Here at Cision, public relations professionals ask us about press release templates all the time. But there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, the key question is: “Why does this news matter?” Every release should answer that.
Especially if you want earned media coverage - making sure your press release is relevant for an audience of journalists is critical. In fact, journalists rely heavily on press releases: 74% want to receive them from PR teams, and 68% use them for story ideas. That’s according to our most recent State of the Media Report.
So, it’s worth making your press release stand out – and here’s how. Below, we’ve outlined the must-haves for your press releases, ways to get the most mileage out of each release, and how to understand if your efforts are paying off.
Must-Have Elements in Your Press Release
#1: Compelling Headline to Keep Them Reading
In addition to answering the “So what?” question right off the top, your headline should also include a positive action verb to convey the key message within the first 60 characters (for SEO purposes, you should always strive to keep your headline to 100 characters or less). This press release from BrightCheck, Inc. is a great example.
For evergreen content or thought leadership, lead with the story – not the brand (much like the Video Advertising Bureau did in this release). The unbranded headline is a great content marketing approach.
Finally, use a subhead to provide additional context - data points, event dates, etc. Get readers curious to know more.
#2: Clear and Concise Call to Action (CTA)
What do you want readers to do after engaging with your content? Make it clear by including a strong CTA that compels your audience – be it media, investors, or consumers – to take that next step (whether it’s following you on social media, signing up for an event, going to a website to learn more, etc.).
Make sure your CTA stands out by:
- Placing it “above the fold” or near the top so the reader sees it early on
- Being descriptive and including a strong action verb, not just “click here”
- Bolding it and making it a stand-alone paragraph
#3: Format to Drive Engagement
How your release looks matters almost as much as what it says. Strategic formatting helps ensure readability, capture the attention of audiences, and convey key messages clearly. Consider implementing these small, but important formatting elements into your press release:
- Bulleted lists for key takeaways
- Bold section headers to break up the text
- Multimedia elements (embedded images, videos, infographics, etc.)
- Short, two- to three-sentence paragraphs for easier reading
Bonus Points
To increase engagement from journalists, consider these additional tips:
- Clear media contact info (Pro Tip: Be sure the media contact is readily available in the days after your press release is distributed.)
- Relevant, concise executive quotes
- Natural storytelling language
- No industry jargon
Get More Mileage Out of Your Press Releases
Sending a press release shouldn’t be a one-and-done effort. After all, you’ve worked hard to craft a compelling, newsworthy story – why not try to get a little more mileage out of it?
Pitching individual reporters and putting your press release out on a wire service (such as PRNewswire) certainly helps increase visibility and opportunities for earned media. But with a little creativity and extra effort, you can get it in front of more eyes to amplify your earned media opportunities.
All the content you need is already right in front of you – it’s just a matter of repackaging it and giving it a fresh spin. Here are just a few ways to make your press release go further:
- Post it to your online newsroom
- Turn it into a blog post
- Share it with your sales team (along with talking points that will help drive conversations with clients and prospects)
- Pull out stats or quotes for your newsletter
- Create a video highlighting key points or takeaways
- Promote it on social media
- Repurpose it for paid ads (if budget allows)
One Last Step: Make Sure the Extra Work Pays Off
After putting in all that effort, you’ll want to know: “Was it worth it?" Make sure you're tracking your efforts every step of the way.
For each press release, keep track of which outlets picked up your news and how much engagement the coverage received. Quantify the traffic to your website with analytics - from overall traffic and unique users to bounce rates to conversion rates - to understand if your content is inciting action from audiences. Social media metrics can also easily indicate if and how your messages are resonating.
Another critical indicator of PR performance is media monitoring. A good media monitoring tool can help you understand if and how your efforts are moving the needle, enabling you to track such metrics as: number of media mentions, sentiment analysis, and audience reach.
For more on how to measure PR performance and what metrics are the most essential, check out these resources:
- Making It Count: A Step-by-Step Guide to Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of PR
- 7 Essential PR Metrics To Prove Impact
To find out how CisionOne Monitoring can help you track the impact of your PR efforts, explore the platform or schedule a demo today.
During this stage of the process, you should also be documenting everything, including:
Client interviews for journalist requests (email, bio, contact details, etc.)
Signed-off comments from clients on relevant topics, as their comments can be used for all kinds of journalist contributor requests
Expert/contributor images and headshots (color, black & white, transparent background, etc.)
