What are the 3 key elements of international press release distribution?

Hello and welcome to the Speak PR Podcast. If you're a business owner or an entrepreneur, this show is for you because we talk about how to get noticed. My name is Jim James. I've been running an international public relations agency for over 25 years. I've also set up 8 companies of my own on 3 continents. And on this podcast, I talk about tools and technologies and the costs which will enable you to get your company noticed, not just in one country but also across the world. And today we're going to talk about press releases because press releases are the bread and butter really of public relations. And my agency, Isos PR, we're just in the process of sending out a press release for a client from America into China and Japan. So press releases have a methodology. They have content, they They have timing, and they have distribution. I'm going to talk about those three elements today. Now imagine that everybody could know about your product or your service. It would be fantastic, wouldn't it? But the only way to do that is to communicate through the broader media because if you knew everybody already, if they're already on their database, you wouldn't need media relations really. You could reach out to them through direct mail, for example, or through your own Facebook or Instagram account. But most companies that are growing need to reach new audiences, and that's why public relations focuses as a cornerstone on press relations. And press releases are, if you like, the, the main weapon in the press release artillery. Now, there are a couple of different stages. I'm going to take you through those because many clients and many companies are looking at how to write a press release. But it's not just the writing of the press release. It's also about the distribution and the timing. And for example, the selection of the spokespeople. So I'm going to talk about those things today. Now, the first thing to do is to look at the content of the release. Now, first of all, I'm going to say this, that no journalist— there isn't a journalist that wants to read a brochure. Journalists don't want to read a brochure or a financial statement or a piece of legalese. But what most companies end up sending to journalists are a combination of what the managing director or the CEO wants to send, modified by what the legal team want to say. And then with a little bit of maybe gloss or polish put on by the public relations team who tried to soften it. But this is, of course, really the, the safe way to do public relations in press releases, but it's not the most effective way. Content from a press release really should be going into the journalist's inbox and should come out of them as being something that's a story. So the first port of call in writing a press release is why is your company issuing this press release? Is it a new product? Is it a new market? Is it a new person? Is it an innovation? Why does it matter to anyone outside of your own company? So ask yourself that question first. It's not just that it's important to you, it has to be important to somebody else. It has to be important to the potential customers, but it also has to be important enough for the journalist to want to pick up and write about it. So the second element of that press release is that there needs to be a context. In other words, writing about what part of an industry or a market or, or healthcare area or whatever context it is, how does your product make a difference to that market? Because too often companies issue press releases because they've invented something, and that's interesting to them, but how is it interesting to anybody else? So what's the context? What business problem or industry problem or environmental problem are you trying to solve? And ideally then you have some facts and figures in there, facts and figures that can be taken through doing some research. There are many sources of research, especially now with the internet, but there are websites, there are companies like Statista, which has a website with lots of statistics on it, funnily enough. People like Gartner, Forrester, OECD, local governments. There are many, many bodies out there that will provide some proof points, some validation for the context that you want to be launching your product or service into. The next will be the choice of a spokesperson. Stories on their own need to have ideally somebody to be their evangelist. Who is going to be the spokesperson? Now, quite often companies will put the CEO down, but actually it's not always the CEO who's the most appropriate person. They might be running the company, But it could be that the most appropriate spokesperson, for example, is a product specialist or maybe a food hygienist. I've talked earlier on in the Edelman Trust Index, for example, it includes the fact that most, most readers don't really believe CEOs because they believe that CEOs are saying nice things about their companies because frankly, they would. Why wouldn't they? But they do trust product specialists. They do trust technical experts, which is why dental adverts have got dentists, for example, or why dogs have vets promoting food, for example. So who can be used within the organisation or within the marketplace that will give credibility to the pitch and say, this product or service in this market context will add value. And these are the statistics to demonstrate that this is a problem worthy of the journalist writing about it. I've said on another podcast that the media will only write about stories that impact 2/3 of their readership. Otherwise, it's not worth it from an advertising or subscription point of view. So I think this is quite a good way of thinking about it if you're looking at writing a press release or asking someone to do so for you. How is it going to impact two-thirds of the readership of that publication? Now, I mentioned about the spokesperson. Now, I've just been launching a new product for a client from San Francisco into China and into Japan from my headquarters here in the UK. Who is the right spokesperson to represent that product that's being launched? Well, now the product is available. Because of some new technology updates, it's now available in Japan and China, but it's the global release has an American-based head of sort of vice president of sales. Now, what we like to do is to find the local hero. Who is the person in Japan? Who is the person in China or in any other country that could be really the local contact? And this is important because people buy from people, and if people are reading about someone who's a long way away telling them that this is a good product or service, they're less likely to want to write the story, and they're less likely to believe that it's relevant to them. So I mentioned earlier on about context. If you're issuing an international press release, ideally the statistics are local and the context is local. And if you're having a spokesperson, that person is local. Now, it could be a foreigner who ideally speaks the local language, or it's a local country manager, for example, who understands the product well enough to represent the product or the company. If you have someone from the headquarters who speaks the local language and who is a technology expert, That's really a sweet spot. I used to have a client from a company called Quantel, and we had a man called Mark Parlett who lived in Japan, spoke Japanese, and was a technical expert. And the media loved talking to Mark because he was able to joke with them in Japanese but also give them all the technical updates in Japanese. Now, what about graphics and information to include? Well, The truth is that the media would like to have as much of the story made for them as possible because they're all pressed for time. But as I said at the very