Marketing and advertising remain an important part of business success

Editor’s note: Michelle Stockman works with Little Rock-based Arkansas Capital Corp. to promote entrepreneurship development around the state. Stockman earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University-Chicago in communications and fine arts, and earned a master’s in entrepreneurship from Western Carolina University. Her thoughts on business success appear each week on The City Wire.

Amongst the multiple functions a business needs to address, marketing and advertising (M&A) is enigmatic at times. Unlike the hard and fast rules that accounting and finance follow, M&A is merely limited to your market needs and your imagination. Additionally, it is no secret the rules of advertising have changed drastically in the past six months let alone few years.

One aspect of M&A is the press release. Unless you are a big enough business to garner news for every little thing you do, the press release is a good tool to use when you want to announce a new product, accomplishment, change in the business or brag about a new employee.

Like advertising, the press release has seen some significant changes. To help you create and send effective press releases in this day of Twitter and blogs, consider the following tips from Open Forum by American Express.

• Identify the search terms that will lead customers or reporters to you. Brainstorm what key words come to mind in regards to the topic of your press release. You can test the words you’d like to use by using Google trends where you can compare search terms to see which are most potent. Studies have found that most search queries are two to four words long, so try to keep phrases within that range.

• Use your key words in your headline body of the release You want to make it easy for search engines to serve up your release when people type those key words. Try to use your key words within the first seven words of the headline. Google search results display only sixty-three characters of a headline, so get those words in that space. Hyperlink your key words and phrases to your website. You want people to read your release and be able to easily obtain more information, so hyperlink key words and phrases to the appropriate page on your Web site, your company blog or another relevant site.

• Use multimedia. Produce a YouTube video or Flash demonstration of your product and include it in the press release. Add photos and logos to make it easy for people to visualize your product. Title them using key words so they will also be indexed in images and video sections of search engines.

Add magnifiers for easy distribution. Make it easy for others to forward your release to others, or to subscribe to future information from you. Include an RSS feed button, Technorati tags and a Digg button. After your release is written, how you distribute it is critical. You can carefully identify specific reporters and bloggers in advance and email them the release (never send it as an attachment). Most effective is to distribute through paid services like Business Wire, whose Enhanced Online News service is leading the major distributors in optimized press release distribution. A less expensive option is PR Web, although its distribution isn’t nearly as extensive as BusinessWire.

After you crafted and sent your press release, do not forget to post it to your Web site and any social media outlets you or your company uses. Using the tools that are at your fingertips will create the publicity you hope to raise.

Stockman can be reached at [email protected]