Updates

Press releases are the cornerstone of any strategic public relations plan.
For technology vendors, press releases can be considered official company announcements. Topics for press releases can typically include announcements of new products or services, technological capabilities, business or technology partnerships, customers and similar company achievements. 

Much has been written about the importance of press releases over the past number of months since the Covid19 outbreak. One of the better articles was published by Forbes with a list of dos and don'ts for preparing and distributing press releases.

From what we see, most technology vendors, especially those here in Israel, understand the importance of press releases, although do not know how to go about turning a company achievement or corporate milestone into a valuable announcement and a well written press release. 

Today, given the realities of the current situation, there is no doubt that press releases are as important as ever and even essential, especially as a means for a technology vendor to broadcast to its market that the company is continuing to make progress and grow.

Press releases have certainly evolved in recent years, in particular with new elements to improve distribution and usability. However, the format of a press release over time has remained mostly the same.

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Press release structure

The structure of a press release should be straightforward and easy-to-understand. This means that the reader – whether a journalist, sales channel partner, potential customer or whoever – should be able to quickly understand what is being announced and the strategic message that is being put forward in the press release.

Below is a press release that we distributed for a client earlier this year with the different elements outlined in orange.

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Each of these different sections outlined above have specific requirements. For example, the body of a press release should focus on the facts of the announcement and be written in a style similar to an encyclopedia entry. Too many superlatives are not appropriate for the body of a press release and will quickly turn off readers, especially journalists. Quotes, on the other hand, can be written in a more colorful language and should highlight the benefits or strategic importance of the announcement.

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A few words about images

Images always add important visual support to a press release. From our experience, including a high quality image relevant to an announcement significantly increases the likelihood that a press release will get covered in a relevant publications and media outlets.

An image can either be sent as an email attachment, embedded into the press release document or linked to anchor text.

For our example press release, the above image was included with the press release to provide illustrative support for the announcement. This image is based on a stock photo with a screen capture of our client’s application added to the monitor.

A corporate photo of one of the executives quoted in the announcement is always a good option to use for an image to go along with a press release. 

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Favorite examples

We have uploaded some examples of our favorite press releases that we have prepared and distributed for clients – both past and present – over the years. You can see these examples at the following link – www.noteya.com/press-releases. 

Each of these press release examples that we have uploaded follow the guidelines we have outlined in this update.

More importantly, each of these press releases received extensive news coverage and follow up interview opportunities, attracted the attention of analysts conducting market research for market studies analyst reports and pushed forward sales opportunities being managed by sales channel partners in local markets.  

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Additional thoughts about press releases

It is important to understand that a press release is much more than just a page and half of text and can be considered a project.

To begin with, any press release must be aligned with the company’s corporate communication strategy and connected to an overall public relations plan.

The approval process, especially for announcements involving customers, partners or other third parties, often takes time and can be a lengthy process. 

Distributing a press release is more involved than just clicking on the send button. In our next update, we intend to cover this subject of press release distribution. 

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Next update: Press release distribution

In our next update, we intend to outline our approach for effectively distributing press releases.

We will include our advice for news distribution service, such as PR Newswire, and interacting with journalists in order to obtain news coverage.

We will also explain how a press release can be the base for a marketing campaign that involves social media and an outbound email targeted at potential customers and sales channel partners. 

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Need help with press releases?

Technology vendors, especially here in Israel, often initially contact us looking for help to announce new products and customers. Many tell us that they simply do not know where to begin or how to go about the process.

Others tell us that they are trying to work with sales channel partners in local markets around the world, but never know how to share updates with these partners.

Does this sound familiar?

Press releases are the perfect answer, if approached correctly.

Noteya Innovations would like to wish everyone a sweet and happy new year!

Needless to say, this past year has been full of unexpected challenges and - like everyone - we are looking forward to better things to come in the new year.

We hope that Rosh Hashana will bring much happiness, health and renewed success to all.

Last week in Part One of this update, we outlined our ideas and approach for creating a strategic press and analyst coverage plan. As a quick review, a strategic press and analyst coverage plan should be sustainable overtime, leverage many different coverage types and consistently broadcast growth. The alternative of one-off interviews and unconnected coverage will not deliver any long term benefits and may create confusion about a vendor in its market.

