How to Write Press Releases for Media Coverage

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The first step when you’re writing a press release is to make sure you have the logo of your business at the top of the page and then obviously “Press Release” written beneath that. The top of the press release is really the most important area. Journalists are very busy people. They won’t have time to read through the whole release. And they’ll probably only read the first paragraph and the title. So you’ve got to make these really, really good. With the title, keep it short. Between three and five words is good. Next, have the date that you’re sending out the press release, and also where your business is located. If you’re using a submission service there will usually be fields for your logo, contact info’, date, etc.

Let’s assume you are writing a press release about the launch of your startup, make sure that’s really highlighted in the title and the first paragraph. In the first paragraph of a press release, it’s important to have the date you’re sending out the press release and the location of your startup. In the first paragraph, just try and summarise exactly what your startup is, or what your message is.

Make sure you include a link to your website so the journalist can easily click on that and view your website. With the rest of the press release, structure it so the most important information for the journalist is at the top. From there, it will usually get more detailed but less relevant, as you go down. In the second paragraph, you might want to include information about the team, about prices, about how it works, and things like that. Then you can go into more detail as you go further down the press release. But really try and include all the key information at the beginning. Then in the third paragraph, You’ll give even more detail.

Write about exactly what you offer and additional benefits for your target market. What does a client/customer get for there money? What makes it such a great deal? How are you different from your competitors? How is your product/service going to improve their life/business?

Lastly, you might want to add information about other products and/or services you offer. To summarise:

1. Write about the highlights of your product or service.
2. Write about what exactly people get for their money, s
3. Who is it ideal for (target market)?
4. Write more about the company, the team, the additional benefits.
5. Explain how you can help in other ways.

Follow the steps below if you’re submitting your press release direct to journalists and newsrooms.

At the end of the press release, make sure you have the word “Ends,” and then beneath that a Notes to Editors section.

In this section, just include your contact information. So if a journalist wants more information, or has questions, or wants images, they can contact you really easy. In this section, you could also include a little summary of your startup or business as well. After you’ve created your press release, then you can put together a list of the journalists that you want to send your press release to. It’s really important to make your list of journalists relevant for your press release. So if your startup is food related, you don’t want to be sending your press release to a sports journalist. This will be annoying for them and a wasted effort for you. There are some tools for finding journalists, such as JustReachOut, which is a new tool that you can use. With JustReachOut, you can search for journalists that write about particular subjects. You could also use Twitter. So you can search for publications on Twitter and find contacts that way as well. So there are different ways. And then once you have your list, if you’re sending out the press release by email, then I would recommend writing individual emails to the journalists with just a short email about the startup, about what you’re sending, and a snappy subject line about what your press release is about.

Also, attach the press release in PDF format to the email so they could easily then open it and print it off if they want to read it later. It’s good news at the moment because there are a lot of new tools out there that make contacting or reaching out to journalists a lot cheaper than it’s traditionally been when you had to hire a PR consultancy and spend a lot of money doing that. So some new tools that I would recommend are GoPRit, which is a startup. And you can send email pitches to select journalists about your startup. And you can also send tweets out to those journalists, which is great.

There’s another good one (already mentioned above) called JustReachOut, which helps you find journalists that write about a particular subject. And then you can also contact them. So this is great when you create your list of journalists that you want to send your press release to because you can find ones that are really relevant for your startup and your story. Another good one is pr.co, which can help you create and write a press release and send it out.

from Web Design & Marketing https://www.webdesignandmarketing.co.uk/online-business-marketing/how-i-write-press-releases-to-get-international-media-coverage/

Content Marketing 101 – Highly Effective Content Marketing Tips

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Content Marketing 101, here we go. So first step, identify your target market, it goes without saying, that if we don’t know who we’re here to serve, then we can’t actually serve anybody particularly well. So we have to work out exactly who our target market is and then figure out where they hang out.

 

 

Your Audience

 

So a good example of this might be that, say for example, I was watching a programme on the BBC called Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. I said “I was”, obviously my wife was watching it and I got roped into it. Five of the women were chatting. Four of them had big engagement rings on their hands and then the fifth one didn’t. And they started talking to her and they said, “Well why haven’t you met your millionaire yet? “We’ve all met millionaires, what are you doing?” And she said “Well, you know, I don’t really know.” And they said, “Well are you going out?” And she said, “Well no, not really.” And they said, “Well maybe you should start going out “and actually, there’s some really exclusive clubs “in Mayfair and Chelsea where millionaires go and hang out “and they pay lots of membership fees.” So identify the target market, loads of millionaires. Where do they hang out? In exclusive clubs in Chelsea and Mayfair and places like that.

