One of the major areas that clients struggle with, especially when looking at press releases and other projects, is creating a business that’s ‘permanently newsworthy’.
Whether you’re an author, struggling with selling your novel, or a client that has slow sales periods, finding ways to make your business permanently newsworthy might be the key to your success. Press releases are a specialist product
Can you make your business permanently newsworthy?
One of the first things that businesses, especially those looking for permanent press coverage, is to understand that press releases can’t be written by just anyone. There is a specific format that they need to fall into, and there are specific wording criteria to explain and support the news that you’re trying to convey – so ensuring that your copywriter has specific experience with press releases is a must.
It’s also important to be very clear about what you want – if your brief lacks clarity, you will need to create more corrections to your content before it reaches what you want or need. If you need to supply information or links, then do so – copywriters often research as far as they can, but if the information doesn’t make the intuitive leap that your product does, it can be difficult to do products – especially emerging ones – the justice they need without having all of the information.
Once you have a brief in place, your freelance copywriter should be able to provide you with a press release in a few days – depending on their schedule, so if you can pre-empt news, or predict a condition that would make something newsworthy and attach that to your product, you should order in advance. Once you’ve worked with a copywriter a couple of times, they’ll know your business and getting information together to match fresh news should become much easier.
Can you predict…?
For items that are used seasonally, or could fit various criteria, what you could do is create a basic press release, which can be tightened to match the news that breaks. In every press release, there is a paragraph, at the beginning that covers the ‘who, what, where, why and when’.
These five w’s can be altered to fit various pieces of news, so you could commission a copywriter to create press releases that have standard information in the middle of the release, and then have them on file to meet news as it happens – this sort of agreement needs to be very clear, and though turn around will be faster because the content is partially produced, you will often need to provide a deposit and work with the freelance copywriter to ensure that everyone is happy – and when your news hits, you should ensure that you get in touch with your freelancer, with an illustrative link, as soon as you can.
Trending
Another option, of course, is to create semi-generic press releases, based on trends. Trending is basing press release information around things that have happened in the past. Whether this is, for example, weather or sales based, or around some other trend or statistic, you can find news in just about everything – including something as inane as your target customer.
For example, what triggers your target customer becoming your target customer? Parenthood is always newsworthy – to parents. Football season is always newsworthy at the start – and there’s always some drama to hang something onto surrounding that. While it’s often difficult to predict breaking news, if something is following a trend, sometimes taking that jump and tying into broader, slightly less sensational news is the main way to make a company newsworthy.
This article on how to make your company permanently newsworthy was brought to you by the leaders in Copywriting – Copyandco.co.za
Copyandco is a Cape Town based freelance copywriting firm. Copyandco provides various copywriting services including – blog writing services, article writing services, seo copy writing services, web copy-writing and editing proof reading services.