A customer announcement press release earns the most coverage when you assess four things before sending: newsworthiness, customer media-willingness, your customer’s own PR plans, and whether wire distribution actually fits.
So you’re a marketing leader at a tech company, and you have a customer announcement to make. Your first reaction should be jumping for joy!
In our experience, customer announcement press releases are great tools for inspiring credibility in the marketplace and garnering valuable coverage. After all, journalists love to write about the retailers themselves — more so than the software provider. That’s just the reality!
However, it’s not as simple as whipping up a good press release — read our advice on how to draft an effective press release here — and sending it to your media list. While that may get you a few hits, for the biggest impact, you need to think strategically about how you’re distributing the news.
We’ve pulled together considerations to make as you assess your customer announcement press release strategy. Take a look!
Consideration #1: Is the announcement actually newsworthy?
You’ll want to do some form of media outreach on a customer announcement regardless, as it helps with your credibility. But the way you approach the outreach is heavily dependent on this question: is the announcement actually newsworthy?
Yes, announcing your retailer customer is exciting, but it’s not always newsworthy.
Newsworthiness can depend on myriad factors, such as name recognition, current events, scale and story.
If your new customer is a smaller or more regional name, opt to keep the pitch strategy simple; omit embargoed pitching and follow-ups. One quick blast is all that you need to ensure you’re not pestering uninterested reporters. When sharing the news for a small, regional retailer for our client Inspectorio recently, we saw two direct coverage hits. That was a win for a retailer of its size!
But on the other hand, our client Inspectorio recently announced its Gap, Inc. partnership. Given Gap’s name recognition and global scale, we received over 14 pieces of coverage for a press release that was only a few paragraphs!
For that announcement, we shared the news a day in advance under embargo with a targeted list of reporters. After the news was live for a couple of days, we also conducted follow-ups with folks who had not yet covered it but who we believed may still want to.
Newsworthiness shapes how aggressively you pitch, not whether you pitch.
Consideration #2: Is your customer open to media opportunities?
If yes, milk that! Make sure your pitching is offering up your customer’s thought leader by name.
If no, that’s okay — it’s likely! Don’t directly offer the customer as a source; instead, keep the language of the pitch centered on your company.
If yes to both of the above questions (the announcement is newsworthy, and the customer is open to media opportunities), and if you have ample time to prepare, you may want to consider offering an exclusive, joint interview with your customer to a wish-list publication.
Give the target journalist a time window to reply, and if no response, move the offer to another valued publication. If nobody bites, embargoed pitching to multiple publications can still do the trick.
Consideration #3: Is your customer running their own PR?
This is an easy question to forget to ask. Our advice? Don’t! Not considering this question can lead to regrets down the line.
Here’s why: overlapping outreach to the same journalists is often annoying to media. Also, if you’re not collaborating with their PR team, you may find unaligned timelines, or the news could break on another channel too early or too late, which lends to a disjointed campaign all around.
So make sure you’re checking in on items like: has your customer approved the language? Who owns the comms relationship? Are they pitching reporters — and if so, who? Is the news going live on their owned channels at the same time?
Coordinate across the board, and your customer announcement campaign will make a bigger splash.
Consideration #4: Does the announcement belong on the wire?
Putting a press release on the wire — paid distribution services like Business Wire, PR Newswire or GlobeNewswire — is actually not always necessary and doesn’t have to be the default for customer announcements. It can make sense when it’s a large, Fortune 500 customer, if there’s a contractual obligation, or if you need an SEO-permanent home for the news that goes beyond your website.
But if the announcement doesn’t fit any of the above criteria, there is nothing wrong with saving dollars and sharing the news via direct outreach alone.
You can also frame the news as a media advisory to give it a more official format. We’ve done a few media advisories, and journalists seem to take to them!
It may sound surprising, but we’ve found that direct outreach often outperforms the wire anyway.
The checklist: What should a customer announcement press release distribution checklist include?
In sum, we recommend you consider the following press release distribution strategy options, from simple to most complex:
- Sending one simple blast to relevant media when the news goes live.
- Sharing the news a couple of days in advance under embargo with select media targets. Widen the net when the news is live. Consider follow-ups.
- Offering the news as an exclusive to a wish list publication. Send it out widely to media when live. Consider follow-ups.
Even the third strategy has a fallback: if the exclusive runs lukewarm, you can still pitch broadly when the embargo lifts.
Your press release outreach strategy can set you up for success
To be clear, a well-written press release is crucial when sharing news, and you should also ensure that the pitch accompanying it is timely and relevant. You can read about how to turn trends into stories here.
But remember: it’s the strategy around how you sharing the customer announcement that ultimately drives meaningful coverage and advances your media relationships.
We’d love to help you with your press release strategy. Reach out to us here to get in touch!
Austin
