Research shows that adding images and video to your PR campaigns can increase engagement and social media sharing. In fact, Forbes found that 75 percent of articles published each week include multimedia content.
Multimedia elements help on a variety of fronts and play a big role in storytelling. We encourage our clients to consider adding image material to all content they create from marketing collateral, to white papers, press releases and blogs. Consider video/animation or an infographic, which is an effective storytelling tactic that helps guide the audience through a visual message by turning statistics into interesting data, tips or other types of learning points.
Get Your Content Noticed
Adding multimedia to a press release provides another opportunity to embed SEO in your PR efforts and a call-to-action for the reader. The benefits of SEO help the press release get picked up on additional websites, creating more web crawler hits.
We’ve been noticing more often that reporters want images as they work on their stories. The media landscape has evolved and a big emphasis has been placed on digital news and social media. Photos, screen shots and infographics are top favorites, but many media outlets have dedicated pages of their site to video content as well.
Use Video to Support PR Outreach
The use of video has been a great support for our clients’ educational efforts. We produced a multi-part video series, each focused on a topic to educate advisors and investors around alternative investments. The client added this to their educational library on their website and we were able to promote this initiative successfully with the media.
Event promotion is another opportunity for video. When promoting an annual conference for example, consider adding the highlights/recap video or still images from the previous year’s event to the current press release.
Use the Right Visual Content
We don’t advise the use of a database to download “stock” images for a press release. Stock images can be useful for presentations and some marketing collateral, but for press releases, we’d suggest a specific screen shot, photo or video to paint a visual story consistent with the company’s brand identity. Multimedia components should be able to provide a human connection, hone in on your personality or define differentiators.
Distributing your visual content is a customized approach. Most image material is best utilized at a high resolution format. To achieve this, a shared downloadable file or link is often most helpful. Tools like ShareFile or Dropbox are common solutions. Since the file types needed for different channels may vary, we suggest creating multiple sizes (low, medium and high resolutions) as well as multiple file formats (JPEG, TIF, EPS etc.) in order to accommodate.
By Dana Taormina – DTaormina@jcprinc.com