Does your company’s PR strategy basically amount to putting out a press release "spray-and-pray"-style through a newswire... and nothing else? Well, that has the virtue of being simple. But perhaps too simple. In our experience, personalized outreach that gets a reporter interested in a story is what gets earned media coverage.
With a newswire, what you’re getting is your press release (not a genuine news article, radio interview, TV spotlight or whatever) syndicated across dozens, maybe hundreds of websites. You're throwing money at the problem (whether that's a few hundred bucks, or maybe up to $10K, depending on how many media outlets you want to spam.) A newswire could be the easiest way to try to get your story out there. But is it the most effective?
Journalists don’t care as much about newswire releases as you might think they do
Just last week, a PR client of ours insisted on paying for a newswire distribution service to give an extra push to a big PR campaign. Coming off of a big win (in the top 10 of a major industry award) and with revenue numbers that would make some CEOs blush (or go red with envy), they certainly had the extra budget bandwidth for it. So we did it…
At least as far as we could tell, what happened is what always happens (at least 97.5 percent of the time): every single reporter that covered their story was one of the media targets for our PR Associates’ personal outreach.
Did the press release syndication give some extra heft to the campaign? Maybe. But it’s hard to see right now whether they got any bonus coverage from the extra cost for the newswire release.
What happens most of the time when your company puts out a press release over a newswire and just hopes for the best, with no personalized outreach? Reporters may (or may not) see the same press release content popping up in dozens or hundreds of places… but it’s still just a press release, syndicated. Not actual news coverage.
Is it ever worth it to use a newswire distribution service for your press release?
Not saying it’s never worth it. But why might the effectiveness of just spamming the newswire be less than effective?
A newswire service sends press releases to thousands of journalists at once, which makes it difficult for any one message to be relevant to everyone. Given the diversity of the audience, the content often does not meet the specific interests of each individual, reducing its overall impact.
A study by Vitis Business Consulting found that only 37% of journalists who use newswires are actually checking them on a daily basis.
Mark Macias, a former Executive Producer with NBC and CBS says,“It’s different with PR Newswires. Reporters know these press releases are written by publicists – not journalists. It’s another reason why many newsrooms don’t even provide access to these PR newswires. In a world where information needs to be curated, newsroom leaders frequently choose the option to eliminate this PR feed.”
The PR industry today is evolving towards a new strategy: focusing on a more targeted group of relevant journalists and content creators to achieve better results with each campaign.
Why do so many startups use a newswire distribution service for a press release if it doesn’t usually work (most of the time)?
Startups do this because they’re copying the big dogs… they think.
They see giant publicly-traded corporations worth billions of dollars (big brand names everyone knows, like Microsoft, IBM, Uber, etc.) put out press releases over newswires all the time. It seems like every week, these kinds of companies are putting out a new release.
You’ll see stuff like this:
(Boooooring!)
(Oh gawd. Kill me now.)
(That’s nice. Never heard of The Vitamin Shoppe so, um, good on ya.)
If my “peanut gallery” commentary seems cruel, you’ll notice what I’ve selected here are not exactly the most spectacular pieces of news coming out of these companies. They’re actually more like boiler-plate updates about the business. If we were managing these clients’ PR, we would of course put out these press releases if the clients wanted them. But the truth is, we wouldn’t expect a ton of news to come out of these announcements.
So why do publicly-traded companies do this?
Publicly traded corporations need to broadcast a press release in order to be transparent with its stakeholders and investors. In other words, they blast out these kinds of press releases over newswires because they have to, because of regulatory compliance.
It’s not because they think they’re going to make the front page of anything.
Since this is what large, presumably successful companies are doing, this may fool startups into thinking that newswires are an effective PR tactic.
What does a press release distribution service even cost? It might be a few thousand bucks but it can also be way more if you want distribution across the USA or internationally.
If you have the budget and would like to spend up to $8,700 on a newswire that may or may not work, that’s an option. And hey, not everything needs to have a million readers to make an impact. It certainly is possible that you’ll get some kind of result.
But if you want real earned media coverage, that takes personalized PR effort. And that’s the kind of thing a PR agency can do for you.
Use your marketing budget effectively. Don’t just put out a spray-and-pray press release on a newswire. Get the personal touch and proactive, creative PR campaigns with a tech PR agency that gets results
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