Equally as important, without strategic press and analyst coverage a vendor runs the risk of keeping its company and innovations hidden from the market and potential sales channel partners in local markets.

In this Part Two of this update, we are providing our recommendations for a typical coverage plan and detailing the benefits to a vendor’s sales channel partners.

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Typical coverage plan

In a previous update, we introduced our concept of Press and Analyst Coverage and segmented the different types of coverage items that can be included in a strategic coverage plan.

Below is a typical coverage plan that we often recommend:

• Press releases – one press release per quarter is a good target. Additional press releases can be added, although current coverage needs must be balanced with ability to consistently make announcements and broadcast news over time. These press releases can be used to announce new products, partnerships, customers and similar corporate milestones.
• News coverage – for each announcement, multiple news coverage items can be obtained in relevant publications. There will certainly be news coverage opportunities in the online publications covering a vendor’s relevant vertical markets and, depending on the topic of the press release, in wider technology and business outlets. News coverage can come in a variety of forms, such as unique articles resulting from an interview or exclusive content provided to selected journalists.
• Press coverage – the publication of interviews unrelated to press release announcements can also be targeted on a quarterly basis. These interviews are a good opportunity to highlight a vendor’s technology innovations, customer success stories, go-to-market strategy and overall value proposition. The coverage resulting from these interviews will likely be in the form of a quote in a feature article or the publication of a full Q&A article.
• Guest articles – at least two guest articles throughout the year can be targeted. Guest articles often provide the opportunity to discuss a selected topic in more detail than the content that is typically published in a press release or interview. Many companies like to use these guest article fill the downtimes during the slow months of August and December.
• Analyst coverage – briefings with all relevant analysts to introduce the company and present its product portfolio, R&D roadmap, customer base and overall value proposition should be methodically scheduled. From our experience, scheduling briefings with one to two analysts per month will raise the awareness of the company among the analyst community and should lead to at least two analyst coverage items over the course of the year. Examples of analyst coverage include an analyst report profiling the company or the inclusion of the company in a market study.
• Awards – it is worthwhile to target winning at least one award recognition from widely recognized award program per year.

For clients of our full business acceleration service, this typical press and analyst coverage plan provides a solid baseline for attracting the attention of and engaging with sales channel partners and support their sales activities.

This typical press and analyst coverage plan can also support other corporate initiatives and marketing programs, such investor relations, lead generation, brand promotion, social media campaigns, SEO optimization and more.

For more insight, please read our previous update on Finding the Balance – What Communications Strategy is Right for Your Company?.

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Benefits to sales channel partners

A typical coverage plan based on the above ideas can provide a technology vendor with consistent press and analyst coverage on a monthly basis that is sustainable over time.

Each coverage item can be used by a vendor’s business development team to facilitate interaction with potential and existing sales channel partners. In turn, these sales channel partners leverage this press and analyst coverage to push forward sales processes.

A vendor’s business development staff must consistently share ongoing press and analyst coverage with its sales channel partners. Strategic corporate announcements – meaning press releases – along with press and analyst coverage from valuable third party sources provide sales channel partners with influential content to facilitate new sales opportunities and revisit sales activities that previously had gone dormant.

The importance of sharing press releases and other coverage items with sales channel partners cannot be overlooked or underestimated. The sales channel partners we work with around the world always thank us for sharing client coverage and tell us that this coverage is an essential part of the sales processes they are managing in their local markets.

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Upcoming updates

In our upcoming updates, we will go into detail with our recommendations on how to approach each coverage type. Press releases will be the first coverage type that we will address. As a quick preview, we will explain how press releases can be leveraged by a technology vendor as a central element of its strategic press and analyst coverage plan to broadcast important company news and messages to the market.

A number of years ago, the CEO of a promising cybersecurity startup contacted us about helping his company access interview opportunities.

At the time, this startup had recently completed a follow-on investment round and was starting to generate revenue from its initial customers here in Israel, although the company had not yet committed to a consistent go-to-market strategy.

