By Gregg Castano News Direct Founder & CEO
August 7, 2024
In today’s cluttered, fragmented media environment, getting your message to the right audience is essential. This is where the tried-and-true newswire can be a huge advantage. Newswires, which simply are commercial press release distribution services, can be an enormously valuable tool for businesses and other entities seeking to broadly communicate their brand messaging.
Some might say that newswires are a bit “old school”, which isn’t always accurate. Depending on the one you select, you can have either a throwback experience, wiring like it’s 1999, or you can enjoy a technologically advanced, streamlined SaaS-style user journey that can save you lots of time, money and anxiety.
Regardless of which way you go, the delivery mechanisms and the endpoints are virtually identical, so what matters most is the quality of the content.
Let’s take a deeper dive to see how leveraging the newswire can boost your messaging strategy. If you ace that, then you’re likely to reap the wide-ranging benefits that only newswires, at their best, can provide.
- Wide-Reaching Distribution
One of the most obvious and substantial reasons to use a newswire is that they’re able to deliver your releases to a huge and diversified audience. With extensive networks of media endpoints, online news sites, investor platforms and even bloggers, your releases reach the local, national and global audiences of your choosing. This makes it possible to enhance the visibility of your news so that it can garner attention from media that might not otherwise have access to it, as well as make it available to hundreds of millions of online readers from the general public.
- Enhanced Credibility and Authority
The Holy Grail of press release distribution is having it used as source material by respected news outlets. Known as “third-party validation”, and assuming it’s written from a positive, or at least neutral, perspective, this “earned media” provides your content with an invaluable layer of credibility that ads and other marketing strategies just cannot achieve. Quality news outlets have stringent editorial standards and discerning readership or viewership that trusts what the reporter is conveying, lending tremendous authority to your announcement. This means your message will likely to be taken seriously and enhance your chances of achieving whatever your desired outcome may be.
- Improved SEO and Online Visibility
A broadly disseminated press release via newswire can also significantly improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. By placing backlinks to your website within your release, which remain live downstream, your site’s domain authority and search engine ranking can receive a positive uptick. And because newswires reach hundreds of online platforms, many of which auto-publish their releases, your news is highly likely to be indexed by search engines, which makes it easily discoverable by those doing online keyword searches.
- Targeted Reach
Newswires also offer the benefit of targeting your news geographically, by industry and even by type of media outlet. This allows you to deliver news that is relevant to the intended audience, which naturally adds to the effectiveness of your press release.
- Time and Resource Efficiency
Newswires initially came about in the early 1950’s as a way to reach a wide media audience virtually simultaneously by eliminating the need to reach out to journalists individually. So, it was an enormous improvement in terms of time-savings and efficiency. That is largely still the primary benefit of a newswire, although the nature and size of the audience has greatly expanded thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet. These days, journalists are just one of many desired target audiences, along with individual investors, consumers, bloggers, influencers and brand advocates. Given the current size, complexity and geographically dispersed nature of the audience, the efficacy of a newswire has never been more important.
- Real-Time Tracking and Analytics
Today newswires offer robust tracking and analytics tools, enabling users to gain a sense of the ROI of each release. The number of views, shares, and engagements all provide insights into how well a release has performed in relation to its objective.
- Cost-Effective Solution
While the cost of using newswires can vary, and sometimes be steep, it is nonetheless a more cost-effective solution in comparison to many other forms of communication. Traditional wires tend to stick with a pricing model that charges for word count and the size of the geographic target area, while newer services have gone with flat rate strategies that provide more transparency, predictability and affordability, while making budgeting much easier.
- Professional Presentation
Newswires deliver content to media and to online sites in a professionally formatted presentation which adheres to established journalistic standards and PR industry best practices. Such professionalism can have a positive impact on how journalists and the public perceive your news. Proper formatting and accuracy can go a long way in making a positive impression and increase your chances of “pick-up”.
Conclusion
Newswire should form the centerpiece to your press release distribution strategy because of the advantages they bring, from comprehensive reach and an aura of credibility to better SEO and efficient use of time and resources. The power of newswires helps you level up the impact of your press releases and ensure that your news reaches the intended audience and attracts the attention you desire. With so much competing noise, newswires can give your news a strong strategic edge that helps your content stand out and generate optimal outcomes and ROI.
