As a small business community, New Zealand business owners have a strong tendency to complete the do-it-yourself angle with everything we can, including marketing and publicity for our own business’ media releases. Helping small businesses understand and facilitate the use of media releases (often also known as a press release or news release) in the New Zealand market is a challenging thing to do given the wide experience levels of small business owners.

That said, many small businesses have cottoned-on to the changing scene online where businesses themselves are becoming the publishers of content with media outlets willingly promoting their business material, particularly when it’s of public interest (or a low news day).

Where to start with marketing my media release?

We start with the key ideas commonly discussed for writing a media release that will help produce a higher chance of being picked up by media publications. These are by no means the definitive guide for writing media releases however they will get you started:

• Write media releases when you have some that’s news worthy to say
• Use the introduction to lay out the benefits for reading the release and grab your target readers interest
• Short is good, the journalist and your eventual reader will get the most benefit from a single page, too much content and you’ll lose the detail you want to potray
• Be as objective and factual as you can, it may be your product however it’ll only look like an advert if you’re promoting it with sales or “I” and “We” language

I’ve always found it useful to have someone you respect from outside your business read over the release as well prior to completion, also if you’re looking for more tips that have been brought together from around the New Zealand press release articles I’d suggest a skim over how to write a press release.

What to do with my media release now?

You’ve written the media release and now you’re looking for places to submit the release as well as finding options you have for marketing it in the wider community to get to your readers.

First step is to submit the media release to a few of the free press release submission services, particularly the local independent publishers and distributors like PR.co.nz, Scoop and Infonews.

Some of the independent publishers offer different distribution angles like pushing the release out to other news desks or potentially promoting your media release itself via a paid service. The leading brand offering media release services is MediaCom, part of the New Zealand Press Association however different services offer advantages to help with lowering the costs associated on a per release basis.

There is also the option of locating news desk emails one by one on the major news providers’ websites however the time spent doing this in the light of the reasonably low chance of pick-up per release (these news desks receive a lot of emails in a single day) could lead to being a reasonably inefficient use of your time.

Offering the release to your regular subscribers in a newsletter if you already have a subscribing database is important, along with posting the release on your own website and leading into it from your homepage on a “news” or equivalent section will help to promote it with your own audience who should already be interested.

Lastly (but by no means least) is using your social media channels (Facebook pages and Twitter accounts) to promote the media release to those who are following your business via social circles. If you can find a hook or one line sentence that is going to grab the attention of your followers you’ll have the highest chance of gaining forwards or re-tweets of the release.

Most of all, remember to be maintain honesty within your release and all associated marketing of the media release to help build the branding of your business as a whole.