Anyone working in Cybersecurity PR understands the importance of top tier media coverage. It works to increase brand awareness, earn backlinks, boost SEO and drive website traffic, and more traffic = more customers.
Press releases are just one of the main drivers of media coverage; official news released to the media with the purpose of providing information, creating an official statement, or making a public announcement. As a cybersecurity PR agency, we certainly know our way around producing and distributing cybersecurity press releases! One of the main questions we get is, how often should I be sending out a press release? Well, we will answer that for you in this blog.
Firstly you have to consider, what is share-worthy news, and do you have it?
Before embarking on your press release journey, it is important to establish what your target media will want to publish. Do your research into the publication and the journalist and see if the story you have is something that they would be interested in. If everything fits, this is a good sign that you should push your story out and work to send your press release.
If you don’t, that doesn’t mean you sit and wait until you have a story that could work, as this significantly restricts how often you can send out press releases, and can be detrimental to your PR strategy. You can’t sit around and hope that news that is relevant to your brand will fall in your lap. You have to make it happen.
If your goal is to maximise media coverage, you want to be sharing newsworthy content as often as possible. In order to create newsworthy content, sometimes you have to create the story yourself. Conduct some research, run an engaging poll, interview your client – be creative and create the story yourself.
One thing to be careful of is to not overload journalists with irrelevant content. Cybersecurity PR is all about relationships, and if you keep sending journalists content they don’t have an interest in, it will become a boy who cried wolf situation and when you actually do have newsworthy content, they might not be interested.
It is also important to get the tone of the press release right. A press release shouldn’t be a sales document, it should be a piece of factual information with statistics and sure, confident language.
Now that we have that established, we can revisit the question of how often should you be sending out press releases?
There are a few factors that will come into play when considering how often you should be sending out press releases:
- The type of media you are targeting – if you are reaching out to a daily print or broadcast media, then you will want to constantly be on the lookout for relevant content from which you can create a press release. However, if you are targeting a monthly print publication then you will obviously be reaching out to them less often. In this later instance, you will want to consider doing your research and learning their lead times and when they plan each publication.
- The purpose of the press release – if you are mainly engaging in digital PR to earn media coverage and backlinks to your site in order to boost SEO, then when you have good-quality, newsworthy content, use it.
To put it simply, the media wants good stories and so the most successful Cybersecurity PR campaigns, or any PR campaigns, will be the ones that deliver an engaging narrative. There is a reason PR professionals write press releases before being the ones to distribute them, because they best understand the language and tone required. They are essentially written by journalists, for journalists.
Are you looking to jump start your Cybersecurity PR plan? Why not get in touch to see how we might be able to work with you.