How to Grow Your Business – Part 5: Get Free Traffic and Exposure using Media Releases
How to grow Your Business – Part Five: Get Free Traffic and Exposure using Media Releases
Media releases are an excellent form of free exposure for your business. No matter what field you’re in, an effective news story will vastly increase your website traffic, customer base and grow your position in the marketplace. However the art of creating effective and hard hitting releases is not always an easy craft to master.
As a journalist for the past 25 years or so, I know what it is like to both write and receive media releases. In the newsroom journalists constantly sort the wheat from the chaff – differentiating between real news stories (with news value), and PR spin – which seems to comprise about 80 per cent of media releases received by most news rooms these days.
That is why it is so hard to get your message across.
There are just so many of them coming from such a wide range of areas that you are literally swimming against the current – fighting to have your voice heard in a very loud and raucous media environment.
To promote your business, or gain any worthwhile coverage in the news media these days, you need to produce something journalists want to actually read, and act on.
Whether it is an online publication, newspaper, magazine or TV and radio station, news gatherers are all looking for the same thing – a hook, that all important quirky news angle that will grab both them and the reader/viewer/listener.
This is the only sure-fire way for you to pique a journalist’s or news editor’s interest and get your story across to the public.
OK, your story may not have the instant ‘aaaah’ appeal of the exhausted elephant seal washed up on Perth’s Sorrento beach, or the tree-hugging environmentalist who staged a 40-day hunger strike up a tree in Thornlie in a misguided attempt to save a stand of old gums.
This is the stuff compelling news stories are made of, and they are of course, very hard to match.
Anything less may be seen as just filling – news ‘Polyfilla’ – that helps gel the pages together, but doesn’t exactly set the world or the reader’s imagination, on fire.
Of course, trying to convince the public to buy your latest product – whether it is a computer advancement or the latest line in washing machines – is always going to be a challenge, unless you can dress it up as something ‘tasty’.
Apple never seems to have any trouble promoting its latest products despite the obvious lack of sex appeal possessed by most other computer companies.
“Sell the sizzle and not the sausage” is an old marketing adage – and Apple has long used this to their advantage.
Therein lays the answer for any business hoping for more (free!) media attention.
Dress up your product with passion and a zest for life. Wrap it in excitement and smother it in superlatives but above all, make it real.
Organise a big community event around your product or service, hold a (charitable) fundraiser, take over a sporting venue with your product, take it up in a hot air balloon, try to set a new world record – these are all ways to garner media attention.
Even if you don’t succeed, you will get yourself noticed and written about anyway.
Finally and most importantly, provide the media with a picture opportunity that actually gives you a chance of being on the front page for a change – not just down the back with the sport and classifieds.
As Oscar Wilde said: “The only thing worse than being spoken about is not being spoken about.”
Mike Peeters is CEO of Mike Peeters Media (MPM)