Today I’m going to talk about the importance of writing a really strong headline in your press release before pitching it to the media. A good way to think about coming up with a strong headline is to think about what would the title of the article be or the words in the TV promo be, should the journalists actually pick up your story. The only thing a journalist cares about is that their content will attract and engage their audience and bring new audiences in so they will make a judgment call on whether they’ll even bother reading the rest of your media release based on your headline.
So I’m going to give you a couple of examples of headlines that we’ve used in very recent press releases that have achieved national mass media exposure for our clients and I am going to read the first one. So the first one is: ‘Landing in Australia with only one hundred dollars in his wallet, to building a multi-million dollar company. How Katt Srinivasan defeated the odds.’ Now this got the attention of a journalist at News.com.au who wrote a great feature article about our clients back story to how he created his business, the success of his business, she included a back link in the article and it got syndicated across all associated titles. The next press release example, is one that we wrote for our client Earworx, a clinic that removes earwax from your ear and the title of the release was: ‘Five myths that you didn’t know about your earwax.’
It’s a bit quirky and as a result it got the attention of a producer at Studio 10, and just last week, our client Lisa was sitting on the desk with a Studio 10 panel talking for about six minutes about ear health and had the opportunity to promote her business as well. A word of warning, so many people are tempted to write in the title: ‘Australia’s most innovative’ or ‘Australia’s leading’ such and such launches knew such and such, but it’s not newsworthy. Firstly journos see straight through those words leading and innovative, I mean who’s to say you actually are those things unless it can be proven of course. And it’s not really having the audience’s agenda in mind.
So hopefully I’ve given you some food for thought. Feel free to reach out chat ask any questions like share or comment if you think this video will be of value to anyone else, and I look forward to seeing you next week.