For us, there was a lot of potential for successful engagement. However, the CEO was stuck on the idea that if he could get just one or two interviews published about the company in a major media outlet, his startup would take off and customers would line up to place orders.

Before speaking with us and without proper consultation, the CEO had sent long emails detailing the company’s technology and products to dozens of journalists at large newspapers like the Wall Street Journal as well as Tech Crunch, Venture Beat and other prominent technology news sites. To no surprise, the CEO did not get any responses from of the journalists he contacted.

Clearly, the expectations of this CEO were not realistic and his objectives for interacting with journalists and reaching out to the market to attract customers were not obtainable.

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Our approach: Strategic planning for long term success

Since the inception of Noteya Innovations over ten years ago, we have always promoted the idea that good press and analyst coverage can turn almost any company into a market player and even a market leader. Feature articles, interviews, news stories, analyst reports and industry awards can strengthen a company’s brand and promote all of its corporate initiatives.

For technology vendors selling indirectly through sales channel partners, such as distributors, value added resellers, managed service providers and system integration firms, strategic press and analyst coverage is essential for initiating business development activities and supporting ongoing sales activities in local markets.

This is achievable for almost any technology vendor, especially those in Israel. From our experience, the starting point for this is creating a strategic press and analyst coverage plan based on the following principals:

• No one-off or unconnected coverage – any coverage has the potential to be positive, although interaction with journalists and analysts is most effective within the framework of a strategic plan. One-off interviews will only lead to a short term spike in movement at best, while the publication of a series of unconnected coverage items may actually create confusion about a company in its market.
• Sustainable overtime – many technology vendors approach us with the idea that they want to bombard the market with press releases and online publications with articles about their news. While press releases and news coverage are important elements of any coverage plan, all coverage should be spread out over time in order to give the market time to digest each coverage item. At the same time, a vendor that makes a lot of noise and then goes silent for an extended period can be perceived as a risk to both its sales channel partners and potential customers.
• Leverage different coverage types – building on the above ideas, a strategic plan for press and analyst coverage over time should include a full range of coverage types. For most technology vendors, it is unrealistic to distribute a press release every month and other coverage types should be added to the coverage mix, such as interviews unrelated to corporate announcements, analyst coverage, guest articles and more.
• Broadcast progress and growth – each coverage activity, regardless of its type, should build on previous coverage in order to broadcast that the company is making progress and growing. For example, a coverage plan can start with a press release and news coverage about a new product, continue with an announcement about new go-to-market partners and follow up with interviews about new customers. Sales channel partners are attracted to this approach and know how to utilize coverage in this direction to promote the sales processes they are managing in their local markets.

Without a strategic plan for press and analyst coverage, a technology vendor runs the risk of keeping its company and innovations hidden from the market and its potential sales channel partners. Even the most well designed web site with full SEO optimization and engaging content is not enough to attract the attention of sales channel partners in local markets. Of course, internally produced content has value, although sales channel partners consider press and analyst coverage to be significantly more influential.

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Part two preview

Okay, this is enough information to digest for one update. We will continue with Part Two next week.

In Part Two, we will outline a typical press and analyst coverage plan that we often recommend and explain the benefits it can provide for supporting a technology vendor’s business development activities and the sales processes of its sales channel partners in local markets.

In recent years, technology vendors have faced ongoing pressure to constantly produce and distribute marketing content. Many marketing professionals will say that attractive marketing content is essential for SEO optimization and lead generation. Others in marketing will claim that successful brand awareness and promotion requires pushing influential content over social networks and through digital marketing.

Currently, we see that many technology vendors are transforming their content promotion efforts into communications strategies. In the world of content promotion, marketing and sales often function in separate silos, each with its own objectives and KPIs. The idea behind the need for a communications strategy is that market outreach needs to be more tightly integrated with business development and sales processes to directly support revenue generation.

With this in mind, the approach we take with our clients for communications strategies and market outreach focuses on promoting the messaging and news of our technology vendor clients to journalist and analyst. Our objective is to obtain influential press and analyst coverage that positions our clients as market leaders and promotes the business development and sales processes that we are leading for our clients.

