The nightmare of the blank sheet of paper is a fear shared by great writers, excellent copywriters and also by you, who find yourself having to write a press release for your equity crowdfunding campaign for the first time.
Writing an effective press release is not an easy task: it is a type of content with its own specificity, different from, for example, newsletters or blog posts.
Moreover, the press release is aimed at an audience of journalists, who, as professionals, expect to receive content that is professionally crafted and that can be really useful in helping them to produce an article for their readers.
Finally, a press release must be able to beat the competition: every day, editorial offices receive dozens of press releases that compete for the attention of journalists and a place in the media. Only a few of the best manage to win this competition for visibility and publication.
Let’s see what makes a good press release and how to write the perfect press release for an equity crowdfunding campaign.
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How to write a press release: everything you need to know
Synthesis, precision and clarity. These are the keywords to keep in mind when writing a good press release.
Never forget to pay attention to the aspect of practicality: avoid, for example, sending the press release in the form of an attachment, preferring instead to write it directly in the body of the email. First of all, attachments are less likely to be read simply because they need to be opened. In addition, very often the journalist may not have the necessary application to open the file, the attachment may overload the e-mail and may even be classified as spam.
If it is therefore preferable to use the text of the email directly, we must ensure that we do not write an extremely long text and that we pay great attention to the layout. The press release should then be divided into four macro-areas, which are essential for reading and within which specific and functional information should be placed: title, lead, body and closing.
Title of the press release
The title of the press release must prioritise clarity. The task of a press release headline is to give the journalist an immediate and clear idea of what the release is about. Already from the headline, the journalist should understand what the press release is about and, in most cases, it will depend on a good headline whether or not he or she decides to continue reading.
Always remember to include the keyword of your article in the title: if the press release is successful, it is very likely that it will be picked up by an online publication. Highlighting the keyword increases the likelihood that it will be used by the journalist when writing the piece.
Lead: attacking the piece – now or never
The lead of a press release should be a concentration of skill: the focus here is on the essence of the news.
A good lead should never exceed four lines and must be able to condense all the key information that makes fact news. Newsworthiness is in fact the discriminating element: who needs that information? Does it have added value for the reader? Does it contain an element of novelty? These are all questions that should be asked when we decide to create a press release and that we must be able to answer in the attack of our piece.
The body of the press release for equity crowdfunding. Don’t extend the soup
Finally, we are there: we have arrived at the central part of our press release, the part where we can finally unleash our creativity and turn ourselves into real novelists. Wrong.
The temptation to dwell on the quality of our product, to tell the story of the fantastic business adventure of our startup and to explain a thousand reasons why no investor should miss the opportunity to invest in our equity crowdfunding campaign can be really strong. Yet we will have to hold back. In the body of a perfect press release, we should always keep in mind the element of brevity.
Being brief does not mean being sloppy, it means being effective. Let’s leave aside the desire to spice up our text with bombastic adjectives and go to the essence. Let’s try to make it clear why what we are communicating can be really important for the journalist and, above all, for the reader.
Can we really think that describing our company as ‘excellent’ or our product as ‘innovative’ is going to make a difference? Who would write that their company is mediocre and their product has been seen before? Let’s take it for granted that we believe in ourselves and leave the hyperbole to others, the purpose of the press release is to reach the final reader with key information, not to incense ourselves to tell others and ourselves how good we are.
We focus on the essentials that make the difference.
We focus on the essentials that make the difference.
READ ALSO – Storytelling for equity crowdfunding: write a success story for your startup
Closure. Let’s stay in touch
The final part of the press release is the part we can use to give a little more information about the company: how it was born, who the key people are and what the objectives of our equity crowdfunding campaign are. All this without losing sight of the need to be brief, clear and focused. Let’s tell our story in an essential way as if we had 30 seconds to introduce ourselves to someone.
The fundamental task of closing the press release is then to highlight the contacts of the company and the press office, the company website and social channels: this will not only allow the journalist to contact us more quickly for an interview or to ask for more details but will also allow us to potentially expand the network of relationships that are the basis of any PR activity.
Press release, the myth of the 5 Ws
Anyone who has ever come across a good journalist’s handbook will surely have encountered the now famous rule of 5 questions, the 5 Ws: Who? What? When? Where? Why?
These five questions are the essence of journalism because they condense all the essential information behind a news story.
At this point, we must therefore ask ourselves whether the 5 W rule also applies when we have to write a press release for equity crowdfunding.
The general answer is yes, an effective press release should always be able to answer these questions and should be able to do so already in the title or, at most, in the lead.
At the same time, however, this rule should not be considered as written in stone: there may be situations in which the news can be born from the answer to even just a few of these questions or others in which the 5 magic questions may not be answered all at once but in different points of our press release. So, let’s consider them a rudder but not an obsession and let’s shape the precious help they can give to effective communication according to our specific needs.
If you found this article on how to write a press release for equity crowdfunding interesting, you may be thinking about the usefulness of a public relations activity to support your company in the launch of a fundraising campaign.
As we have seen, writing a press release is not an activity that can be left to improvisation if you want to have the possibility of beating the competition and obtaining adequate visibility in the media.
SCAI Comunicazione is an agency specialised in equity crowdfunding, discover the world of marketing and communication services that we can provide for your company.
