At INK inc PR we believe the best way to get our clients sustained, quality media coverage is not to inundate reporters with countless press releases that do little than fill their inboxes. Rather, it’s to provide story ideas and insights that help reporters do their jobs better. Press releases rarely do that. We’ve seen some companies insist on at least one press release a week. Sometimes it gets hard to find real news…
“CEO Successfully Removes Hangnail!”
“Two New Coffee Creamer Flavors in the Company Breakroom!”
Rather than think about how to simply promote anything that happens within a company to reporters, sometimes it helps to think about how to help reporters with what we know they may be working on, and to provide them with something unique and helpful.
Take INK client EnigmaSoftware.com. The folks at Enigma make anti-spyware and anti-malware software for PCs. They’re responsible for cleaning up the digital mess that happens when people have clicked where they shouldn’t online and ended up with malware infections.
Enigma had some pretty basic but helpful tips on how people who are shopping online during the holiday season can keep their computers safe. Those tips could easily have shown up in one of a thousand press releases being sent out by other online security firms during the holiday season. But in addition to the tips, Enigma also had data: awesome data on the number of infections that showed up on people’s computers during the holiday shopping season. It turns out, when more people go online to shop, more people get infections. We worked with Enigma to prepare an analysis of infections on Cyber Monday in 2015 to infections in 2014. We also looked at infections in specific cities. The resulting pitches were filled with good data and trends on topics we knew reporters would be writing about.
In a few short days we landed placements (with valuable hyperlinks) in The Guardian, Crain’s New York, the Philadelphia Business Journal, and ITBusiness Canada. The stories were timely, they were local, they were relevant, and they helped reporters tell a good story.
