Press releases can have a pretty poor reputation when it comes to spreading a corporate message among potential leads. The click-through rates for these releases are generally in the fractions of a percentage point, which can certainly be frustrating if you have put a lot of time and effort into crafting the perfectly worded document.
The answer to these low rates may lie in thinking visually and using multimedia elements like video as a new way to catch the eye of a potential journalist or news site.
In fact, the value of multimedia was recently explored by PR Newswire, which has released a study that tracked just how useful these elements can be in achieving strong media reach.
The research looked at how well a press release performed, based on how many visual features it had. This was then compared against a standard, text-only release.
The results? The more visual elements a press release contains, the greater the reach. In fact, a release with just one visual element recorded an increase in performance of 92 per cent. The benefits didn’t stop there – a release with multiple media features outperformed text-only releases by 55 per cent.
So how can visual elements like video boost performance? Here are some best practice tips to help:
Send video as an attachment
Every PR and marketing professional knows that text sent as an attachment won’t be opened and will quickly find its way to the junk folder.
The same goes for video and multimedia aspects of your release. Instead, embed the videos in the text of the email so that it is as easy as possible to access them.
Coordinate across multiple sources
As the number of communication channels for an organisation has increased, so too has the potential for a great message to be lost.
The answer is to coordinate your branding across different sources so that the experience for the end-user is coherent and thought-out.
The benefit of this approach was also seen in the PR Newswire research. The top-performing category of releases didn’t just have a number of multimedia angles, they were also part of a broader campaign that featured things like a campaign microsites.
Releases that were part of a broader campaign outshone the rest by far, performing 5,092 per cent better than a text-only source.
This article was originally published by Viocorp as part of their Video Insights series.
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