One of the great misperceptions that people in the startup world have when it comes to marketing is that issuing a press release will result in people writing about your news. Nothing is further from the truth. The vast majority of press releases do not result in news coverage. It takes a little more work than that to get noticed. I am going to use the recent Half Off Depot acquisition as a case study.

We closed the deal mid January. We had planned to announce sometime in mid-February. At the Half Off Depot February board meeting turning the transaction into news became a topic of discussion. Here was our general plan.

We were to drop the release at 10:00 am EST on Monday February 11. At that time I personally put it on the wire using PRWeb.

But before putting the release on the wire we reached out to four national technology news outlets that we targeted. We provided them with some details of the release and offered to share it with them under embargo. Embargo tells a reporter they can not publish anything before the embargo time date. You have to slap this on the release in large font red letters. The embargo time/date we used was 9:00 am EST on Monday February 11. This gives a reporter a jump on the release, an opportunity to break the story. It gave us an opportunity to figure out who, if anyone, would be our national lead.

After getting this cranked up and some interest from two of the four targeted nationals I reached out to the trade press. In this case Street Fight and Daily Deal Media. We gave them a 9:30am embargo. I did not want them to dork up the national publication coverage. If a national sees local before they publish more times than not they will kill their story. 

I also selected local press in Atlanta and Tampa (home of CrowdSavings) and did the same as with the trade press. In Atlanta I focused more on the Atlanta Journal than the Atlanta Business Chronicle because I thought I could get the former to bite and they are a bigger outlet with broader reach.

We did this ourselves, because if you can get a hold of them, a reporter is much more likely to listen if talking to management instead of a public relations firm.

This all worked.

All Things Digital turned into our national lead, publishing their story at 9:00am. That was picked up by VentureWire. It became a reference point for the locals and trade writers to update their stories. All, to remind you, before Half Off Depot officially released any news. This was also picked up by Pando, another of our target national outlets.

Building on this locally the Atlanta Journal gave us some nice coverage both online and on the first page of business section of the print edition the following day. The Atlanta Business Chronicle and Tampa Bay Business Journal had coverage. And the trades covered as well. Daily Deal Media and Street Fight published stories.

So it worked. The key is talking to reporters who you think might have an interest before you issue a release. I am not really sure you need the release at all. It is mostly a tool used as a basis to start a conversation with reporters about your news.

If it works for me, and I have seen this type of thing work countless times, it will work for you. 

Update: My dear friend and marketing maven Erika Brookes provided great strategic directon on how to get news coverage of the CrowdSavings transaction. Or put another way, she told me how she would approach it and I did what she said.