beginning, the media do not want to publish a brochure. That's not, not their job, and they compromise their editorial integrity if they do that. And that's why we never ask for them to publish things that essentially are publicity, or at least openly so. So a good, a good innovation in the last few years has been the infographic. Now, the infographic is really a combination of information and a picture, but it's embedding the market context with the product solution. Often companies try and issue press releases with an infographic from their internal sales presentations, from their PowerPoint presentations that a salesperson gives to key accounts. That's completely impractical. Really often the graphics are poorly done, the fonts are not well done, and they just look low-grade. Infographics using a product like Visme or Canva can help to give the journalist really a story within a picture. And as is often said, a picture's worth a thousand words. An infographic may be worth 5,000 because it in that if you embed, for example, industry statistics and company facts and a proposition, then really you've told the whole story. And also, from a cynical point of view, it's almost impossible for the journalist to edit that out. So you can embed some of your own key messages into, for example, an industry trend story represented by an infographic. Now, it used to be that we could put links into press releases. There was a trend for a while where you could embed your links and hyperlinks, but the media, now that they're relying on the page views being on their own website, so now they're really cleansing all releases of those what we used to call rich media. So it needs to get to the point quite quickly. It needs to have good content, needs to have a good spokesperson. And what we also like to try and do is to include a third party. Now, if it's possible to get a quote from either an industry expert or a customer, for example, or a government or anybody that says that your announcement isn't just about you, then that adds a lot of value and credibility. In terms of photographs, we always offer photographs of the person who is speaking. In the in the in the in the press release, if we have two people, we include both and we caption those pictures. And a small tip is to give the file name of the pictures just as you would like to have it written, rather than just write just send photo JPEG one three four five or something like that. If you could put the name of the person. As the file name. It helps with SEO, but also for the journalists or the compilers, the publishers. It makes archiving so much easier because there's so many pictures, and you can put the company name and the person's photo ID in there. Makes life a lot easier for everybody. Now, the other thing then to look at is the timing of a press release. So press releases, we've written again in the studies that have come out from people like Cision that journalists have up to 1,000 press releases sent to them every week and up to 100 stories pitched. So they— these are busy, busy people. So you have to have a great headline, a headline that gets to the point very quickly. And that sells the journalist on why they should read it. But then we also need to be thinking about when they get it. So by and large, our view is that Monday morning is not the best time. People are, frankly, like most of us, just sort of clearing away from the previous week and getting their priorities set. And often they will have, for example, an editorial meeting with the publishing or another journalist on a Monday morning. So we often find that Tuesday around 10 till 12 is a good time, a Wednesday or a Thursday. So what we do is we try and send press releases really after they've had a morning rush of emails, but before they spend their afternoons writing. And then on a Friday, the view is that most journalists will either be too tired Or we'll have a deadline, and we'll need to file and be finishing things off. Now we're sending out press releases, as I've mentioned, in Japan and China, and so we're sending them out on a Thursday at ten o'clock in the morning. The client is in San Francisco, and of course for them it's the day before. But we will coordinate with the client. But what we have to recognize is that a global release. Going out one time all around the world really no longer makes sense. There was a time period when people wanted to do a global release, so New York 9 AM, which would go out to all the markets at 1 o'clock in the UK, but then of course that was going to be 8 o'clock in Hong Kong. So we, I think, have all moved on and recognized that we've gone back to where we were pre-internet. Where we would send out press releases to people within their work times. The next thing is the follow-up, and of course it's quite possible that press releases from anybody will go into the spam filter. It's not possible necessarily to follow up with all media, so what we'll do is we'll choose a target Tier 1 media, and without trying to annoy anybody We will ring and make sure that they've received their releases. Now, another aspect of this is to ensure that the releases are personalized. Now, it's possible to do that with some of these big platforms like Prowly, like Cision. They absolutely personalize the press release for you, and it's essential. Otherwise, it's a dear editor, dear journalist, dear sir, dear madam. No one likes to receive blanket press releases or blanket email that way. So why should a busy journalist? If we can, we like to try and insert something that we know about their media that would find this story particularly interesting. So we, we would tailor the top 5 to 10 press releases for those journalists because we know that they don't all write the same story, otherwise they'd all be the same magazine. So making some decisions about which media are really important and which ones are perhaps, if you like, tier 2 and perhaps newswire-worthy, then to focus the amount of time on personalising that. And remember that it's going to be a person getting it at the other end of the email. And then it's hopefully leading on to a pitch. Now, a press release isn't an end in itself. We do press releases because they're great for SEO, and many websites, as I've spoken about before, have a lot of their content, up to 2/3, being from content syndication. And that's where they get the content, is from press release distribution. But what we really want to do is to get interviews or editorial opportunities for longer-form stories. The press release really is written To give a taster, give a flavor, an amuse bouche as it were, for the main story. And that's what the phone call is for and why we mentioned the person in the press release, because it's that person we are hoping to get an interview for with the media, or it's those statistics and that product feature set that we are hoping to be able to give a journalist to try. For example. So press releases are still the mainstay really of public relations for anyone who wants to get everyone to know about their new product or service or restaurant, whatever it is. Press releases still are an essential part of that, of that process. So today I've shared with you just a few key elements, and you can find more about the this. And obviously, we're more than happy to help you. You can contact me at eastwestpr.com. And you can reach out to us also on LinkedIn or Facebook. This podcast is full of tips and ideas to help business owners like you to get noticed just like big companies do, but without spending any of the time and the money on the big platforms that they can afford to use. Now, if you found this useful, Like you to consider subscribing to this podcast. We also have a newsletter which you can get also at eastwestpr.com. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating. Send out those press releases.