Press release writing tips from our Editors
It's quite likely that you now receive more sales enquiries through the internet than through any other marketing medium. Your company's website has probably become the single most important part of your 'marketing mix', more valuable than any exhibition stand, print advertising campaign or anything else. Why? Because we all know the internet is now the first place almost all potential customers turn to for information.
The Pro-Talk web sites are a major source of up-to-date information and should be used to full advantage, as it is a FREE SERVICE to post all your press releases there. But the press releases still have to be written, and there are some important differences, as well as similarities, in writing best copy for our medium.
Unlike magazines, where the editor is forced by lack of space to select only a small number of press releases for publication in each issue, there are no such constraints on the editors of the Pro-Talk sites. We will happily publish every press release received free of charge, provided: it is supplied in the correct format; it is relevant to that particular site; it is written to a reasonably high standard of English that the editor can understand.
Write for a reader, not a customer sales leaflet. So-called press releases which sound like sales-speak are the largest group of items to be rejected by the Talk-site editors.
Many companies and PR agencies are starting to consider the supply of press release material by email.
The Pro-Talk websites undertake to publish ALL relevant press releases they receive, for free, and as quickly as possible. While conventional paper-based magazines can carry only a fraction of the news, and take weeks to put this in front of readers, we can start generating sales enquiries for you within hours of the press release being written.
You can help by following a few basic guidelines. We don't expect this to transform every PR into a ready-edited piece, but if the basic points are followed by most contributors it would certainly reduce the donkey work for us. We really just want to make it easy for you to make it easier for us.
1. Signing Up
The procedures to sending in copy are covered on the web (see list at foot of page).
If your company is not already on the website, you'll need to fill in the form below to accompany your first release, simply to ensure we have the correct contact details. Please note this web site is NOT a company directory. It is a resource of news releases, so you must send in a news release with your registration. You will not be added otherwise. Once you have completed and submitted this form, you can email us your news releases as often as you wish. There is never any charge for publication. You only need to re-send the registration form is your company details have changed.
Keep those details up to date however and it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY not to allow them to lapse. The Marketing Contact is the one to whom sales leads and sales enquiry reports will be sent. In addition, editors need a named contact to call if they need clarification or more information, so this should always be included on the individual press release.
2. Submit only appropriate news
Each Talk site exists to serve its own sector and will not carry news which does not have at least some relevance. There are now over a dozen Talk sites serving different industry sectors, which means there is likely to be one which is appropriate for your news. Please save us both time and effort by sending your stories only to the appropriate sites. And remember that your company will need to be registered independently on each site.
It helps if stories are able to give the main message in the first paragraph, and not seven or eight paragraphs later! Encapsulate the story in the first sentence, with subsequent sentences in decreasing order of importance, so editors can get the news, however far down they read. Watch how newspapers do this.
Please don't send press releases about trivial items - concentrate on the small number of significant launches
3. Formatting and sending emails
Perhaps the single simplest way to help us publish your news quickly and accurately is to format your emails properly. Tell us in the subject line that it is a press release and who it is from. The contents of the email should be just the title, introduction, and main text, which should simply be copied and pasted into an email. Mark the end of the main text clearly.
Do NOT send the release as an attached document, such as an MS Word file, and do NOT send photographs. This is very different to magazines, where the supply or availability of a good quality illustration is virtually essential - another reason why many magazine editors are rightly reluctant to encourage material to be sent in speculatively by email. In our case, supplying an illustration as an electronic attachment will result in the automatic rejection of your email and a note from our autoresponder!
If your email system is set up to highlight forwarded text (ie, each line begins with >), then please do not just forward it. It's tedious to remove all those >s! And please do not include the email addresses of every editor in every magazine you are sending it to! Check that you are not using any non-Ascii characters (particularly check that quote marks are reproduced faithfully if you have simply cut-and-pasted from a word processor), and send news ONLY to the specified news@... address (for example, news@laboratorytalk.com). Ideally, set your email up to send text only - our system receives text only, not HTML, and this way you can be confident that what we see is what you sent.
4. Managing content
Say what the release is: New Product Information, New Free Literature, Technical Feature or Company News, for example. The headline will, for reasons of space, be probably only three or four words. But don't try to write the headline - leave that to the editor. You have more space, so use it to summarise exactly what the story is about. Don't use clever puns, alliterations etc; anyone reading over a thousand releases a month will have seen that one before.
Many of the principles of writing good copy apply equally to press releases intended for electronic publication and for traditional magazines. It is the content and the way it is presented that matters most, not the presentation of the words - most editors will jettison all the formatting as the first task anyway, using a text file for importing into whatever page makeup system is being used.
With the internet, where space isn't an issue and press releases get published in their entirety, long is better. Although it can be argued that brevity gets the point over to the reader better, there's a far more fundamental issue, and that's getting people to the web page in the first place. And when it comes to getting people to a web page, it's all about getting the keywords in which people might be searching for. Consequently, the longer the release, the better. The more words you have, the more chance there is of that unknown phrase they're searching for appearing in your web page. To a search engine, a web site (indeed the whole web) appears as one continuous piece of prose, and the more of that prose which is devoted to you, the more likely you are to be found. So cover everything! As long as the story covers the important points first, it won't matter if the reader stops reading half way through.
