Daryl Willcox

All PRs can generate press releases. But not all turn into news stories. The skill is understanding what, out of everything you have going on, is news, and learning how to communicate it in a timely way that will interest relevant journalists. If you get it right, your client will be written about and the press coverage will put your client in front of its desired audience; building profile and hopefully encouraging new business calls.

So what is news?

When you pick up a trade magazine, for example, why do you read it? Probably because you want to monitor developments in a specialised industry, be alerted to trends, keep an eye on what clients’ competitors are up to, spot opportunities – generally keep informed about what’s going on.

If information you have will provide value to readers of the publications you want to reach, you have the beginnings of a news story.

How do you tell your story?

Understand first what your story is. What is the most newsworthy angle? That is, what are the people you want to read your story going to be most interested in? What will make them sit up and take notice?

A classic mistake is to think your headline is ‘X company is launching X,’ or ‘X company has appointed X.’

While these are obviously part of the story, and state ‘what’ is happening, leading with headlines like these means your story is not nearly as newsworthy as it could be.

The key question you should always answer is ‘why?’ Therein lies the real story.

‘X company creates 20 jobs by launching manufacturing division,’ or ‘New CEO appointed as X company expands into regions’ – these are powerful headlines and tell the correct story. Journalists often have to do a lot of leg work to find the story. Do the work first yourself by choosing the right angle and this gives you the best chance of being noticed by journalists.

Tips for writing a good press release

When writing your press release, stick to the facts. Avoid any hype or marketing speak – press releases are not sales documents. Plain English is enough to get your points across. Structure your press release beginning with the most important or significant points.

Avoid saying something is unique or the best. The first question in a journalist’s mind will be why? Demonstrate why. Show how people will benefit. Does your clients’ product save time or money? Make people’s lives easier? Understand clearly what the benefits of your news announcement are and you’ll be able to tell your story clearly.

Ultimately, write your press release in the style of how it would appear in your chosen publications.

The easier you make it for a journalist to understand your story, the more likely your efforts will result in press coverage.

Stay away from jargon or industry buzz words – you may understand what you mean, but you will alienate those who don’t. If you use technical terms, explain what they mean using a few words.

A quote is necessary to add colour and personality to your story. A quote should give further insight. Avoid things like “I am delighted…” or “The whole company is excited to see…” Quotes should be written as someone speaks – they should feel natural and add substance. If they don’t, they are unusable and it’s likely they won’t appear in any press coverage.

“The merger will help us take our products to Spain and Germany as our partner has offices in these countries…” or “Our new CEO’s contacts in the retail industry will enable us to start stocking our products in independent fashion stores in the North of England…”

These quotes give valuable information and add substance.

The length of a press release is as long as it takes to tell the story and get across all relevant, useful facts. Don’t go over two A4 pages – if you need more room it’s likely you are not getting your points across clearly.

Always include contact information at the bottom of your press release. Make sure you have a name, direct landline and mobile numbers, email and web address.

How to reach journalists with your news

You may have a few journalist contacts already, and emailing them your press release is the next step. There are likely to be hundreds, sometimes thousands of journalists who cover the sector your news is relevant to, so to reach all of these people you may want to use an online press release wire. You populate an online form with your press release, opt to add a photo or video, choose which sectors your release is relevant to and press submit. Your press release is then delivered to journalists in your chosen sectors.

The day you send your press release out, make sure the named contact is available to speak to journalists, otherwise you risk wasting your efforts.

Be available, be helpful, and your press release will translate into press coverage.

Daryl is the founder and chairman of Daryl Willcox Publishing (DWPub), which provides online information services to journalists and media relations professionals. Follow Daryl on Twitter here.

As PR students the importance of reputation is always being stressed to us. We are taught the importance of making sure that people have the right impression of you, and this is especially important when you are about to enter the job market. So why not put some of your effort into applying the rules we are learning in our degrees onto our own lives? It is a concept I like to call: Brand Me.

I began building Brand Me right back in my 1^st year by grabbing every opportunity that came my way. While others missed lectures on the account of being ‘hungover’, I was putting in the work and thinking of ways to get a head.

David Lurie, Managing Director, Setsights Ltd Coaching & Training makes a good point: “Recruiters aren’t just going to come across your CV and offer you your dream job. It’s the graduate’s role to go out there and get it themselves and build up their own reputation.”

A few years ago it would have been a lot harder for students to get their names out there with opportunities like guest blogging being non-existent. But now there are many things that students can do to make themselves known. For example being on LinkedIn, Twitter, creating your own blog, guest blogging for others and writing for websites such as Behind The Spin.

Guest blogging was one of the ways I have achieved online recognition. It is a fantastic way of getting your name out there and to practice your writing. If the blog you are writing for is well established it can be a fantastic platform to gain new contacts. Guest blogging is mutually beneficial the owner of the blog achieves double publicity as you will be promoting the link and they are updating their website with new content. It is fantastic practice for meeting deadlines as you are producing work for someone else’s website, working to their timescales.

Now in my 3^rd year at the University of Lincoln I have been lucky enough to write for Behind The Spin, Inferno Designs, a variety of other PR professionals, achieve a placement at Shooting Star PR for one day a week and have a well-established Twitter account.

From my experience guest blogging has a few dos and don’ts:

Do

-        Write to the best of your ability

Make sure that the work you produce is the best you can, spend extra time researching and getting quotes. You should be proud of all the work you produce but you should be especially proud of your guest posts. Your post is visible to a whole new audience so you want to make a good impression, plus if you write well and produce the work on time there is a good chance you will be asked to write for them again or they will recommend you to others.

-        Reply to comments

And promptly! It is important to engage readers with your posts and make sure you connect with the ones that comment.

