How can you make sure your press release gets picked up?

There’s nothing like third-party endorsement—in the form of the media—to boost your brand’s credibility and buzz. Yes, there are tons of books and courses on this subject, but here, we’ll touch on some tips you may not have considered, as well as some standard guidelines to make sure you get the ink—or pixels—you deserve.

• Start with your audience. We’ve covered this here before, but we can’t stress it enough. Know thy audience. For your story, there are a few layers to consider. Naturally, there’s your end reader. What’s their demographic? Mindset? Education level? What publications and social outlets are they following? But there’s also your editorial audience: think of them as the gatekeepers. Your release won’t get read by your target audience if it doesn’t get picked up in the first place, so you really need to “sell” at the editorial level as a prerequisite.
  
• Decide what’s newsworthy. In other words, Why would anyone care? Yes, you may be very proud that you’ve unveiled Version 2 of your product or service, but how will it make people’s lives better? That’s the angle you want to exploit. For example, “New widget has double the processor speed” is about you. “New widget lets people cut their work time in half” is more about them. Get it?

• Consider the timing. Are you unveiling something? When’s the best time to let the world know? Some events are predictable (huge trade shows you’ll be at, holiday seasons); others are more subtle (does your story perhaps coincide with the 10th anniversary of some noteworthy event?). You may have seen how stories in Washington are sometimes purposely “buried” by being released late on a Friday after the end of the news cycle; the opposite logic applies to you.

• Craft your lead. Your opening sentence is everything. Work it to death. No one will read one word past it if it’s not a grabber. It’s the whole story, but it’s also the tease to the rest of it. If it makes you feel better, we’ll often devote more than half the time spent on an entire press release just to working, and reworking, the lead. It’s that important. And it’s worth the work.

• Build out the story. Use inverted-pyramid structure: Craft your release so that an editor could chop the thing from the last paragraph and work his or her way up, and the release would still hold together as a coherent whole and not appear “edited.”

• Stick to proper style. It may not be fun to follow the guidelines of a benchmark like the AP Stylebook, but if you format that dateline incorrectly, or toss in a serial comma when you shouldn’t, it can give you away as an outsider, and weaken your release in editors’ eyes. Hint: It’s actually pretty easy to decode style guides—simply look at stories published in established media, and follow their formatting.

• Push the limits. Okay, we’ve just told you to follow the rules. But you can—and should—creatively break them, too. Give a luxury brand a more luxurious voice. Get philosophical: Establish the “in life…” setup for your story’s payoff. Include some assumptions that unbiased reporters wouldn’t. Toss in an occasional fragment sentence, if it works. Your release needs to cut the clutter, and, to the extent it can, be provocative.

• Write the headline last. If you thought the lead was important, the headline is even more important. It’s got to encapsulate, yet tease. Write several versions. Write several versions of subheads. Mix and match them. Then go with the winning combination. Don’t be alarmed—or surprised—if the headline takes you as long to craft as the lead.

• End with a great boilerplate. That’s the final “About Your Company” paragraph at the end of your press release. It’s a concise and powerful description of your company, ending with contact information. Again, it’s easy to get ideas here: Go to the website of a company you like or respect, navigate to their “News” section, and look at any of their press releases. Scroll to the bottom. You’ll find their boilerplate there. Simple as that.

• Consider getting help. While the guidelines above can certainly help you, there’s no denying that writing a perfect press release takes time and effort, not to mention skills you may not possess. If you find the prospect daunting, or simply want to keep your time free for core activities, consider bringing in expert help. The results will be the best you can get, and the investment will pay strong dividends. Contact us and let’s get a quote in your hands. 

Are you slide decks snoozers?
Tips for making your next presentation a grabber and a business-builder.

No one wants to sit through a PowerPoint. Yet everyone wants to be told a story. Keeping that premise in mind—along with an understanding of your audience, and your already-stellar grasp of your own material—it’s not hard to make your next presentation better than your last one.

How much better depends on you. While it’s possible to write an entire book about PowerPoint (in fact, Amazon lists nearly 8,000 of them!), you can use some of these basic best-practice pointers to clean up your act, keep your audience engaged, and most importantly, coming back for more:

Set proper expectations. You should know, in advance, how much time you’ll have to present; so will your audience. You’ll also know, in advance, all the material you’ll be covering; your audience won’t. It sounds like a no-brainer, but don’t forget the up-front outline/overview of your presentation. This way, the audience can quickly get a feel for what you’ll cover, and will secretly feel proud of themselves for knowing where they are at any given point in your presentation—and will subsequently avoid getting fidgety while trying to guess “how much is left.”