Quantify the statements. If a valve has a wider pressure rating, say how much wider. Editors and readers both love seeing figures.
Keep the verbs active if possible: "XYZ is launching" is much more interesting than "XYZ has launched", which could be referring to something that happened weeks ago. Please also avoid terms such as "today announced", because tomorrow, today will be yesterday and today's news is old hat. Far better to use "is announcing".
Over 6000 press releases on one of the Pro-Talk sites, that's just over 30%, feature the word "solution". It is a word that has become meaningless and most of the time can simply be omitted without affecting the meaning or integrity of a sentence. Amongst editors' other pet hates are terms such as "paradigm shift" and "leverage".
5. Submit current news, and only once
New stories are published as quickly as possible, and may be available for the world to see the day after you send them to us. These stories remain available permanently, forming a living archive of product and company announcements. We'd like you to send your news to us as soon as it is released, rather than months later (although for new companies joining our database we're happy to publish stories up to 12 months old).
If your story has an embargo, please do not submit it until the day before publication is allowable.
Stories which have already been published should not be submitted again - this may lead to future stories being delayed or rejected, because we will find out about it and it could prejudice future decisions.
Accordingly, please put a date on all press releases - do not just rely on the email date stamp. Editors who want current material won't give you the benefit of the doubt if they don't know the age of a release, which could be a shame for a good story.
It's a good idea to send just one press release at a time. Multiple submissions stretch credibility - they can't all be new, can they?
6. Name the product
If your product has a name, make sure this is included. You might laugh, but we receive plenty of news releases which omit the name of the product they promote. Please also note that our adopted style is for product (and company) names to be given an initial capital letter and are thereafter written in lower case. Similarly, please avoid excessive capitalisation to provide emphasis in sentences.
7. Name the organisation
Whether you are submitting news directly or through a PR agent, please make it easy for us to know which company it belongs to. All stories are attached to an entry in our database of organisations. No identifiable organisation equals no publication. We sometimes find the company name buried at the bottom of a release or omitted altogether, meaning we have to try to guess it from the email address - or simply abandon the item. If the story concerns two or more companies, such as reporting a business link between them, please make it clear which one you are sending it on behalf of.
It is our style to use the singular case when referring to a company. We should not humanise inanimate objects (like Acme's as a possessive).
8. Spelling
Pro-Talk is based in the UK and we use British spellings. Please follow suit if possible. We use Iupac notation for chemical names.
9. Units
It should be enough to say that we use SI units, and leave it there. But the real world is not quite so simple and there are rare exceptions where other units are tolerated by convention (microscope slide dimensions or hydraulics, for example). Otherwise we will convert units to metric or, if in doubt, cut them out altogether.
10. Scientific and Special Characters
The internet does not reliably transmit non-standard characters and our advice to all marketing people is to select trade names and company names which reflect this.
Because of problems with web site display, additional complications occur with scientific characters (like mu for micro), super- and sub-script digits, and other non-Ascii characters, such as angstrom. Here we will substitute the best alternative (15 micrometres will appear as 15um, for instance). Confusion may be avoided if stories are submitted in this style, as the conversion to Ascii text may mean the loss of characters or even their transmogrification into different characters. Mu is a particular case in point: you may have written it with a mu, but by the time the editor sees it the mu has become an m! Finally, please note that units should be hard up against the numbers, with no spaces.
11. Title and introduction
The way our pages are put together means there are limits on the length of headlines and introductions, and it helps us if news is submitted which more-or-less follows this. Maximum length of a title is 50 characters, including spaces, and the ideal length is four to five words. Product and company names are best left out of headlines. Our human editors will write or amend them as necessary, but the closer the raw material conforms to the template, the less mangling will be required.
12. Bulleted lists
We really don't like bulleted lists, because: they're ugly, nobody reads them properly, they are awkward to edit in our templates, and they pressure the editor into doing a lot of re-writing.
Although bulleted lists sometimes make sense, it's certainly best to avoid them in the first paragraph. Occasionally one meets a PR that is all bullet points - usually the copy from a sales brochure. This can be highly irritating and could lead to your story being sidelined.
13. Professional Writers
Hopefully, these few simple pointers will make the job of writing press releases easier, but it remains a daunting task for many people whose primary function this is not! Also, because we have no limit on press releases, we can accept far more than you may have previously been considering as a reasonable output for the printed media. Thirdly, if we can't understand what the story is about, or if it requires wholesale re-writing, the chances are it will simply be binned.
These are three reasons why you may consider it useful to bring in outside assistance and use the services of a press release writer or PR agency to put a polish on your prose. Many public relations (PR) companies exist to provide this service, varying in size, level of expertise and area of specialisation. Selecting the best PR company can be a daunting task in itself, so if you require some advice in selecting a good one for your needs, do not hesitate to get in touch. We also have a directory of writers and PR agencies which already submit news to us and are always happy to make a recommendation.
Russ Swan and Andy Pye
Autumn 2004
(additional contributions by Mike Page and Nick Denbow)
IMPORTANT NOTE
Before sending in your first press release to any of our websites, you must let us know all your company contact details. You can do this at the following pages:
Buildingtalk
Electronicstalk
Engineeringtalk
Insidemoneytalk
Laboratorytalk
Marketingservicestalk
Manufacturingtalk
Printingtalk
Processingtalk