According to Cision research, it’s not uncommon for journalists file up to 10 stories a week. They need information, and they need it fast. Having commentary and assets prepared earlier means you help journalists meet their deadlines and push out high-volume, high-quality content.
3. Define Your Audience
Whether you're pitching journalists or driving traffic, relevancy is more important than ever in PR right now.
Relevancy in pitching terms means choosing the right journalists with the right audiences.
Relevancy in SEO/traffic terms means driving those audiences back to the right pages on your site, with the right keywords, to improve your topic authority in search engines.
And getting the first part right makes the second part a whole lot easier.
Relevancy is key today because boardrooms and clients are demanding more than just top of the funnel results from digital PR pros. They want audiences who are considering and converting. And for that, they need to get in front of hyper-relevant audiences.
If you want to forensically investigate the audience of your brand or client, head to SparkToro.
A quick search for a website in the SparkToro dashboard will show you key audience insights, including:
Demographics
Social accounts they follow
Websites they interact with
Podcasts they listen to
Subreddits they’re members of and, crucially...
Press accounts they find most engaging
I’ve been on the receiving end of agency pitches that have been exceptionally generic. The problem? The person pitching didn’t ask our team about our audience – an audience which we spend most of our working days trying to figure out.
Tools like SparkToro can go a long way in helping you get into the mind of an audience; however, nothing can replace that quality of insight that comes from talking to customers, customer-facing teams, and – if you’re agency side – clients.
All the information you gather will be key to creating a relevant press idea.
4. Research Your Press Idea
Once you know who you’re targeting, you can get creative. Here are some different avenues to explore with your PR campaign idea:
Reactive PR and Newsjacking
Capitalize on breaking news or trending topics by conducting relevant research, gathering data, and pitching expert commentary or analysis to journalists covering the story.
Diversified Content Formats
Our research proves that press releases, surveys, and data-driven research are the most effective content formats to pitch journalists.
But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider diversifying your content formats to stand out from the competition.
Explore interactive elements like calculators, maps, morphing GIFs, or compelling visuals that can capture journalists' attention and provide a fresh perspective on your topic.
Regional and Niche Angles
Think beyond just national coverage and consider tailoring your campaigns to include regional or niche angles that can appeal to local publications or industry-specific outlets. This approach can help you build a diverse portfolio of high-authority links from a wide range of sources.
“With clients we always try to have at least one ‘Regional hook’ campaign, where we have data down to a state level and, even better, a city level. Any time you do that, you suddenly open up your network to hundreds of other regional publishers. They generally have a domain authority of 70 or above, which is really great – that's my threshold for what is a real authoritative site. There are radio stations, there are news publishers, there's ABC, CNBC, Fox, and they all have regional sites. So any time you can have regional data in a campaign you're going to get even more than just national news.”
Kelsey Libert, Co-Founder of Fractl
Earning Press Coverage With Insights From 5K Campaigns
Get Ideas from Journalist Content
Keep up to date with a journalist’s latest work, and let their best content inspire your next PR idea.
Get Inspiration from Existing PR Campaigns
Track down successful campaigns to inspire your next PR campaign strategy. Follow publishers and online content curators to see the best examples, including:
The Grapevine newsletter by PR expert Iona Townsley
Unbottled newsletter by Bottled Imagination
Once you have a bunch of relevant topics, start brainstorming your actual press idea.
At this point consider:
- Campaign format
- “Innovation level”
- Agreed upon goals and key results
- Budget and resources
5. Pitch an Idea and Get Sign-Off
This is when you really need to focus on validating your idea with data. Why should your team or clients buy into it? How does it help them achieve their goals? For the decision makers: how will it save or earn them money?
Here are a few ways you can build trust in your idea:
Prove Engagement
Can you prove that there is a strong appetite for this kind of PR content using search data from Google Trend.
Showcase Cost Savings
Do the keywords surrounding your campaign have a high paid media cost-per-click (CPC) – meaning it’s more commercially viable to earn relevant, organic coverage around the campaign topic versus spending money for it via paid media?
Prove Traffic Potential
Present the number of links, and the amount of traffic opportunity your campaign topics are able to earn using tools like Ahrefs’ Content Explorer.
6. Create the Campaign and Review It
Start gathering all your strategic outputs. Once your campaign is at the point of final review, you should begin involving anyone who needs to pass comment – i.e. clients or experts.
