When Press Releases Do (and Don’t) Help Your Marketing
Why is that? Because press releases are syndicated for a certain amount of time … but are actually taken down at some point. Even though they are full of keywords and your company’s name, their temporary status online does not lead to any progress in the SERPs.
As mentioned before, press releases can help your SEO in an indirect way — by leading to other beneficial press. However, your PR strategy should not depend on them for SEO success. Use them as a means to an end that will get you higher rankings, instead.
2) Press releases don’t improve your communication with consumers.
Even though press releases may get the attention of a journalist, it is very unlikely that it will reach your target audience (or enough of them to make a difference in your marketing). Consumers like to read information in a way that is easy to digest, and feels more natural — like news stories and blog posts. The press release format takes longer to read, and is often harder to understand without reading a couple times through. In a world with thousands of stories being posted every hour, readers want to be able to quickly understand the story by reading it through a blog post or another form of writing.
So marketers, that means in addition to posting your press release, you should make sure the content is somewhere else in a better format so that your audience gets access to it. Instead of promoting your press release through social channels or email, promote your blog post to achieve the same effect of the press release and get your audience the information in the announcement.
3) Press releases are difficult to measure.
Data is the prime way marketrs can prove success to the rest of their department and company. Unlike other parts of your marketing strategy, however, press releases are extremely difficult to measure, and therefore it’s hard to prove whether or not they are successful. I mean, it’s pretty hard to say “X amount of people viewed our release, and X amount of journalists decided to write about it/not write about it as a result.”