-        Spell check

Brilliant content. Influential website. But you have spelt something wrong…not good. It doesn’t take long but it is something that many writers forget. And don’t just rely on spell check! Print off a copy, get a pen and do it the old fashioned way – proof read!

-        Keep a copy

Print out a copy of your work or include a link on your blog page. This way you can keep track of the work you have done and use it in your portfolio to show potential employers.

Don’t:

-        Over promote yourself

It is to be expected that you ask for a link to your website/blog to be included in your post however don’t mention it a million times throughout your post and include links to all your previous work in an attempt to direct traffic to your website. It makes your posts disjointed and does nothing but irritate readers.

-        Just write for anyone

It is tempting at the beginning to take every opportunity that comes your way. It is a good idea, initially, to do as many as you can to find your feet and build up relationships with people. However once you have a number of opportunities under your belt it is sometimes more beneficial to be associated with a small number of successful websites than tarnish Brand Me by writing for just anyone. Aim high, after all you don’t see Chanel handbags in Lidl…

Jane Crofts, former PR Practitioner and PR lecturer at the University of Lincoln echoes this point: “Make sure that, like all good PR, the messages are aligned and build your reputation as you want to see it – in a way that is consistent. Does the student party animal on Facebook need to be part of the profile? Should there be different identities for the professional you and social you? Use all the tools wisely.”

I recently wrote a post Social Networking: Business, pleasure or both? in which I explored the difficulties of keeping online identities separate. In my opinion it is advisable to use different sites for different purposes and often it is best to keep them separate as much as possible, I personally use LinkedIn for business contacts and Facebook for close friends.

Let’s face it though, it is easy to sit back and just do the work that is required at University, but with increasing numbers of graduates entering an already cluttered job market it is becoming harder to get the job that you want. So put some work into Brand Me by getting your name out there before you are even on the job market. It creates a buzz and builds interest around you. Imagine going to an interview and your potential employer already having seen some of your work? Providing they liked the work, you have an advantage over others straight away.

Image Credit: Stockxchng

Writing for your lecturer is one thing. Yes, you want to be grammatically correct and you want to ensure that your key messages are communicated in your essay or dissertation. But writing copy for professional people to read is a whole different ball game, and a daunting one at that.

That was the challenge I faced when I got my first job in PR. I graduated in 2007 from Leeds Metropolitan University with an MA in PR and I was lucky enough to land my first job a few weeks after handing in my dissertation.  The company I work for is complex and communicating to its shareholders means communicating to other businesses; therefore business to business (B2B) PR is a regular focus of my day-to-day job.

The first rule, which I quickly learnt, about B2B PR is this: know your audience. Even now – two years into my role as PR Executive for a large retail and wholesale buying group – I have to ask myself who my audience is when I’m producing copy.

Fantasy older man

I always try and imagine the reader – for example, when I’m producing award entries I try to imagine the judge, and I always seem to go for an older gentleman whose hair is brilliant white, he wears a blue cravat, glasses, he’s extremely clean shaven and smells of peppermint tea and tobacco smoke – I understand this is bizarre and maybe even a little insane, but for me it seems to work!

In my experience, award entries are hard to draft. You want to champion the project or business that you are putting forward for the award yet you don’t want to sound too conceited. I still find it hard to do this, but luckily I’ve had tremendous support from my managers to help me understand how to write the entries.  One important thing that I was taught is to imagine the judge, what would they want to hear, and how can I add some visual elements to the awards to keep them engaged.

B2B means trade press

Communicating with the trade press is a routine B2B task and it is a large part of my job and one which, fortunately, I truly enjoy. Writing press releases, liaising with my colleagues and promoting their expert opinions through features in the trade press and providing company statements is all in a day’s work.

Usually the trade press have a great understanding of the business in which I work; but like in every sector, journalists move on and new ones are brought in with whom you have to establish a relationship. We tend to invite the new journalists to the company headquarters, give them a background presentation on the organisation (due to its complex structure, this usually generates a lot of questions!) and then give them a tour of the warehouse.  This often results in a positive feature about the company which helps us to raise the profile of the business; it’s a great way for us to ensure that the journalist is familiar with our organisation; and it’s a relationship-building exercise.

Member magazine

Arguably our in-house magazine, of which I am the news editor, is a B2B PR tool – as the definition of B2B PR is communicating to other businesses rather than directly to consumers (Tench & Yeomans, 2006) and the internal magazine goes out to our members who own their own businesses.  The magazine has a readership of 12,000, and its style is very different from press release copy as the tone is more friendly and less formal.

This is another dimension to the skills that are needed when producing B2B copy.  Although initially it’s hard to vary your writing styloe when you have just left university and started work in the ‘big wide world of PR’, it’s always exciting to learn about the different ways that you need to communicate within your professional role.

Annual report

The hardest part of B2B PR, for me, is writing the Annual Report.  Yes, this is mainly viewed as a financial document – but the company I work for uses the Annual Report to communicate about planned projects for the forthcoming year, as well as using it to report on the company’s annual results.

Although this might seem like a mundane communications exercise, it’s rather exciting to reflect on the year’s events, analyse them and then find a way to communicate them to the target audience. Yet again, the same principles of B2B are present: who is my target audience, and what are my key messages?

B2B is a great PR discipline which comes essentially with time and effort. The top tips, which I still go by myself each time I commence a B2B PR exercise are this: know your audience and understand the key messages.

Although these seem like fairly easy things to do some people may be complacent in thinking that they know their audiences when in fact they only think they do. Trying to ‘get inside the head’ of the reader will help ensure that you connect with your target audience and that will enable you to communicate your key messages effectively.