Some pointers:

• Use chapter breaks. A simple structure works best. You may have 20 things to cover, but don’t make 20 chapters. A basic five-part structure—such as “Overview of the problem/Research Conducted/Findings/Key Conclusions/Next Steps”—works well and is easy for your audience to grasp and be comfortable with. Dedicate a single full-screen slide to each new chapter, to remind your audience where they are in the deck. (Sometimes it helps to show the whole outline, dimmed, with the new chapter highlighted.)

• Be consistent. If your upfront outline calls Chapter 2 “Research Conducted,” don’t change it to “Study Undertaken” when you get to that point in the presentation. Ditto for colors and fonts. Whatever you establish in your upfront outline should be reflected in your chapter-break slides. Why invite confusion?

• Do your upfront outline last. This is the same rule that you should use for writing an executive summary of a larger report or outbrief. Just insert a placeholder for it at the top of the deck; you can add in the exact chapter titles you’ve created when the rest of the preso is finished.

Start in Word. If you’re a PowerPoint maven, or if you have a pre-existing slide deck you’d like to leverage, the temptation can be strong to start in PowerPoint. Don’t. There are simply too many distractions for you to try and “write in PowerPoint,” and you’ll lose the thread. Your ideas are more important than the slides! Get them down, even as rough notes, in your favorite word-processing or note-taking app. Then revise them as much as necessary. You can—and should—always translate the thoughts to actual laid-out slides later. Consider that 1) a slick-looking magazine gets written before it gets laid out into pretty pages, and your situation is similar; and 2) many busy consultants rely on outside PowerPoint professionals to make their decks look slick. You can, too. And polishing your work in Word first saves both time and costs.

For now, you can just type “[Next Slide]” for each slide break. Don’t even worry about numbering them, because you’d only get bogged down fixing the numbers each time you get a new idea.

Frame the narrative. The tacit message is that what you are about to reveal is going to save their day. If you step back and consider what you’re about to present in that light, it makes it easier to turn, say, basic research into a story. What’s the challenge? How daunting was it? Feel free to pose these exact questions up front; they’ll build healthy expectations and suspense and keep your audience enaged.

Remember what’s new to them. Don’t forget that each image you show is entirely new to your audience. Unlike you, they’re seeing it for the first time, and need time to absorb it. Let them enjoy an image while you explain the story of what’s happening.

Keep your slides terse. The more text you give them to read, the more they will read. And who should be the star of your show: your slides, or you? You may have a paragraph’s worth of material to describe for a given slide, but that slide should just be a headline and a few bullets. It’s cleaner. It looks nicer. It keeps the audience focused on you instead of the screen. And, importanly, it ensures that your live presentation adds value. Otherwise, you could simply e-mail in the PowerPoint deck, and your client could forward it to others on their team—as if you’d never existed. Keeping it terse keeps you in the client’s loop—where you need to be.

Don’t let them read ahead. If you’ve got a slide with, say, a headline and three important bullets, “build” the slide, so it starts with just the headline, and blank space beneath it to properly set expectations that more material will soon be appearing there. Then click to reveal the first bullet. Click to reveal the second bullet. And so on. Why let your slides steal your thunder? This is a common, tragic, and ridiculously easy-to-avoid blunder.

Use teasers and humor to your advantage. An oft-overlooked strength of the slide-deck format is its linearity. If you choose to halt the audience in its tracks with a provocative full-screen question (“How much did this one change affect revenue?”), you can. And should! The format lends itself to teasers and payoffs, and an occasional humorous break (“How not to do this!”), to keep the audience engaged and liking you.

Consider using FUD to open new opportunities. Read any academic research paper, and it will always conclude with “More research is needed.” They want more work, and so do you. So don’t be afraid to lay on some FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about what sill remains to be done even after your brilliant presentation has concluded. If you don’t pre-sell, you won’t pre-book.

Consider tapping a cost-effective outside resource. Following the above best-practice guidelines will maximize your odds of success. But they require specialized skills which may not overlap your strengths. Fortunately for you, we have the unique combination of consulting, marketing, and creative/story-telling skills which have let us help independent consultants just like you to maximize the value of their presentations for more than 15 years. Best of all, we’re fast, efficient, and surpisingly affordable, given the value we provide. Contact us right now and let’s talk about transforming your slide decks into a revenue stream.