We know that our approach to communications and market outreach is one of many options available to technology vendors.

Considerations for a communications strategy and market outreach

Many large vendors with the necessary resources are communicating to their markets with good success by synchronizing attractive messaging with effective promotion over multiple broadcast channels.

For vendors with limited budgets, communications and market outreach need to be balanced to support the company’s corporate objectives and other strategies.

In our opinion, determining what is right for your company in terms of communications and market outreach depends on the go-to-market and revenue generation strategy of your company.

For example, a technology company selling a consumer-oriented product or end user application can generate value in terms of brand awareness and growth by focusing on promoting influential digital content, such as internally produced movies, video interviews, infographics and so on, over social networking channels.

For vendors selling directly to enterprises, content promotion is still important for SEO optimization and outbound marketing activities are necessary for lead generation.

At the risk of getting off topic, it is worthwhile to highlight that for direct sales to be successful, a vendor must have the infrastructure in place to support the required commercial, delivery and support activities to turn a qualified lead into business and revenue. We see that many vendors, especially recently funded startups that opt for direct sales over working with channel partners, often overlook these important issues and miss out on many business opportunities because their management underestimates the distance between lead qualification and revenue generation. We are planning to cover this topic in detail in a future update.

For companies with go-to-market and revenue generating strategies based on selling indirectly through sales channel partners in local markets, such as distributors, value added resellers, managed service providers and system integration firms, press and analyst coverage is essential for supporting business development activities and sales processes.

Our recommendations

Our advice for communications and market outreach is to always focus on promoting benefits and value propositions, while consistently broadcasting the business progress and growth of the company. The benefits that are promoted should be targeted at both end users and sales channel partners with equal importance.

This does not mean that product descriptions or functional specifications are not important. This type of content is of course needed, especially as part of a vendor’s product management and sales tool kit.

Our point here is content that communicates benefits, such as reducing costs through automization or enabling new services with increased network capacity, is far more attractive to journalists and analysts and better supports business development and sales than content describing new protocols or the number of ports in a new device.

For vendors going to market and generating revenue through sales channel partners, our recommendation is that press and analyst coverage should lead communications and market outreach activities.

In our previous update, we introduced our concept of press and analyst coverage and outlined the benefits to a vendor’s business development staff and sales channel partners.

Press and analyst coverage, which includes press releases, interview articles, quotes in feature articles, analyst reports and awards, can be used by a vendor’s business development team to attract and interact with sales channel partners. In turn, these sales channel partners can use this press and analyst coverage to facilitate and push forward sales processes.

In parallel, press and analyst coverage can be used for a vendor’s other marketing activities and campaigns. For example, an interview published with a vendor’s executive or one of its customers can be posted to the company’s web site, shared on its social media accounts, featured in an email-based newsletter, sent directly to targeted customers and partners and more. In addition, interview articles also have value for SEO purposes, especially if published on a prominent online publication.

Two final thoughts

First, we are often asked: “Why bother with journalists and analysts when we can produce the same content ourselves?” Our response is that internally produced content of course has value. We are actually in the process of arranging for a video interview with the managing director a customer we brought to one of our clients to discuss the benefits of working with our client. However, the feedback we always receive from our sales channel partners around the world is that press and analyst coverage is more influential in attracting new customers and moving forward sales processes than internally produced documents.

Second, during this uncertain time caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is essential to continue to communicate with your market and broadcast both the benefits of your company and its progress. In the recent weeks and months since the Coronavirus outbreak, we have had good success and received positive market feedback from the press releases that we have distributed for clients, especially those about new customers and other project milestones.

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What’s next

In our next update, we will share our advice on building an effective press and analyst coverage plan. We will include our recommendations for creating a coverage plan that is both achievable and sustainable over time. We will also elaborate on what is involved in a executing a coverage plan that supports the sales processes of channel partners.

Please share your thoughts or any feedback with us below and we will get back to you soon.

Public relations is a wide and dynamically expanding space. Most technology vendors, especially here in Israel, know or at least assume they need public relations, although very few know where to start and what is really involved in reaching out to the market.

