In today’s world, lots of information is disseminated via social media. This is a platform for the type of person that wants to know that things are happening, but doesn’t want details.
But there is also a type of person who wants to be informed. For this type of person, a press release is a better format for engaging interest.
The following tips will improve your skills as a press release writer.
Structure of a Press Release
A press release has three fundamental parts: title, summary, and body.
As a press release writer, you need to understand the purpose of each of these parts and craft your prose towards fulfilling that purpose.
Title
The title of your press release is the source of your search engine optimization. Current search engines will also analyze the summary and body of your press release, but the title gets a lot of weight. You need to include at lease one popular keyword in your title and the name of your business, product, or both.
Use an application like Google Analytics to determine good keywords for your title. The final goal is to crafts something that both has good keywords and succinctly describes the content of your press release.
Summary
The summary of a press release is roughly two to three sentences long and gives the reader a full understanding of what they should expect to see in the body. The purpose of the summary is to hook the reader.
You want your summary to be interesting and include just enough information that the reader wants to learn more.
If the summary hooks the reader, the rest of the content often all but sells itself. As a press release writer, you should practice writing summaries that are highly engaging.
Body
Finally, the body is the full story of your press release. The main goal of this section is to make the reader feel informed. Start the body with a date and include direct links in the body to your website. While it may seem a bit counter intuitive, a press release is better for marketing if it doesn’t try to sell a product.
Instead, focus on making it informative and not too long. An informed reader that isn’t bored by an overly long press release is likely to explore links, allowing the actual sale to be made by a web page focused towards that purpose.
