Hacking the Press Release with Mickie Kennedy: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Imperfect Action. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down how to hack the press release. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Mickey Kennedy into EO Fire Studios. Mickey founded E-Releases 22 years ago to help small businesses, authors, and startups increase their visibility and credibility through press release marketing. He lives in the Baltimore area.

0:34In today's foundation, we'll talk about why the headline and writing are essential aspects. But the most critical part is the strategy. What are you announcing? We'll talk about the most important metric you can use to measure your press release performance, that's your sales, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Mickey and our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by my friend, Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversation on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship.

1:07In a recent episode, Scott brings Kate Bradley on the show, founder and CEO of Lately.ai, to discuss the best ways to use AI to create content. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Yahoo Finance makes it easy to get financial news, data, and insights fast. For carving out some financial news and analysis, visit the brand behind every great investor, yahoofinance.com, the number one financial destination, yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com. Mickey, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:46What's up, Fire Nation? I believe that creativity can really be the difference for building a successful business. Creativity is the thing that sort of have kept me on my toes. and I keep reinventing myself and my business over time. Fire Nation, I really hope you're absorbing these comments by our guests because sometimes it's like this out of the box thinking. It's like a different shift that's gonna give you that aha moment. It's gonna crack open something for you and I think this is a great example of that because today we'll be talking about hacking the press release and there's gonna be some out of the box thinking and chatting and strategies and tactics we'll be talking about in regards to hacking the press release because, hey, if everybody was doing it, it wouldn't be successful.

2:34So what exactly, Mickey, is a press release, and how the heck do they even work? Press release is basically an announcement to the media. It's usually written very objectively, third person, pretty boring. It basically explains the who, what, when, where, how, and why of what you're announcing. We see a lot of them that are like a new hire at a company, like a new vice president of HR or something like that. And those are the worst types of press releases, but they're also the most common type that we see. And so we want to talk about not just doing the common. We want to talk about doing the above, the beyond, and really writing that winning press release.

3:19Let's go into some pretty deep detail now. Give us some tips, give us some tactics, give us some strategies for writing a winning, not a losing, a winning press release? I think that the thing that a lot of people get tripped up with press releases is they spend a lot of time writing and following the format of what a good press release is. The headline is, of course, the most important aspect because you lead with that and it's what journalists see when they are on a newswire, like PR Newswire, looking at press releases. And that determines whether they drill down. So a headline is important and the writing is important, but it's not very important.

3:58The most important part of the press release is the strategy behind it. What are you announcing? I would say like 80 % of the press releases that I move through e-releases don't do anything. They get zero media pickup. And it's not surprising because a lot of the press releases that we're moving aren't newsworthy. They don't move the needle. Nobody really cares about a personnel change at your company or the fact that your website is now, you know, mobile responsive. You may have invested a lot in that, but it's not something that a journalist as a gatekeeper is going to want to share with his audience.

4:35So you have to sort of think, what can I announce or what can I say from my company that a journalist would want to share with his readers or viewers in the case of TV or listeners with radio? And I think that once you change your mindset and start creating content with that in mind, you can really come up with some compelling stuff. The hack that I see utilized that works the best is a survey or study. You know, we had an auto repair center in Pennsylvania that wanted to do a press release. They were looking for the SEO benefit of getting links from articles. And they did a survey and they partnered with a small trade association of independent auto repair members.

5:28And one of the survey questions that they asked was, what's the strangest thing you found in a customer's car and just left the field open? They ended up getting a lot of weird responses. And that was what a lot of the articles were about. It was like top 10 strangest things left in a customer's car at the auto repair center. And, you know, it was like boa constrictor, grandma in an urn, really strange stuff. And that's the kind of stuff that readers like to read. I mean, it's captivating. Now, the rest of the survey questions that were in there were included in a lot of the articles as well. But the real meat of it was something that was sort of unique and sort of stood out.

6:11And that's something that anybody can do. You know, that's an auto repair center in Pennsylvania that did it. They also ended up getting local media press as well, but they didn't necessarily go into it with that in mind. They were just looking for links from other trade associations and things like that because they didn't have a very strong presence on the internet. Said, oh my God, that survey you guys did was really crazy. I can't believe all the things that people leave in their car. And they're like, yeah, drugs was one of the top ones. You know, marijuana, bongs, things like that. But it was something that I think a lot of people can identify with.

