5 Things Startups Do Wrong In Press Releases

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Marcus Holmes
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Here at //Startup News we get a ton of Press Releases. An actual ton. And we see a lot of the mistakes that founders make on their PR. Here’s some of the common ones.

1. Not Knowing What You Want.

Why are you writing this? What’s the goal? What’s the outcome you really want? There are three specific goals and one general one:

  1. More sales – getting your customers aware of your product
  2. Investor awareness – investors are more likely to invest in you if they’re heard of you through the media they read
  3. Recruitment – likewise, you are more likely to attract top talent if they’ve heard of you before

And the general one: raising awareness of your company and product. The random connection element that brings unknown rewards from people just being aware of you.

Be specific about what you’re trying to gain from this press release. Write specifically to that goal. If you want more sales don’t talk about your excellent work/life balance. If you want investors don’t talk about your loyalty discounts.

2. Not Knowing The Audience

//Startup News’ audience is the startup community. Investors and potential employees read this blog, but not many customers. You probably won’t increase your sales by writing for us, so don’t send us a customer-focused press release.

The West Australian (for example) has an audience of random people in WA. You won’t find many investors or employees in their readers, but you will find customers.

Tractor Parts Monthly (I might have made this publication up) has an audience of tractor parts enthusiasts and farm mechanics. If you’re looking for an eventual trade sale for your agritech startup, it is read by investors. If you’re making tractor parts, it is read by customers.

Don’t write a single Press Release and send it to everyone, because it’ll be inappropriate for half the audiences. Write multiple press releases and target them specifically to the audience for that publication.

3. Not Telling a Story

No-one cares about your company, your product, or your success. It’s boring. Utterly without interest or merit.

What people want to read is a story. What’s the story you’re telling them? If you have a new product, why is this interesting to them? Put yourself in the place of the reader and try to work out what they would find interesting about this story.

People don’t buy products because of features. People buy products because of the story about how the product solves their problem. If your aim is to get sales, tell this story.

People don’t invest in companies because of the numbers. People invest in companies because they want to be part of the story of the company. The numbers provide a reason to say no, they rarely provide the reason an investor says yes.

Great employees are less motivated by salary than they are by being part of a great team doing amazing things. Tell the amazing story of your journey so far and you’ll find recruitment a lot easier.

And so it goes… what story are you telling? Make it interesting, inspiring, and awesome!

4. Not Being Authentic

But don’t make shit up. And don’t bullshit. And don’t just include the successes.

Every great story has tragedies and challenges, points where it was almost lost. A story of relentless success and winnitude is actually pretty dull, and serves only to flatter the writer’s ego.

Authenticity is everything in media these days. Find the authentic voice of your brand, your product, and speak with that voice. Tell your real story in your words. Include the things you messed up, because that’s what makes the story interesting. People are much more interested in narrowly-averted disaster and stories of failure than they are by smooth sailing and success.

What you learned is especially interesting for investors and recruiting. Investors need to know that you’re learning from your market: no idea survives contact with the market unscathed. Employees need to know that you’re not some egomaniacal idiot who’s charging on with your idea regardless of market feedback. Learning implies the humility to accept that you were wrong and the acceptance of new knowledge. This is good.

5. Not Choosing Images

Here at //Startup News if a story doesn’t come with images we just grab the first reasonable-looking license-free image we can find and slap it up there with the story. After all, if you don’t give a shit about the images associated with your brand, why should we?

Business News does the same. All publications do. Our lives are too busy already without doing half your job for you as well.

So provide some images, and make them good images that create good impressions on your readers. Something that emphasises the story and provides a context.

A lot of readers skim-read the words, so the only impression they get is the first half of each paragraph and the pictures. Make the pictures tell the story and you’ll get there anyway.

Bonus: Don’t Send a PDF in an email!

Lastly, and this is really, really important: Do Not Send A PDF!

We get sent hundreds of PDFs every week. Each is a few megabytes of uselessness in our mailbox.

If we decide we’re going to run with a release, once we finish downloading the bloody thing, the first thing we do is strip the text out of it so we can reformat it for this site. Any of your formatting is gone at this point. Usually, though, because PDF is such a nasty format, all the lines have extra carriage returns in them so we spend a couple of minutes deleting them by hand too.

Then we have to try and get the images out of the PDF. Often this is actually impossible. I’ve reverted to taking screenshots of the PDF display and then cropping them in GIMP. This is not fun, and doesn’t give the best results. If it’s too much effort then we won’t bother and will just use the first image we can find license-free that seems to fit, because if you can’t be arsed doing it properly, why should we?

The best press releases come with a link to a dropbox or google drive folder, with all the images in there. And a plain-text rendition of the release itself. We love those. So easy. The very best ones are actually a page on the product website with everything neatly labelled and downloadable.

If it’s a choice between spending half an hour sweating over how to get your crappy release out from inside that crappy PDF, or to spend 5 minutes copy-pasting from a nice friendly cloud storage box, we’ll go the 5-minute route every time. So would you in our shoes.

Stop sabotaging your success and write better press releases! If you want to send us a press release, lob it to [email protected]

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Picture of Marcus Holmes

Marcus Holmes

Gentleman Technologist and co-founder of Startup News. His vision has made //SN a sustainable media cheerleader for the startup community. Former CEO of Phnom Penh Post, he can be found somewhere in S.E. Asia coding away...
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