5 Ways to Ensure Your Company’s Next Announcement Sticks

It’s the bread and butter of public relations. Your business has something to announce. It could be a new product. A service enhancement. A geographic expansion. Or an important, new hire. 

You’ve been working on it for months, and the day has finally arrived. You’ve decided to put out a press release. It’s written. Double-checked. Distributed on one of the newswires. And … nothing. Onto the next project.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In today’s world, we have access to more powerful tools for telling our business stories and reaching our audiences than ever before. Yet, many continue to approach public announcements as they were done 20 or 30 years ago. Any company of any size can step out of this rut and create engaging, effective announcements. 

Here are five ways to put your news out so it lands with maximum impact.

• Write for your audience. Too often, news announcements are written with a strictly internal focus. Here’s what we want to say. Instead, step back and think about who will consume the news. Customers? Prospects? Investors? Business partners? What in this announcement is important to them? 
• Tell a compelling story. Even the rigid format of a press release allows us to tell a story. Why did we develop this new product? Where did we get the idea? How long have we been working on it? What are some of its use cases? We have more than enough words to play with. Let’s make them count.
• Target the right reporters. Once the announcement goes out, we need to send it directly to reporters. But we need to be honest. How big a story is this? If it’s minor news and the best chance of coverage is industry trades, don’t send it only to the A-list. Pick the right targets for the right news.
• Don’t forget your visuals. Images capture attention. All publishers know this. We need to illustrate our news. Images and graphics can be included with a news release, but they also allow us to lay out the story nicely on our websites. And they provide great material for social media storytelling.
• Create bespoke social content. Our potential audience on social is orders of magnitude larger than traditional media. So, we must create content for our announcement specifically made for social. Simply linking to a press release is a waste. Nobody visits social media to read press releases.

Are there any additional steps that will help our announcements perform? Of course there are. But I’ve focused on these five because they seem the most easily overlooked. And not one of them is hard to execute. Just go through the list from top to bottom as you’re working on your next announcement.