BusinessWire, a press release distribution service we at SGC swear by, recently looked into some of their most successful and highly effective press releases to determine what traits they all had across the board. The following are the seven traits BusinessWire found to be necessary for an effective press release:
- 87% of releases included at least one link in one form or another in the body of the release, with many of the top releases containing quite a few very descriptive links. If your company happens to be a holdout in the release linking game, I hope this may persuade you to start adding descriptive links to your press releases.
- 73% of releases incorporated some special formatting within the body of the release, whether it be bold, italics, underlining or an embedded image. In today’s xhtml world, special formatting can be an excellent way to emphasize key points of your releases, break your content into distinct sections and provide cues for ‘skimmers’ to gather meaning as they quickly scan content for relevant information.
- 68% of releases had a subheadline. This stat was the most surprising to me. The subhead seems to have an unclear role in press release SEO, since it’s not really the headline and not really the body either. While the robots digesting releases may not pay it much mind, it’s clear that the subhead offers valuable supplementary guidance to readers as they consider whether to continue on reading a release and possibly even share that release.
- 58% of releases included the company name in the release headline (Ex. Company X releases XYZ app). Of course, this also means that 42% didn’t include the company name and still performed quite well with readers. There is very little real estate available within your headline and if it is more than 22 words you might not make it into Google News. With this in mind, consider the goal of the release and campaign when making your choice. If company branding is a chief concern, including the name is probably a good idea. However, if the focus is more product or service focused, for instance, maybe the company name should take a back seat.
- 35% of releases included a photo or video, with the vast majority of those including a photo only. It’s safe to say that much fewer than 35% of all releases include multimedia, so it’s clearly a good idea to include multimedia in order to help your releases stand out. Product photos, charts, infographics, company executives, high-resolution logos . . . the list of possibilities is nearly endless.
- 23% of releases encouraged social sharing or engagement within the body of the release, typically Facebook or Twitter. All EON releases already offer social sharing chicklets covering all major social networks, so it’s not absolutely critical to give them additional emphasis within your release. However, if social engagement is a priority or your release is geared towards “sharability”, why not give readers a bit more of a push?
- 5% of releases, just two, had any special characters in the headline. So perhaps adding special characters in headlines is not a good idea.
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