Why Press Releases should be a part of your Digital Marketing Strategy?

Increase your Press Release Reach with Digital Marketing

Businesses worldwide use digital PR as an online marketing strategy to increase their online presence. Digital PR is the quickest and most effective way to reach extensive networks of journalists, influencers, and bloggers at once. Therefore, digital PR means press releases can gain high-quality backlinks, social media shares, and search engine optimization (SEO) with one solution.  

Why Digital Marketing should be your Go-To Strategy

Digital marketing is a subset of content marketing. Along with gaining high-quality backlinks, it also involves gaining online publicity, accumulating customer reviews, and interacting with customers and journalists. 

Digital PR is a valuable marketing strategy that helps you reach your desired audience by advertising your business content on websites that your customers are most likely to visit often. Content is also shared digitally on social media. If you’re a local business, planning your digital marketing strategy properly can land your content on newspaper websites, local blogs, social media accounts that share content for your particular area. If your strategy instead depended on traditional PR, your content wouldn’t make it that far. 

There are several advantages of digital PR over traditional PR; relying on print-based publications, TV, and radio advertising does not get you as many views as digital content does in this day and age. Online publications are becoming increasingly influential and the Independent is the foremost example of this change, given how the UK newspaper abandoned print and embraced digital-only publications in 2016.

When done right, SEO along with the right digital marketing strategy can reach much larger crowds in a much more affordable, convenient, and effective way than traditional PR can. All it takes is to be updated with Google’s guidelines and ranking signals. If you are doubtful about the worth of successful digital marketing, I’d like to tell you that there are 5.6 billion searches on Google per day, and with well-planned SEO, your business can land on the first page in at least one of these searches. 

Coupled with social media marketing, digital marketing increases your chances of generating customers generously. As of 2021, 50.64% of the world’s population actively uses social media. According to these statistics, social media marketing has the potential to grant you access to a little more than half of the world’s population.

How to Write a Press Release for Digital Marketing

If you’re looking to write an effective press release either for potential customers or journalists, your foremost aim should be to save as much of the reader’s time as possible. To achieve this goal, your message should convey clearly and concisely what your story is about.

A majority of your readers will only skim through your press release. If your content does not immediately deliver pertinent information to your readers, your press release will be skipped almost indefinitely. If you want your readers to take action e.g. buy a product or attend an event, a call to action will help you achieve this. Here’s how you write a few common types of press releases:

How to Write a Press Release for a Product

Writing about an old product is a little different than writing about a new one. For the latter, one should mention what changes the new product brings to the market. In this case, highlighting how the product benefits its customers, mentioning the primary features and the pricing of the product, and discussing how it’s different from other products in the market becomes necessary.

While writing your press release, keep in mind that you’re not only listing down the details of the product; you also have to market your product. Still, your advertising efforts should not be blatant, and writing in a way that directly speaks to your customers will be most successful for you. To familiarize your readers with your company better, mention a quote or two in your press release. 

If the product is instead the relaunched version of an older product, differentiate between the two and highlight its additional features and improvements. Again, mentioning pricing and quotes from your team will help you.  

Read More: How to write a Press Release for a New Product

How to Write a Press Release about a New Hire

Writing a press release about a new hire is much simpler than writing one for a product. The few things you should include in your content are how the new employee will add value to your company, the employee’s relevant background information, and how the new hire will fit into your organizational structure and goals. 

How to Write a Press Release to Promote Your Business

It might be a little daunting to write a press release that generally promotes your company; there are no set guidelines since the marketing style depends on the goals that the company aims to accomplish. To drive customers to respond the way you want them to, include a call-to-action in your press release.  

How Digital Press Releases Benefit Your Business

Below are the advantages of incorporating press releases in your digital marketing efforts:

• You can directly reach your established audience:
  If you have an existing customer base, press releases are an excellent way to share your news with your subscribers. All you need are the email addresses of your established customers to share your news to. Press releases, therefore, benefit both the company and its customers because your audience will always be updated with the new products, services, and events the company offers. 

• You benefit from Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
  By using keywords relevant to your niche and tailored to convey your message effectively for indexing, you give your content a chance to be featured on the first few results on search engines. If you have a website, backlinking to it will help you boost your website’s SEO profile. High-ranking SEO profiles will drive traffic to your website and increase your outreach to larger sets of audiences.
• Your exposure to new audiences increases:
  Through distribution efforts on websites and social media — preferably done through a distribution service — you maximize your outreach to potential customers.  Efforts to target your distribution campaigns based on specific geographic and demographic characteristics.

• You boost your brand loyalty:
  Along with brand awareness, digital marketing also improves your brand image. Audiences become more and more attuned to your brand and its offerings, and this builds a relationship of trust between your brand and its customers.

