Many businesses understand the need to bring regular press releases to the market to help gain increased coverage of their brand in main stream media. There is however a mistaken belief that a press release is required to be specifically targeted at main stream media and the coverage of a piece of PR is only successful if it is picked up by a paper or highly trafficked news website online.
Within a market such as New Zealand this is an understandable belief considering the top-heavy feel to the market where only a few large media brands cover
the majority of the press coverage within the country and press release marketing is the realm of PR consultancies.
That said, it is not a good reason to ignore the benefits of a well written, regular press release campaign that is aimed specifically at the mid-range news distribution market online including PR channels like the PR.co.nz press release service where the distribution of New Zealand press releases online is available.
While building a press release that is targeted at main stream media can take many hours to get quality, compelling content and tone into the piece of written material, it is not necessary to spend this level of time on something that is aimed at the wider market.
There are a few major benefits of building a persistent and interesting profile of press releases on about your brand on your website and within your local vertical online.
Every release you put out there, if presented in the right places, will be picked up by a number of news and press release feeds that will help to distribute it around the New Zealand web.
As long as you can keep the content interesting to your target market (and hopefully you suppliers as well) then it’s positive reinforcement of your brand on a regular basis, helping to bring you to top-of-mind for that prospective clients.
The search engine optimisation benefits of well written topical press releases that have links back to your website are well documented but not as well used as many people would imagine. At present it is largely the search optimisation companies themselves that are implementing this when it could easily be marketing teams or content writers for the company who develop these press releases prior to approval from management.
Another benefit is a growing level of content on your website that is topical and fresh helping to bring customers back as well as helping your own search engine optimisation through regularity of implementing fresh content on your website which is becoming more import over time with Google.
Too often businesses believe the only way to bring regular readership and content to their website is to start a business blog however a blog post is not easily passed around the community online and is quite unlikely to get picked up by any other media outlets online (mainstream or not).
The idea of using a blog service (e.g. WordPress) to facilitate the regular posting of solid press releases either to complement a business blog or even in replacement of it has not been well explored but may well be the answer for some companies who prefer a slightly more structured approach as well as the external media benefits of writing press releases instead of blog posts.
Here are a few NZ specific PR distribution channels you might consider posting your latest press release to;
PR.co.nz – New Zealand Press Releases
InfoNews – infonews.co.nz
Scoop – Scoop.co.nz, independent media releases
Geekzone – Geekzone.co.nz, IT related news releases
