The 5 Most Impressive Press Releases from January

As any public relations and communications professional will tell you, creating compelling content that “cuts through the noise,” captures’ readers’ attention and incites them to take action is a tall order. Yet I’m continually impressed by how many of our clients are able to do it – and set an example for others in the industry. In this new monthly feature, we’re highlighting the press releases that stood out this month – and why.

We close out this first month of 2021 seeing the same growing trends we saw in 2020: Brands engaging their target audiences by going digital and including strong calls to action (CTAs) in their outreach to connect with their audience. As the brick and mortar experience continues to wane, brands need to stay relevant and front-of-mind by crafting a story that immediately captures a reader’s interest online. 

Here are a few examples of brands that got it right in the month of January:

• 2021 Harley-Davidson Motorcycles Fuel Passion For Adventure & Freedom
  Harley-Davidson engages audiences with a positive, new year headline, encouraging readers to “fuel [their] passion.” The keyword “experience” is used five times in this release, and the company leads with strong multimedia engagement to bring its audience into that experience of the beautiful open-road adventure in a nice 30-second video. 
  
• Cisco Study Reveals Critical Role of Privacy Emerging from Global Pandemic
  Cisco Systems leads off with a bulleted “news summary” engagement, eye-catching imagery and an “above the fold,” hyperlinked CTA in this thought leadership piece. They continue further down with bolded bullets, helping to fight against a reader’s potential F-shaped reading pattern (i.e., scanning quickly, missing key brand/product messaging).
  
• SAS offers free digital tool for brands to assess their analytical marketing capabilities
  SAS answers the all-important “Why does this news matter?” with a great CTA that appears early in the release and is bolded to stand out further.
  
• IBM Helps Audi UK Reimagine the Digital Customer Experience
  IBM cleverly took advantage of an underutilized piece of press release real estate: the subhead. In it, they provide a winning data point that gives the reader additional context upfront. (Bonus points for including excellent video and photo engagement.)
  
• ADP Achieves its 12th Perfect Score in Workplace Equality
  Lastly, ADP went all in, with a well-crafted piece of content that knows exactly what it wants from the reader. Their release contained a bolded, hyperlinked and centered CTA that drove readers to “click here to engage more with our positive brand story by watching this 1+ minute video.”

The Cision wire saw a January packed full of well-crafted press releases – I didn’t even touch upon the great engagement examples coming out of the all-digital CES show.  As the year moves along, I look forward to highlighting more press releases leading the charge in standing out with their engaging content.

About Glenn Frates

Glenn Frates is Regional Vice President of U.S. Distribution at Cision. Glenn’s 20+ years experience in content distribution and best practices, global marketing strategies and large-scale operations management has provided him a broad perspective on what does and doesn’t work well in the Marketing/PR arena.