• It is a cost-effective marketing strategy:
  Contrary to popular belief, press release distribution is a very affordable solution, especially if one considers the return on investment it boasts. Most packages of newswire services offer multiple features that are tailored to maximize your exposure and spread your news like wildfire. 

• Social media advertising:
  Social media marketing is a very valuable part of the marketing efforts; any strategy that does not include social media marketing campaigns is rendered incomplete and borderline useless. To elaborate upon the importance of this strategy, we’ll get right to the topic of social media advertising in the next section. 

Reach Mass Audiences with Social Media Advertising

By sharing your content on social media, you immediately increase the potential of your press release’s effectiveness. For those unfamiliar with it (and to be fair, who isn’t familiar with social media nowadays?), let’s introduce you to social media marketing:

What is Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising started with business publishing their content on social media platforms, but improvements in the features, accessibility, and popularity of these platforms changed the marketing game forever. Now, businesses use social media to interact with their customers; to gain reviews; to get their customers to share their posts individually to their personal networks; and allow customers to know your company, its values, offerings, and updates on a very direct and accessible way.  

Social media optimization and monitoring also allow companies to keep a finger on the vital statistics of their social media marketing campaigns. With just a few clicks, your marketing team can find how many views, clicks, and engagements your post on social media platforms have had. Furthermore, paid social media advertising campaigns help you focus your marketing efforts on your desired audience better. 

There are five main pillars of social media marketing:

• The primary strategy:
  This firstly involves knowing what the demographics of your target audience are. The strategizing step involves thorough research into who will be most likely to interact with your content. After you know who your audience is, you can work on planning your message and its marketing accordingly. Once you know what your message is, you decide where you want to deliver it. 
• Publishing your ads:
  This step is pretty self-explanatory; you publish your advertisements on your chosen social media platforms. For example, if your content is video-based, Youtube and Vimeo are your best friends. If instead, you want to share your content through a text-based or image-based approach (also read as “press release distribution”), a good idea would be to instead publish your ads on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 
• Engagements on your ads:
  Once your ads are published, there’s a high chance that your audience will interact with them. The engagements definitely depend on your message and how well-planned your marketing efforts are, but if your audience does engage with your ads, now’s the time to leave a good impression. Reply to comments, answer queries, appreciate post shares and feedback; do all you can to let your customers know that you are available and enthusiastic about catering to their needs. 

• Analytics and Reporting:
  Once your social media campaign is running, you can start monitoring what the views, impressions, shares, and other relevant statistics are. Analyzing your marketing and distribution campaigns is just as, if not more than, important as running these campaigns. Analytics lets you know what strategies have turned out to be fruitful for your business, and where you can improve. Through reporting, you can also measure the return on your investment. 

• Growing accordingly:
  Based on the reviews from your customers, your customers’ comments on your ads, and the analysis of the overall performance of your campaign, you can rethink your strategy to improve your future campaigns. If your previous strategy fared well for you, stick to it. If you observed room for improvement, you’ll know what to do.

Best Social Media Platforms

There is a multitude of opportunities for you to market your business on social media networks, but according to global statistics of usage, below are the six best social media platforms as of 2021 (messaging apps have been excluded): 

1. Facebook
2. Youtube
3. Instagram
4. TikTok
5. Pinterest
6. Twitter

This was the list based on usage statistics, if you are focused on results, these are the social media platforms that offer you the best ROI:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. Twitter
4. Pinterest
5. LinkedIn
6. Snapchat

Types of Social Media Ads

There is a myriad of ad types that you can post on different platforms. Although all of the major social media platforms offer you paid advertising options, it’s best to only choose the networks best suited to your campaign and goals. Here’s a list of some ad types on major social media networks:

Ads on Facebook

Facebook is widely used over the world by various demographics. The platform offers you excellent paid advertising options. Below are the types of ads on Facebook:

Photo Ads

Images are a great way to quickly catch your audience’s attention. You can also add a caption for your photo; a good idea would be to include a 90-character headline with 90 characters of text. Your caption should generally include a call to action to get your customers to perform the actions you desire.

Video Ads

Video ads on Facebook are generally short loops of video clips that can autoplay on users’ feeds. You can also upload longer videos, but those aren’t as effective as short, to-the-point videos. Another option is to upload 360-degree videos.

Stories Ads

You can upload photos or videos as stories as well. Photos show on stories for an interval of 6 seconds before skipping, and videos can show for up to 15 seconds. These are good for marketing limited-time offers and for showing content that’s quick and easy to understand. One problem with story ads is that you can’t run an ad campaign on Facebook ads alone; these come as part of the package when you select Automatic Placements. 