Kelsey Libert, PR expert and Co-Founder of Fractl, reported that she is increasingly receiving requests for commentary and quotes, alongside all kinds of PR campaigns.
7. Research and Build Your List of Journalists
The fate of your digital PR campaign lies in a journalist’s hands – that’s why you need to be hanging off of their every word.
Here are a few ways you can build your media list of journalists.
1. Find the journalists who are writing about your key campaign topics...
3. If you’ve created a specific format of content, like an infographic, track down journalists that have already published infographics.
4. Research relevant media outlets and work backwards from there.
Once you’re happy you’ve sourced relevant journalists who will genuinely care about your content, then bank them to your media list.
To do all of this research, make sure you have access to a journalist database with an archive of media coverage and regularly updated information.
8. Pitch to Journalists
At this point you need to make sure that your pitches are as personalized as possible. Prove to a journalist that you’ve done the legwork to understand their beat and back catalogue. If you can get hold of their top performing content, reference it and demonstrate how your story will help them replicate that success. And heed the advice of PR expert Domenica D’Ottavio, Associate Director of Digital PR at Journey Further:
"Pitching ain't easy." It's not as simple as emailing a journalist and watching the placements roll in.
In 2023, journalists outnumber PR pros by 7 to 1.
Now, more than ever, it's essential to start on the right foot - by building relationships. These journalists are likely folks that you will be reaching out to for the remainder of your career. Refrain from burning bridges by sending irrelevant, off-beat pitches to contacts who don't care about what you're pitching.
Instead, remember that journalists are people first and foremost, and they have a job to do.
Ensure you craft an email that:
Acknowledges that you've read their work and know what they're about and
Helps them do their job, either by providing them ideas, content, or data or offering to connect them with subject matter experts
Does your press release offer something new for their readers? Does it answer a question or challenge an existing convention? Is it newsworthy, surprising, or does it evoke an emotion? Journalists want readers to engage with their articles and stay on the page, so only send press releases that you know are primed to entertain their audience.
Domenica D'Ottavio
Associate Director of Digital PR
Here are three more tips for pitching journalists:
Prioritize Personalization
Personalization is crucial when pitching journalists and building relationships with them. Go beyond simply addressing them by name; find ways to connect with their interests, recent work, or personal anecdotes they've shared. This level of personalization will make your pitch stand out and increase the likelihood of a positive response.
Engage on Social Media
Social media platforms like X/Twitter can be powerful tools for building relationships with journalists before pitching them. Follow relevant journalists, engage with their content, and share insights or quotes from their work. This proactive approach will make you more recognizable when you eventually pitch them.
Offer Exclusive Access
Instead of mass-pitching your content to multiple journalists simultaneously, consider offering exclusive access to a select few, high-authority publications or writers first. This exclusivity can be compelling for journalists and increase the chances of your content being covered.
“The most effective thing to do is to [conduct] high touch outreach to select publishers that you know are going to have the biggest syndication networks. Go for them first, because then you can get in with a writer that's going to syndicate to 100 other writers.”
Kelsey Libert, Co-Founder of Fractl
Earning Press Coverage With Insights From 5K Campaigns
9. Win the Pitch and Coordinate with Journalists
This step is simply about general etiquette when you’re working with journalists to deliver the story:
Be responsive if a journalist needs more information from you
Don’t pester or follow up too often
Don’t request to make edits – respect their expertise
Be clear (but not pushy) about reference and link requests
Be friendly and appreciative
You can find out more do’s and don'ts of pitching, based on real responses from over 3,000 journalists, in our State of the Media Report.
10. Monitor Coverage and Report On Goals
To track the success of your PR campaign you need to be using a PR tool that specializes in media monitoring, so you can get instant alerts of coverage.
It’s important to bring together data that can help you benchmark the actual performance of your campaign against the key results you set at the beginning. This is especially important if you set multi-disciplinary goals (e.g. social, search, PR, etc.).
To do this, some PR pros build their own PR dashboards using Google’s Looker Studio, or internal software.
Other tools, like CisionOne, give PR practitioners business-critical data in preconfigured dashboards, so they can easily slice and dice campaign performance.
About Amy O'Connell
Amy O'Connell is the Global Content and Experience Producer at Cision. She is a skilled marketing and communications professional with over 15 years of experience across various industries.