 

So you see, none of this stuff is rocket science, it’s quite basic common sense logic. What we’ve got to do, is simply go to them. We make it easy for them to find us. And we do that by hanging out in the places where they’re more likely to hang out. Now, we don’t want to upset out audience by overdoing it (the online equivalent of stalking). We just show up regularly and often, with the same consistent message in the same places where our clients hang out, our ideal target market. So for example, if we design websites for small businesses, where are small businesses most likely to hang out? Well more than likely it’s gonna be on Facebook groups, or on LinkedIn, or on Twitter, or places like that. So if we’re showing up there with the same consistent message, giving tips about websites and things like that, then potentially we’re gonna start piquing people’s interest. And if we’re giving away value upfront, when we show up regularly and often, with that same consistent message, then we’re more likely to get clients on board.

 

 

To Summarise:

 

1) Identify target market.

2) Where do they hang out?

3) Go to those hangout spots

4) Show up regularly and often with the same consistent message.

 

 

Your Message

 

What should your message be? And this is one of the biggest mistakes that I see entrepreneurs making. When we go to our clients and they say, “Well I’m looking for a website designer.” If I start saying, “Oh, well I’m the best web designer. We build standard-compliant websites, which are very well optimised and Google will love them”. That may not necessarily be what the client wants. But, it may be what they need. So what we’ve got to do is think carefully about what our marketing message looks like.

 

There are three core pillars in business, delivery, sales, and marketing. Marketing will lead to sales and conversations, which in turn leads to the work that puts food on the table. But there’s an old saying which is still used, which is “sell people what they need, not what they want“. Now I actually believe the saying’s kind of half right, actually what we need to do, is market to what people want and then sell them what they need.

 

 

 

So in this example, we’ll talk about websites, rather than talking about the great features of having a standards-compliant website. The reason why people generally want a good website, is because they want to generate more leads, which is gonna generate more business for them and ultimately lead to more sales and more money. So what we say is, “we build awesome websites which are highly effective at converting prospects into leads” That’s what people want, they want leads, they want sales conversations, they want money. And then when we sit them down, once we’ve piqued their interest and they say, “Oh cool, well nobody else is saying that they can do that, so I’m interested“. They’ll usually say something along the lines of, “Well, how do you do that?” And that’s the point when you now have the opportunity of saying, “Well, how we do that is through working out who your target market is, we’ll add on Google Analytics, we’ll make sure the website’s search engine-optimised, standards-compliant, etc, etc.” This is where we can go into the technical side of it, but we don’t put that in our marketing message.

 

People don’t want to know what the features are of your products, they want to know what the outcome is going to be. Here’s a good 3-step practice excercise:

 

1) Write down ten features of your products.

2) Next, write down not one, but ten outcomes that your products will deliver.

3) Now, compare the two and see what differences there are between them.

 

I can guarantee there will be an awful lot of differences.

 

 

Market Research

 

There are several stages to market research.

 

If you’re in a position whereby maybe you’re just a startup, or maybe you’ve launched your product, but the marketing message isn’t quite landing, you must look at your market research. the first step of market research SIMPLY is to assess whether there’s a need for your product.

 

The second thing is (and there are three steps to this). Ask people how much they’re willing to pay. There might be a need, but if people aren’t willing to pay for that product (at a point that’s profitable), then there’s no business need for this product and it’s not a sound investment. A good way to do this is hold an imaginary Dutch auction, Start at a low amount and ask people to hold their hands up if they’d be willing to pay the figure you say. It could be a widget for five pounds, ten pounds, twenty pounds, thirty pounds. At what price point to most people put their hands down. If there’s actually £1,000 worth of (imaginary) business in that experiment, find out if that would produce a good profit margin after covering things like marketing, branding, website, overheads etc. Let’s assume all is wonderful and the profit margin is looking good. Next, comes your value proposition, the outcome that your product delivers.

 

 

Value Proposition

 

This is real life example of a marketer who worked with a group of students…

He ran an experiment using the Dutch auction method and said, “Right now, if you don’t buy this product, in the next 30 days one of your teeth will fall out. Now, how many people will buy my product? Lots of hands went up.