Carousel Ads

You can add up to 10 images or videos on carousel ads. Each of these multimedia attachments can mention a different caption and link too. Using carousel ads, you can easily mention the different features of a product, or explain a step-by-step process to your potential customers. 

GIF/Slideshow Ads

You can create a short, looping video by combining different static images together. This collection of images require no video-specific resources and you can create a compelling video in no time. 

Ads on Instagram 

Instagram performs the same functionality as Facebook when it comes to marketing, the only difference is that it does so using a visuals-based strategy. You can run sponsored ads on Instagram and these usually generate a large audience within no time. Instagram is more popular among millennials and can be a great platform if you want to reach youngsters from Generation Z and Generation X. 

The types of ads on Instagram are similar to Facebook as well. Here’s a list:

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads
• Stories ads

Ads on Twitter

Twitter works almost the same way as Facebook and Instagram do. Using Twitter Promote, you can choose a business objective that aligns with your organizational goals. Using this feature, you can choose up to five interests or metropolitan locations. Twitter will do the rest for you. Here are the types of paid advertising options you can choose on Twitter:

• Promoted accounts
• Promoted tweets
• Promoted trends
• Website cards

How Ads on Different Social Media Platforms Work

Now that we know about what the best social media networks are and what types of ads are used on them, let’s quickly familiarize ourselves with how advertisement campaigns on different platforms work:

Facebook

These are the steps you should follow to set up your campaign on Facebook:

1. Setting up your ads
2. Selecting your targeting
3. Setting up your retargeting options
4. Monitor your campaign’s performance

Instagram

Since Instagram is owned by Facebook, setting up ad campaigns on the platform is very similar to setting up campaigns on Facebook. Here are the steps you should follow to set up your ads campaign on Instagram:

1. Select an editor to create your campaign
2. Select your objective, audience, and placements
3. Decide your budget and scheduling 
4. Monitor your campaign’s performance

Twitter

Below are the steps you should follow to set up your campaign on Twitter:

1. Select your campaign objective and add campaign details
2. Select your ad group and bidding
3. Select your targeting
4. Select where your ads should appear

Benefits of Advertising Using Social Media

Below is a short list of the benefits of marketing using social media:

• • Build Awareness: your reach will increase and more people will know about your company 
  • Increase Traffic: engagements with your posts will increase traffic to your website
  • Get conversions: with increased traffic, your sales will increase
  • Monitor your campaigns: use A/B testing by using performance analytics and determine which ads campaigns are better for your business
  • Use customer-generated content: this type of content works much better when used for advertising purposes

Great Hooks, Interactive Audience Building

It’s safe to say that we’re now well-aware of how digital marketing campaigns work. Let’s now explore how to make them work, especially when incorporating press releases in your campaigns:

Advanced Advertising Tactics for Facebook:

• Don’t run the same ad to target all your audiences. Tailor each campaign for each type of audience you wish to target.
• Use emojis in your captions; emojis are being used much more frequently now, and leave a friendly impression on your customers. Be sure not to use emojis in your press releases though.
• Benefit from Facebook’s analytics and monitoring capabilities.
• Don’t run ads that always look alike. Mix up your style to keep your audiences. 

Advanced Advertising Tactics for Instagram

• Customize your ads for your audiences.
• Start to market your content to lookalike audiences using Instagram’s algorithm. 
• Use your own content for images when marketing your press release rather than using stock photos. 
• Use hashtags properly so that you drive traffic to your ads.

Advanced Advertising Tactics for Twitter

• Compelling images work well on Twitter; create an eye-catching ad creative for your press release ad. You can also get your ad creative created by a newswire service. 
• Twitter targeting is a little different to navigate, so familiarize yourself with their targeting options better to maximize your campaigns’ results.
• Always include a call to action in your ad. 
• Twitter is all about brevity, so keep your tweets short.

Conclusion

This concludes our article. I hope this article helped you understand the importance of press releases in your digital marketing campaign. I also hope it taught you how to set up effective ad campaigns on different social media platforms for your press releases. 

FAQs: 

Is digital marketing most ideal to send a press release?

Yes. Digital PR is the quickest and most effective way to reach extensive networks of journalists, influencers, and bloggers at once. Therefore, digital PR means press releases can gain high-quality backlinks, social media shares, and search engine optimization (SEO) with one solution.  

Why do we need press releases in 2021?

Press releases are a surefire way to tell your stories in a way and generate leads. You can use press releases to announce a new product, service, plans, product launches, changes in your company’s infrastructure, etc. 

What is a press release in digital marketing?

A press release in digital marketing is when you summarize an announcement of something you want to promote. You publish and distribute this digitally in the hopes of getting your story picked up by journalists or for it to directly reach your customers.