Five top tips on how to make a press release work for your business

Sending a press release to journalists with PR software is a fairly simple process. But how do you monitor how well it’s doing and improve the results?

Here are five top tips to follow when you use a PR Platform with ‘Analytics’ such as JournoLink.

1- Track your view’s engagement. What time of the day you had the most interest and whether any day of the week was most active. This will help you to time subsequent press releases to optimise the pick up by journalists. Also, track where the views came from. Were they verified pick-ups from the direct press release distribution or were they through a social channel such as Twitter. This will help you work out where journalists interested in your news are most likely to engage with you going forward, and where you should share your release link.

2- Monitor the actual journalists interacting with your release. They may not use your news in an article immediately, but they are certainly worth staying in touch with. Follow them on Twitter and when relevant send them a Direct Message to start building a relationship. The Analytics in JournoLink’s PR Reach tool tracks journalist engagement over time.

It also helps you build and monitor your own personal target journalist list.

3- Set up Google Alerts to track both your own brand, and the journalists who are showing most interest in you, and who you are most interested in covering your news. Once you know who they are, you can focus on the titles that are most likely to be read by your customer base.

4- Ensure that the Media Room on your website is up to date. The media room provided by and hosted by JournoLink does this automatically, but if the platform you are using doesn’t automatically add new press releases each time they are distributed, ensure you add them. This is important as often your website is the first place journalists look when they are checking out whether your business will work in their articles. But it’s also critical for you to know which pages of your Media Room are most visited and when those visits occur, allowing you to understand how your media campaigns are working and whether you need to make changes to your website to optimise the engagement with your viewers.

The JournoLink Analytics picks up your ongoing Media Room hits as well as the actual Press Release to help you track total engagement.

5- Create a weekly reoccurring diary prompt in your calendar, including the link to your Analytics…the PR Reach one on your JournoLink dashboard for instance. So that you keep a close eye on who is watching your news on an ongoing basis. Remember, journalists do their own research when they are writing their articles and if you know who is looking at you, you can reach out to them as well.

The time has moved on from simply measuring the effectiveness of a news release by the immediate coverage, which might be difficult to track fully anyway.

Now what is equally important is having Analytics to help you to monitor your business profile on an ongoing basis, making data-driven decisions to optimise your brand reach. And in return, your sales growth.