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Contractor Marketing Tip: Make Your Company Newsworthy

You don’t get many opportunities to send out a press release, but when you do you need to know the right way to make sure it gets picked up. You have to keep in mind that an editor of any publication big or small receives dozens if not hundreds of press releases and publicity kits every day.

How to get them to read yours

That being said, start off your press release by identifying what it is about you or what you’re doing that will grab the editor’s attention because it speaks to his or her readers, then write your release about that. For example, let’s say you are a janitorial company who just moved to “green cleaning”, and you want to let your local market know they have a new choice to keep their buildings clean and green. Your press release would be geared towards that part of the story, because “green” technology in any industry is a hot button issue and will appeal to many of the editor’s readers.

This is the foundation of what being newsworthy means: sufficient interest to the public or audience to warrant coverage

So make your release about why people need and want to know about you and your contracting business. You’re not trying to make the front page of the New York Times; you are just trying to get coverage in your weekly local newspaper, so tailor your message to your local audience.

The standard news release format for real contracting companies

People that read press releases for a living expect to see them in the same type of format. Double-spaced with margins of at least an inch, standard typeface with a slightly larger or bold typeface for your headline. And make sure your news release includes the following.

  1. Contact person — in the upper left-hand corner of the front page indicate who the contact person is in their phone number.
  2. The date — you should have the release date in the upper right-hand corner or on the first line of the first paragraph.
  3. Headline — make this all caps, centered and not longer than two sentences.
  4. Body — begin to release immediately below your headline and make sure to keep it to a maximum of two pages, with one page being preferred. Make sure to include one good quote from either yourself or someone else in the release.

Since you will be sending this out as a single release without a publicity kit you want to include a photo as well. Just don’t make it so big that it overpowers the release and takes away from your message. If you want to get more information on sending out your own press releases for your contracting business then you should check out the guys over at 24-7Pressrelease – Effective press release distribution with results, they do a great job helping contractors with press releases.

3 responses to “Contractor Marketing Tip: Make Your Company Newsworthy”

  1. Leif Hurst Avatar
    Leif Hurst

    It’s funny you bring this up because we’re just now getting on the ball about doing press releases (we’re an insurance agency that works almost exclusively with contractors… artisan and heavy construction) ourselves. It’s amazing how many times, now a week, that we’re running across something that is press release worthy. You’ve just got to have a plan to get them done and submitted to the wires and the right people in the right places looking for those opportunities to have something to put in a press release.

    Best Wishes!

    1. Darren Avatar
      Darren

      First of all, thanks Leif for stopping by! There is such a demand for content these days that press releases make sense for many companies…including insurance agencies! You should think about advertising here! 🙂

      Thanks again for stopping by!

      Darren

  2. Chris Spoerl Avatar
    Chris Spoerl

    Ingenious ! This is one of your best articles, and anything you can do to stand out will produce results !