6:48You know, we all have, you know, exposure to weird stories and strange things. And when you collect those in one space, that's kind of interesting and compelling. Another thing that works really well for press release hacks is blind spots in your industry. We had a carpet company in New Jersey that had more money than cents, and they wanted to do a PR campaign every month with us. And I told them initially I didn't think that there was much they could announce that would move the needle. And I just kept taking their money, and after five months, I said, we've got to brainstorm and figure something out because this isn't working.

7:27And we were talking, and they said – I asked them who their biggest enemy was, and they said it was the big box home improvement stores. And then they went through this litany of all the reasons why they suck and how they have to market against them. And I said, we should do a press release on that. And so we did. And it got picked up in every floor trade publication. I didn't even realize there were that many out there, but like 10 publications picked it up. And they all responded favorably saying, send us more. People are really hungry to talk about marketing in these floor trade publications.

8:04They'd ignored that. It was a blind spot for them. A couple of them even started adding a marketing column because they were getting so much favorable press. So many other local carpet companies identified with the same problem that this company was experiencing and no one was talking about it. And here was a company that had solved it to a degree and they were sharing their tips and their strategies. And that was really important. One of the outcomes of that is we did several more releases and they got even more pickups, mostly in the same types of publications. But they also ended up getting picked up in their daily newspaper as well as a state magazine.

8:43And they put together a book of all their clippings. And when they go to give a quote to a customer, they show them this book and they go through it and say, look, we've been nationally recognized by this floor trade publication, this publication, this publication. And I just want to let you know that, you know, I don't know who else you're getting quotes from. But if you get one from Home Depot or Lowe's, just, you know, I want to let you know that the padding they use is terrible. And 80 % of a carpet is its padding. And also the people who install your flooring, they don't know who it is. And it changes week to week.

9:19Our installers are salaried. They receive benefits. They stay with us for decades. we know the people that come into your home and how they will actually install it and we stand behind it and they started converting about 20 percent higher as a result of just taking those clippings in they said that the messaging hadn't changed they'd always told them that you know the padding they use is superior than what other companies use and they didn't really trust it or it did you know just seemed like it was an advertising or marketing gimmick but when that was saddled with the credibility and the implied endorsement of all these publications, recognizing them, they trusted them and the messaging worked and they converted more as a result.

10:02Fire Nation, I want you to be thinking about the things that Mickey's talking about here. I mean, surveys, studies, they've been proven to work best. So how can you work that into your press release? Like, I love that thing. What is the strangest thing you've ever found in a customer's car? People are curious. They're going to want to talk about that. They're going to want to read that. They're going to want to share that. And again, think about that. What will get shared? What will get talked about? Because that's just leveraging and scaling your press release when other publications are picking up or people are talking about it at the water cooler because they just find it interesting for any number of reasons.

10:35And that's the kind of press that you want, the press that keeps on giving. And I love how Mickey was talking about the blind spots in the industry. What are the blind spots in your industry, Fire Nation? Think about those blind spots to get people fired up, you know, think about some controversial things, you know, think about some things that, you know, are kind of on one side or the other, like, that's not a bad thing to kind of stir up a little bit of controversy every now and then. And Mickey, now that we've talked about all the ways to make a winning press release, the reality is so many, and I mean, so many press releases just flat out fail.

11:11Why is that? I think it's because of the mindset that I mentioned before. I think people write by saying this is important to us and we would like to get exposure, media attention because of this thing. We retooled our product or service and here is the press release as a result. And the thing is, they didn't take into account the journalist who's saying, is this important enough for me to share with my readers? Why would my readers care about this? And the truth is that a lot of the things that people put in a press release aren't really that important. Maybe your customers might enjoy a new release that includes some additional features, but for most people, they really don't care that you've now added a couple of new features or offerings as part of your service or or a thing like that.

12:09So I always say, you know, do a audit of what it is that you are doing that defines you and makes you unique. And when something comes along that enhances that or improves it, you know, that's something to announce and that's something to celebrate. I do think that people tend to celebrate the wrong things in businesses and the press releases are the result of that. The releases that we see are often name dropping of things like that. A new white paper that you did. And the thing about it is, why is that white paper important? What is it that's in there that people really want to know? And a lot of people don't do a good job of honing their sort of unique selling proposition.

