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FEATURE

Getting Publicity for Your Product Announcement -- A Tactical Approach

Putting out the word

Issue: 3.3 (January/February 2005)
Author: Gwen Palmer
Author Bio: Gwen Palmer is the director of marketing at REAL Software, where she uses her extensive public relations and marketing experience to build awareness for REALbasic and for REALbasic developers like you. Got a tricky marketing question? Want feedback on your launch strategy? Email her at pr@realsoftware.com.
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Starting Page Number: 11
Article Number: 3308
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It can be very rewarding to see your product news in print, as it can help to build your reputation and increase revenue. But what is a good process for helping to make sure your news announcement is noticed and picked up by the media?

There are three general steps involved in successful tactical announcements:

1. Plan your announcement

2. Target media appropriately

3. Create a well-written press release

Plan Your Announcement

To provide the best experience for the press and for your company, think about all of the things that go into a press announcement and plan them out. Answer the following questions:

• What do you want to accomplish with the announcement?

  Who is your target customer? What are your broad media targets?

  What are the details of your announcement? Naming? Pricing? Ship Date?

  What will be your announcement date?

Write these out in a little mini-plan so you have a clear idea of your goals. The goal of the announcement might be to raise awareness, win new customers, or sell upgrades. Your target customer is the person you most want to buy your product. Your broad media targets are the general markets that you are going after -- business, consumer, Windows, or Mac, for example. The details of your announcement will be important as you write the press release, so start pulling this information together before you begin.

To determine announcement dates, keep in mind that most media outlets publish their news in the morning, since most people read their news in the morning. Sending out your news release on a Friday afternoon or Sunday morning may mean that your news misses the people you most want to reach. Mondays are very busy for daily reporters and Thursdays are deadline days for most weekly reporters, so plan your announcements accordingly. Release early in the morning on news day, or even the day before (to give reporters a heads-up). Also, don't release announcements on holidays, as fewer people are at their computers.

Target Media Appropriately

The goal here is to figure out who the best media contacts are for your company. Because the media spend every day inundated with email, press releases, faxes, and phone calls, provide them relevant information in the most efficient way possible:

1. Select media outlets. Read the magazines and websites you think your customers are likely to read. Review the articles and make a list of the topics and issues that are current and relevant to your business. This will give you a good idea of the kinds of stories each media outlet considers interesting to their audience.

The Macintosh and Linux markets have tight-knit communities and news is dispersed through only a few outlets. For Windows, think hard about your target customers and narrow your focus. Get pinpoint accuracy on who your customers are, then pick the publications they are likely to read.

As an example, MacWorld, MacCentral, MacNN, and MacMinute are common news sites that print new product announcements. For Linux, publications like Linux Journal, Linux World, Linux Today, and Linux Business News are pretty easy to reach as well. However, if you write a Windows software product, who do you send your news release to? If it's business or enterprise-focused, check out Cnet or eWeek. If your product is personal productivity software that helps PC users measure how screaming fast their PC is, you will want to get familiar with Maximum PC or ExtremeTech.

2. Target Reporters and Trends. Start tracking specific reporters that cover products and services in your market. Read their articles. Think through what they are thinking about and try to find broader issues that may attract them to your company. Sometimes, this can give you good ideas on how to broaden the story and add interest, simply by approaching your product news differently than what has already been written.

3. Target Specific Contacts. Make a media list of your target contacts; include their name, address, phone number, and email and keep a log of when and how you contact each other. Get to know how they like to work. Do they prefer email? Do they like simple text files? Do they like to include graphics in their stories? Keep special track of people who have written about you or your competitors. If you can, keep a record of your pitches so you know what has worked in the past. Use your background to inspire new ideas to help get your company noticed.

4. Plan ahead. Reporters like to report new news, not old news. If a reporter has been receptive to your ideas and gets what you do, provide a preview of your announcement before news day. Send the release out a week or two in advance for daily news and online news and up to 3 months in advance for monthly magazines or professional journals. This helps the media plan the story and include interesting angles that they wouldn't have time to come up with if you waited until press day or the day before.

Create a Well-Written Press Release

The press release is the crux of the tactical announcement and has several functions. The first is to drive business strategy. Because press releases contain feature sets, customer benefits, pricing, availability dates, and other important facts about your product, there are a lot of decisions that can be finalized as you write the press release. Another function of the press release is to educate prospective and existing customers about your company and your products.

An easy format to use for the press release is lead (which includes the headline, sub-headline, and lead paragraph), the body (which contains more in-depth information), and contact info. The lead, of course, states the most important facts first and pulls the reader into your story. The body amplifies and supplements the lead. The contact info helps the media get more information from you.

Here's an example of an interesting lead:

DELL DELIVERS PLASMA TVS, PRINTERS, AND MUSIC PLAYERS FOR HOME ENTERTAINMENT

A subhead adds more detail, and can describe what this means to audiences:

Customers Benefit From the Dell Advantage With Best Product Prices, Quality, and Service

For the lead paragraph, start with the city and state of origin and the date of the press release. Then include a clear paragraph of what you are announcing. In a product announcement, this explains what the product is and may include the ideal customer benefit.

Here's an example:

AUSTIN, Texas (October 13, 2004) -- Dell today opened its holiday selling season with new products, including its first plasma TVs, a compact photo printer, and sleek, new models of the Dell(TM) Digital Jukebox (DJ) music players.

In the body of the release, it is a strong approach to use customers to validate your announcement. If you have a customer who will act as a reference, include a quote from the customer. Otherwise, use a senior executive (this may be you if you're a one-person company).

Here's an example of an executive quote:

John Hamlin, Dell senior vice president, U.S. Consumer, said, "Our competitors' prices provide us considerable room to pass on huge savings to our customers. Our high-definition plasma TV is significantly less than other brands with comparable features -- less than half the price of one company's."

In the next paragraph(s), tell exactly what's interesting and beneficial to your target customers. Use action language. If you outline features and functions, or updates to features and functions, focus on the benefits. Features give you a long laundry list in your press release, but then the customer has to interpret why the features are good. Instead, provide the interpretation for them. Customers don't want to have to work that hard.

Use a clear writing style. Don't use a long or foreign word when a short, familiar word will do. Check for run-on sentences and break them up. Tie up the loose ends on your sentence fragments. A brisk writing style will reflect well on your company and make your news easier and more interesting to read.

And deliver them from jargon. Because technology is a jargon-rich environment, you will need to be conscious about eliminating acronyms and techie terms from your press release. Find meaningful ways to share your news with ordinary words. Everyone likes clear writing.

Include pricing and availability information in your press release. This is where reporters and customers turn to find out the cost, where, and how to buy your product.

Finally, include your complete contact information. If a member of the media wants to contact you for a quick question and they're working on a deadline, they need to be able to get in touch with you, pronto. Provide a phone number and email address at a minimum, and include a web URL to make it easy for the reporter to find out answers to product questions.

A Word of Caution -- proofread your materials. Typos, broken links, and sentence fragments can make you seem unprofessional. Package your materials. Send electronic materials, such as the press release, a screen shot (.gif or .jpg for online, .eps or .jpg for print media), links to your website, or other information, in a well-organized, easy-to-access format. Include links to graphics, text-only documents, and no attachments.

A final note. To lend a professional air to your press materials, follow the AP Book of Style (http://www.apstylebook.com). It is the definitive standard, and journalists can see it a mile away if you don't follow it. It covers sentence structure, capitalization, and punctuation, and can help anyone, from the novice to the pro, become a better writer.

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