How to Cut Marketing Costs with Newsworthy Press Releases

Let’s say you are spending too much on marketing and need to cut costs, or you want greater marketing exposure, but can’t increase your budget. One quick answer is to use the power of press releases to enhance your content marketing. There are four good reasons for using press releases for marketing:

1. Press releases cost much less than other forms of advertising. They may be distributed free, or for a small one-time fee.

2. You can target a press release to specific groups, or you can go for broader, more general distribution, depending on who you release it to.

3. Newsworthy press releases are generally more believable than ads

4. Sending frequent newsworthy press releases helps build or strengthen your brand.

5. By placing a link to your site in the release, you gain a backlink to help with your SEO efforts.

I hope you noticed that in points 3 and 4 above I used the term ‘newsworthy press releases.’

I used it because that is the number one thing you must remember each and every time you send out a press release: It must be newsworthy. If it isn’t, it will be boring. It will not enhance your marketing. It will detract from your brand. It will be a waste of words and time.

But what makes it newsworthy? Something may be new, but that doesn’t necessarily make it news – version 30 of your killer app, for example. And something may genuinely be news but not worthy of much attention – your company has a new CFO.

What you have to do, in almost every instance, is find the story that you want to tell. People love stories. They love stories about overcoming difficulties. They love stories about success. They love stories that tell them how to do something. They love stories with strong characters in them.

So if you are writing a release about KillerApp V.30, dig a little to find out why anybody other than you, your developer and your developer’s mother should care about it. Will it save time… money… lives? Will it revolutionize hosting… the Internet… social media?

I guarantee that if you dig, you will find the story that will make your press release interesting.

And if you do have to write about the appointment of a new CFO, VP of Marketing, or board member, do the same thing… dig. Why have they come to your company? How did they get to be a CFO? Does anything in their background give them a unique perspective. For example, maybe your new VP of Marketing got the marketing bug in a comedy writing class and likes to tell people: “Everything I know about marketing I learned from watching Seinfeld.” Sure, that’s a farfetched example, but everybody has stories to tell, you just have to find the story and a hook that makes the story compelling.

Bottom line: You can’t bore people into buying from you in any medium or format, whether it’s a brochure, a letter, a banner ad, an email… or a press release.