13:02What is it that makes you unique? And I think that the stronger you get and understand your business and what makes you unique, you'll have a better understanding of what it is that readers want to read about. And you can hopefully solve that. One of the things that you mentioned and we talked about was controversy. Be a contrarian. While everybody in the industry is saying one thing, be the person that gets out there and with credibility and logic, define yourself by saying something completely opposite. Everybody seems to be pro-electric car. And all the articles talk positively about it. Very few of them bring up the negative.

13:49And if you are willing to get out there and say something that's contrarian, you have a very strong likelihood of being part of that conversation because journalists, by definition, are supposed to be unbiased and to give both sides. So many articles come out with only one side because there's no one out there sticking out their neck and saying the other viewpoint. So in the case of electric cars, if you get out there and say, hey, I think that this is a laudable coal, but I don't think we're there yet. You know, the mining and minerals that are used to make these batteries, they're not environmentally sound.

14:23We haven't solved what we're going to do with these batteries at the end of their life. We're just creating another environmental hazard. So we should probably wait until we solve that before we move forward embracing electric cars. I mean, that's completely logical, but yet it's a viewpoint that very few people are seeing out there. And if you're willing to get in your industry and ruffle some feathers and say stuff that's against what a lot of people are saying, you can get impressed and you can get some media attention. You just want to be careful that you're not saying something that would alienate you from your customer base or make you seem like the crazy uncle in your industry.

15:04Fire Nation, ruffle some feathers. What are you scared about? Do it the right way, like Mickey's saying. You don't want to believe in it. You want to stand behind it. You want it to honestly be how you think and feel and want to act, but ruffle some feathers. And guess what, Fire Nation? We were talking about measuring press release performance. Mickey's going to be giving us a specific example of how an offline company actually use media to pick up and convert more sales. And we're going to talk about all this jazz and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Personalized support has quickly become an expectation from customers everywhere.

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17:25For comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit the brand behind every great investor, yahoofinance.com. The number one financial destination, yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com. So Mickey, before the break, we were talking about measuring press release performance and how are you going to dive into that? Because it's important. It's like you want to know what the ROI is. What is that return on investment? People are paying you, they're paying for the press release and people are just paying the time, the energy effort to create all this stuff as well, the ROI, the return on investment, what is the performance of this press release?

18:02It has to be able to be measured if you're going to continue to do it going forward. Tell us how to measure this stuff. The biggest metric that I tell people to use is your sales. If you're undergoing a PR campaign and a push over, say, a six-month period, what are your sales during that period with all other things taken into account? And what my customers tend to see is they get an increase in revenue as they get articles published. And sometimes they can actually look at their Google Analytics and see the actual conversions coming in from the actual article. In some cases, they cannot. So I always say try to ask your customers how they found out about you.

18:51And some of them will tip you into where they came from, like they saw you in the New York Times or something like that. But you're only going to capture a little bit of that. It's important to get out there and do both Google News searches as well as Google Web searches. Only about 60 % of most news sites are in Google News, but most of them are in Google Web. So I always tell people to look at both and you can define a search within both Google Web and Google News by the actual dates. So you can pick the date that you moved a press release to, say, today and look at that and see are there articles or blog posts or things that happened during that period that you can then link back to the actual press release that you did.

19:38At the end of the day, we're looking for unique articles, blog posts, things that were written about you that were inspired by the press release. What we don't consider a positive result is just a reposting of the press release. That doesn't really help you very much. It's the same duplicate content. It's not something that's been turned into an article by journalists. So journalists take the press release, they turn it into an article, and then hopefully you see the results from that. Sometimes they don't link to you. And, for example, the larger publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, they often don't link to the actual place.

20:19But people will open a window and do a search for you and then find you. And that's why you have to look at that correlation between, you know, the article got posted on this date. Did you see an uptick in sales? And can you then extrapolate that that was the result of your media attention? In the case of SEO, even when they don't link to you, you still get SEO benefit from the actual article. um google patented years ago and a lot of seo people have have seen it where if you get a mention in the new york times or the wall street journal you'll see your seo overall increase and it's because they can contextually tell that that article was about you and give you the benefit as if there is a link even though there isn't so you know that's some of the earned media uh improvement you can see with seo even in the instances where there's not a direct link to you another thing is when people search for someone that was mentioned in an article, they often do not price shop.

