Originally published April 3, 2024, on Certainly's blog.
Why do we create certifications and standards?
There are many specific reasons, but, at root, they are about bringing people together around a shared set of priorities and a shared perspective on how to pursue them. To create that community, to help your certification standard make an impact, you need to bring new people into the fold. A press release can be a great way to reach new, relevant audiences.
From putting your message verbatim in familiar, trusted outlets to improving search engine optimization (SEO) and creating earned-media buzz, a press release can be a powerful tool. But what does that look like?
What makes for a good press release for a certification group or standards body?
It all starts with knowing what a press release is – or, more accurately, what one should be. A press release is not a product page with extra copy, nor is it a blog post with extra backlinks. A press release has a traditional formula, but first and foremost, it explains why a newsworthy event matters to two audiences: the journalists at the outlets where you send your release, and their readers.
Those journalists decide if they’ll republish your press release, cover your news themselves, or pass it over altogether. While they may not be your end-goal audience, these people help decide a lot of what those end-goal audiences see, and how trustworthy they consider the information. It’s wise to develop good working relationships with journalists at relevant outlets and on relevant “beats,” or topics. But whether or not you have that relationship, your news won’t get the coverage you want if the press release isn’t effective and engaging.
That’s all well and good, but what actually makes for an effective, engaging press release?
Open strong
A good press release for your certification organization begins by succinctly and memorably introducing your brand, your topic, and its value propositions. Ideally, some portion of each of these objectives is complete by the end of your first sentence. A common “formula” for this is:
[Company Name], [brief, unique, impactful description of company], announced [news] today, [significance].
Let’s use a fictional company and topic for an example:
Steve’s Sticker Standards, the world’s pre-eminent body for rating adhesive papers, unveiled its newly digitized online database of millions of sticker ratings today, making it easier than ever for users to find the right paper for the job.
This formula isn’t entirely rigid. Sometimes it’s better to save the “significance” portion for the second sentence, allowing both sentences to be a bit punchier. Also, it’s often best to replace “announced” (or its cousin, “unveiled,”) with a more direct, descriptive verb:
Steve’s Sticker Standards, the world’s pre-eminent body for rating adhesive papers, today opened its newly digitized database of millions of sticker ratings to the public. The new database aims to make it easier than ever for users to find the right paper for the job.
Understanding and highlighting the significance to your audiences is absolutely essential to the purpose of a press release. You want to make it clear, quickly, so the journalists – and then the readers – who glance at your press release know right away why it matters to them. That’s how you get people to read on – and click through, buy-in, or take other desired actions. Because you are targeting where you send your press release, you can use that information to target your messaging, as well. Think about what customer or user personas engage with this outlet, and what about your news will matter most to them. Lead with benefits, and support with features.
Support your claims
Getting into specifics – without getting bogged down in technical details, depending on your audience – about how what you are announcing accomplishes the goals laid out in your opening sentence and paragraph is the work of the rest of the press release. With a new or enhanced offering, this often includes highlighting individual features and how they concretely affect the user’s experience. Sometimes, a bulleted list of new features and quick, high-level explanations of what they are and how they help is appropriate, but be sure to keep the focus squarely on benefits to the user – keep your audience engaged by engaging directly with their goals and pain points.
Another powerful way to support your claims is with a quote or quotes. A quote from an executive in your organization can help distill the most important information in particularly accessible and/or memorable ways. Not every executive quote has to be the next great piece of prose for the literary canon – in fact, matter-of-fact is best in a lot of cases – but those quotation marks draw attention, so you want to be sure you’re making the most of such prime real estate. Hammer home why you set out to do the thing you’re announcing in the first place: the problem you were trying to solve, or the opportunity you were trying to create for your users. Be unabashedly clear about why this is a game-changer.
In addition to the executive quote, some press releases may include a user testimonial quote. These testimonials may be more central to the release, especially if it’s a joint press release and/or customer success story. Quotes from long-time satisfied customers, impressed early adopters, and others can lend a level of legitimacy and trust that you simply can’t get any other way.
After a supporting paragraph or two and a quote, close things out, typically with a link or call to action inviting readers to learn more or otherwise engage with your news.
While you shouldn’t let keyword research derail good writing, aim to include key phrases you want associated with your brand and announcement, to help improve your SEO for those terms. Similarly, a good press release that gets picked up by a lot of outlets can help increase your number of backlinks, further boosting your SEO.
Now that you know how to write a good press release, let’s get into good reasons to write one.
What is press release-worthy?
Not everything demands a press release, and the more common and less meaningful yours become, the easier they become to ignore. You want to make sure your press releases are worth your audiences’ time and your efforts.
Developing a “news sense” is certainly a soft skill, but it’s one you can work on. Take note of what announcements you actually stop to read about. Once again, user benefits should be your North Star. Good reasons for press releases include:
a new version of your standard has been released, and here are the ways it’s an improvement;
we’ve streamlined the certification process to address X, Y and Z;
we’re now offering certification coaching services; or
we’ve digitized our standard for easier use by certification-seekers and easier understanding by their end-users.
Where and how to distribute a press release
There is a variety of press release distribution platforms out there, but perhaps none is more well known than Cision PR Newswire. Hundreds of thousands of journalists and thousands of outlets have opted in to receive relevant press releases from the service. When sending out your release, you can target contacts and outlets alike by geography, industry, and beat.
Cision also has tools to help you identify contacts who may be particularly interested in your news. Returning to our earlier example, the team at Steve’s Sticker Standards may be interested to know if a sticker-review site prominent in the user community has a reporter on the adhesion-tech beat who recently complained about the difficulty of navigating the organization’s dated, clunky database.
That’s the kind of person a brand may want to target with individualized outreach: a direct call or email to discuss how this news is of particular interest to them, potentially offering exclusives such as early access to details or interviews with executives to help secure earned-media coverage. In fact, many journalists’ Cision profiles include their preferred mode of contacting them for this very reason. Media outreach strategies will vary from announcement to announcement. Not every press release requires 10 phone calls to particularly relevant media contacts. Not every press release even requires one. Again, here, your “news sense” will be your guide.
Watch and learn
Once your press release is out in the world (and you’ve followed up with the appropriate media contacts), your work isn’t done. Use information like the press release’s reach report, tagged-link traffic, and other, relevant metrics to track the success of your announcement in driving action. This information can help you understand which audiences your release over- and under-performed with, as well as help you identify potential targets for re-marketing and areas where you could refine your messaging.
Every communication between you and your users is part of a larger conversation, a brand journey. A press release demands attention in a unique way, so it is our job as communicators to make that demand feel not only worthy, but important and impactful.
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