media growing in the business environment utilize those tools too, Your Blog, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Linkedin, BlipTv, are all avenues where you can utilize the press realse format.
So get out there, get in front of your crowd, create buzz and give value, and leave me your comments below.
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