21:22So they will not open a window and say, can I find this cheaper on Amazon? They want to do business with the company that was mentioned in that article. There's almost an implied endorsement that happens when someone like the New York Times writes an article about you. It's a real honor to have that bestowed upon you. And people feel like, oh, wow, I've discovered this great company. They want to go. They want to do business with you. And my customers find that the clients that they get as a result of these articles and earned media tend to be the most profitable and the most loyal. They'll stick around and keep coming back.

21:59And, you know, that's just some of the benefit that comes from that. I wish there was an easier way to measure like you can with, say, Google Advertising, Google Ads, where you can just look and measure your conversions and just do your ROI that way. But you can do it the way I talked about where you are looking at your revenue. You're looking at the times when you do get earned media. You can tell when the articles were published and then just get a feel for what kind of bump you see in revenue. And another thing that you can do with this earned media is share it. Share it with your own customers.

22:39Share it with your suppliers and vendors. It's a huge credibility boost. I had one client who said, I shared my article that got picked up with my local bank, and they gave me a credit expansion. It just happened. The conversation happened. Could you use some more credit? And they said, sure. And he goes, the funny thing is we had asked for a credit expansion just nine months prior, and they'd said no. And here they just offered it after seeing the article, and I shared it with them. And so PR is one of those things that a lot of people don't understand. There's a lot of services out there that just syndicate your press release.

23:21They put the same press release on multiple websites. And as I mentioned before, that doesn't do much for you. What we're really looking for at the end of the day is to have a journalist look at your press release and then say, I want to write an article about that. I want to share a story, put my spin on it, and get that out there as original content. And that's the thing that happens every day with PR because journalists are looking for stories. They're constantly writing. They're hungry for attention. And they hate writing the same articles for the big guys. They love to find a small, undiscovered small business or startup or an author who self-published a book that's on an interesting subject.

24:01They like sharing those stories. And, you know, if you look at, say, something like Inc. Magazine or Fast Company, they're often profiling startups and small businesses that are growing that no one's ever heard of, as well as the ones that you have. And they try to do that balance because their readers are like everybody. everybody, they like to discover hidden gems. And PR is a very effective way to get yourself out there and to sort of share what makes you different to the media. Fire Nation, this is why you listen to the experts, why you listen to the masters, because I asked Mickey to share how to measure press release performance.

24:40You just heard so many value bombs. Now, Mickey, let's end with a bang. Give us that specific example I talked about of how an offline company used media pickup to convert more sales. There was the example with the carpet company. And the thing that they did was they created this big brag book that they shared with their listeners. What we also have is a local car wash that is in the area. And they did a lot of press releases of just similar types of stuff, quirky things, a lot of press releases along the lines of what's the strangest thing that happened in one of these automated car washes and things like that.

25:30And, you know, bumpers falling off, you know, people coming in with duct taped antennas and things like that. And they got a lot of people sharing strange little stories that they've experienced over the year with car washes. You know, everybody has the story where a kid's in the car when it goes through and they'd say, oh, I wonder what happens if I put the window down while we're moving. It happens a lot more than you think. And so they got a decent amount of press. And what they did was they blew them up and made them poster sized and put them throughout their lobby. And every time someone comes in there, you know, when they, after they run through the car wash and then they're getting detailed inside and they walk inside, they tend to wander around.

26:18And he said that what he noticed is the people who come in and linger and read these articles and share these stories, he goes, they tend to come back more. And he says that they have, because there's a rewards program, he says, I can see that the people who go through my lobby, he goes, tend to be more loyal people and come back more and more. And what they saw was when they put the posters in and people started to just read the posters while they're waiting for their car to be done detailed inside, they would come back again and again. And people felt a connection. I mean, humor is one of those things that sort of binds us all together.

27:01And by having these articles that were humorous and sometimes tongue in cheek and sharing these crazy little stories and adventures of just being a small business in America, it really formed a bond and a connection. And people are much more less likely to complain. They're more likely to be understanding. It's just one of those things where it humanizes us. And that's what good PR can do. It basically can take you out of obscurity and build an emotional bond between you and the customer. And that's the type of things that anybody in business and marketing is ultimately trying to do. A lot of genius, Fire Nation.