Many years ago when publications were available only in print, public relations activities mainly focused on distributing press releases to magazines and contacting journalists directly to get company executives quoted in feature articles.

Today, these two activities are still very much relevant to any public relations effort, although public relations strategies now encompass much more and often overlap with other market outreach programs, such as social networking and content marketing. In fact, we have met technology vendors that contend that they have a strong public relations outreach without ever distributing a press release or interacting with journalists.

While social networking is an important element for growing a brand among certain circles and content marketing has value for SEO promotion, more is needed from public relations and marketing activities to support business development activities and drive revenues through sales channel and go-to-market partners.

This is where our concept of Press and Analyst Coverage offers value to technology vendors and their sales channel partners. Press and analyst coverage is an important subset of overall public relations and market outreach. Broadly speaking, it involves interacting with journalists and analysts to broadcast company news and messages with objective of obtaining various forms of coverage.

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Press & analyst coverage segments

In our view, press and analyst coverage can be divided into the following segments:

• Press releases – official company announcements about new customers, partnerships, products, awards and related company milestones
• News coverage – articles, interviews and similar coverage of press release announcements
• Press coverage – coverage that is not directly related to a press release announcement, such as a Q&A interview article, executive quote in a feature article, customer success story and much more
• Analyst coverage – coverage from analyst firms generally involves the publication of vendor assessment profiles and inclusion in market studies
• Guest articles – also known as thought leadership articles, these are articles written and published in the name of a company executive
• Awards – award programs and similar recognition from online publications and similar industry-specific organizations

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Value to business development activities

Press and analyst coverage is a respected framework to broadcast the growth and progress of a technology vendor that is strongly valued by sales channel and go-to-market partners, such as distributors, resellers and system integration firms in local markets.

Press and analyst coverage provides independent validation from third party sources and gives business development staff tools to interact with existing sales channel partners and attract new ones. In turn, sales channel partners have influential content in the form of press releases, interview articles, analyst reports and more to share with customers and push forward sales opportunities.

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Additional value

In parallel, press and analyst coverage provides companies topics for their social networking outreach and supports SEO promotion. We have many clients that base a majority of their social media posts around promoting the press and analyst coverage we have obtained for them. We also have clients that regularly tell us that the publication of this press and analyst coverage across the Internet is sufficient for their SEO purposes.

In addition, individual coverage items can be turned into full marketing campaigns. Let’s take the easy example of press releases. In parallel to distributing a press release over a news distribution service, such as PR Newswire, and sending the announcement directly to relevant journalists and analysts, a press release can be shared with not only sales channel partners, but also leads, customers, technology partners, investors and so on. A press release can also be shared over social media channels and include a call-to-action to attract web site traffic and generate leads.

Similar marketing campaigns can be performed for nearly any obtained coverage. We will elaborate more on this topic in a future update.

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Going forward

In future updates, we are planning to share our insight on the different aspects of press and analyst coverage and the connection to supporting business development and revenue generation through sales channel partners.

We are already working on our next update, which will provide recommendations on how to find the correct balance between press and analyst coverage with other market outreach activities based on the priorities and go-to-market strategy of a technology vendor.

เราขอให้คุณมีความสุขและสุขภาพเเข็งเเรงในเทศกาลสงกรานต์ปีนี้ หวังว่าเราทุกคนจะผ่านช่วงเวลานี้ไปอย่างปลอดภัย และขอให้กิจการต่างๆเติบโตขึ้นเรื่อยๆไป

For the past ten plus years, we have been promoting the growth of our clients by successfully providing public relations services. In recent years, we have added valuable business development and sales capabilities to our service offering and have evolved into a provider of business acceleration services.

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We are now excited to officially introduce Noteya Innovations and our business acceleration services. Today, we are providing a combination of press and analyst coverage, channel generation and management, and fund raising services. These services are available individually or as part of a full engagement.

For our clients, we are creating valuable marketing and sales opportunities that are generally beyond the reach of most Israeli technology vendors in low risk engagement frameworks. Our unique and logical approach directly connects important public relations activities with ongoing business development processes and facilitates profitable revenue generation.