Marcus Austin explains how to get your business's latest news and products out to the media and influencers and explains why a media centre is an essential part of that process.

If your business has a new product, service or new initiative, and you want to tell the world about it, how do you do it? Do you post on social media, write a press release, create an advertising campaign on Facebook or Google, or put something on the radio or advertise on TV? Ideally, if you have the time and money then do all of them, but there’s nothing more effective than using the media to get your message out, it’s quick, all you need to do is talk to a small number of media and influencers, and they will do all of the work for you, and it’s more cost-effective and just as targeted as any Google or Facebook campaign.  

Why use media and influencers?

Most people tend to find information about new products from a search, either on a social site or via Google or Bing. Those searchers are more likely to click on a link to a media site - which hopefully offers unbiased information - or to an influencer/blogger they respect than they are on an advert to a brand they’ve not heard of.  

So, it’s important to get your new product information and business news to the media so that they can use it in their features, new stories, and product roundups. But what’s the best way to find the right media to promote your products, and how do you get your content to the media?    

Getting content to the media and influencers

Increasingly, businesses are looking to social media and influencers as their main way of getting the message out to the wide world, but by just concentrating on influencers, you’re missing a trick. Especially if what you’re trying to sell is something that’s complex or has a niche audience or requires a lot more reassurance from a potential purchaser than the recommendation in a quick Tweet or Instagram Post from an influencer.

Take it from me: the media is not dead – not yet anyway* – worldwide, there are still a huge number of media outlets, including national and regional newspapers and their accompanying websites and social feeds, plus magazines, freezines, niche journals and blogs. However, many businesses are afraid of the media and are worried that their information will be ignored or given the third degree.  That may have been the case 20 years ago, but most media are now only too happy to get information from brands. Media need content more now than they ever did, news is now 24/7/365 and to keep on the top of Google sites need to keep a constant flow of content.

When I started in journalism almost thirty years ago, I worked on a monthly magazine. The news team had five pages to fill every month and there were two of them writing it. Fast forward to today and you’re not just providing pages for the magazine, you’re also providing content for the web and for social, and they all need news 24/7/365. The media need to push out news constantly, Google and Facebook want news regularly, or they will push your website further and further down the page until you drop off. Ideally, they also want lots and lots of content. The more content on a page, the more likely they are to be indexed by Google and the more likely they are to appear at the top of a search page.

Getting the media’s attention

So how do you get your content in front of the journalist? Well, you can email them - and we recommend that you do, as it’s still the most efficient way to get your story out. However, to be effective you need to know who to send your email to. You can grab general emails, e.g. news@ info@, from most sites' contact pages, but to be really effective, you ideally need a personal email, and they’re harder to find. There are a couple of ways to get those lists, one way is to get an account with a media database service like Gorkana (now Cision), Kantar, Prowly, Roxhill, Vuelio or PRmax, or alternatively, you could go to a PR agency and use them to send out to their contacts.  

Alternatively, you could put your press release or content on a newswire, but once again a journalist needs to be subscribed and watching out for it – newswires are like Twitter, if you’re not constantly monitoring them then the story sinks to the bottom of the feed and then off the page.

You can also put the story out on social media, but while you can get to a lot of people, they a) have to know who you are and follow you b) you’re limited on the amount of text you can include and the number of images that you can add to the post, and more importantly, no matter which social media you will ideally need to link back to somewhere with the full content details.

Lastly, you also need to cater for all of the journalists and media who missed the press release or the social media post from you, and who want to cover the story with their own angle and with all the facts in front of them. To do that, they need to be able to go back to the source, and the first place they will look is your site, and they’ll be looking for a media centre that allows them to see, not just this release, but any others that they think are relevant, and they’ll need to be able to find it easily. Believe me, when you’re on a deadline, the last thing you want to be doing is having to look at a site map to find just where the news is located.  

So why do you need a media centre?

If you have a story, or if you have a message to deliver to the media and influencers then you need to have a media centre. It’s not an either-or; it’s a must-have. With a fully functioning media centre, you can put up as many releases as you want, on as many subjects as you want, you can make comments on news stories in the press, and you can provide images and video to go with the story – the media need images more than you think, Google likes news to have images, and increasingly it also likes video content but we’ll leave that for a future blog.

Marcus Austin – IT Director PressArea

*Journalism isn’t dead although AI solutions like ChatGPT may be a long-term threat when it comes to rewriting press releases, but we’ll see what happens