 

He than said, “how much money would you be willing to spend?” He started low and most hands went up. At £1000 20 hands went up. He then went up incrementally and there were actually ten people who would spend 2,000 pounds on his product. So, now he’d grown and scaled the potential of that product, from 1,000 pounds with 20 clients, up to 20,000 pounds with just 10 clients. So actually he could have a cheaper product, a medium-quality product, and a high-end product. That’s a whole suite of different things there. But the USP was the sensationalism, the story which sat behind the marketing message, the fact that it was sensationalist and he was starting to market to the outcomes of what people wanted to hear.

 

If it was just simply the features, oh there’s this thing, this mirror, which you can look in your mouth and it’s connected to an app and blah, blah, blah. People don’t want that, they’re just like, what’s it gonna do? So, think about that when you’re putting your marketing message together. Remember, features versus outcomes. What is it that your product does? What are you going to deliver?

from Web Design & Marketing https://www.webdesignandmarketing.co.uk/content-marketing/content-marketing-101-highly-effective-content-marketing-tips/

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How Much Does a Website Cost in 2019?

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How much should your website cost?

Let’s break it all down and take the mystery out of a website pricing.

When a web designer talks to a new client, pricing is one of the first questions they have. Most, genuinely have no idea what a website can cost and that actually makes perfect sense when you consider that there’s such a broad range of price points out there.

There are generally 4 common pricing tiers you’re likely to encounter. Each tier comes with its own level of services that you can expect to be included, and you’ll, of course, pay more for more each service level. The correct one for you will depend on your individual circumstances and the budget you have set aside for your website project.

For the purposes of this article, let’s assume you’re just looking for a great marketing website designed to get you more customers, bookings, or leads. We’ll start right at the top and work down starting with the “Agency” tier.

Web Design Agency

At this level, you’re dealing with a full-blown web design company that have offices, lots of employees and a high level of service that goes along with it. You can expect not only a website but one that’s built on a solid customised strategy and a digital marketing plan as well. But, at £15000 all the way up into the six figures, this tier is pretty much out of reach to most small businesses. You’re paying for that higher level of service, their experience and of course their overheads. It’s also worth factoring in that, at this level there’ll be a certain ‘pay-to-play’ price. This just means that they simply won’t touch anything under that threshold.

Virtual Agency

O.K. The next level down is the “Virtual Agency” tier.

Here you can expect a price tag from between £5000 to £15000. You’re likely to get more or less the same quality of service as you would with a bigger agency. The real difference here is that virtual agencies are generally more home-based or they at least have a much smaller footprint, a scaled-down team, and far fewer overheads than the bigger guys. They may outsource specialised tasks to trusted partners if it’s not within their specific skill-set. Because of the way a virtual agency is set up you’ll pay less. If you have the budget, this is probably a great option for you. At this level, you’ll get a great website that’s built on a framework designed to support your goals.

Freelancers

Next, we’ll look at “Freelancers“.

You can, of course, find extremely cheap freelancers but I’m talking about good quality, reputable and reliable people that you can be confident in. You’ll find the price here will generally be between £1000 and £5000 depending on the type of website, features, and custom functionality required. You will see a drop-off in service at this level as a web designer is not going to provide an in-depth discovery process or develop a strategy based website for you at this price. This isn’t through lack of ability, it’s simply that a smaller budget won’t provide the scope required for high-level deep discoveries due to the time and effort involved. At this level, most web designers will design a website based on the pages and functionalities that you specifically asked for. There are a lot of really talented freelancers out there who can give you a beautiful site. If you know what you want and your budget is limited, then this can be a great option.

Templated and Brochure Style sites

Lastly, we’ll look at “Template/Brochure” style websites.

If your budget is really limited (under £1000) then this may be a good option for you. This type of website is built on a pre-existing template but the colours, images, text and general content are changed to reflect your needs. These websites give you an online presence and help represent your business. Some web designers will also give you access so you can make changes yourself. A few of them will even be able to provide simple E-commerce functionality.

At WDM we try to cater for all needs as much as possible. The majority of our projects range from £2000 – £10000. We have built complete custom sites for £1000 – £2000 but it really depends on individual requirements. We even have a set of 3 website packages which start at just £199 + £35 p/m (which cover hosting, support, updates and more).

from Web Design & Marketing https://www.webdesignandmarketing.co.uk/misc/how-much-does-a-website-cost-in-2019/

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