A press release is an important communication, PR and marketing instrument. It helps to attract the attention of the media so that the news you need is published and shown to the audience of a news portal, newspaper, or news agency. Simply, a press release is an application for publishing material in the media.
Writing press releases is an essential part of the work of specialists working in communications. But simply writing a press release (following the rules, including key messages) is not enough - further work is carried out on the distribution (hello-hello, well-developed mass media base) and analysis of the results. And the Semantrum system will help you with the media-monitoring and analytics.
Semantrum is AI-based media analytics and reputation management platform that gives you 24/7 monitoring of mentions of brands, personalities, events, or any keywords across online media, news agencies and social networks with detailed analytics, visualization, and by tracking the speaker according to your personal metrics.
With Semantrum system you will be able to track the distribution of publications based on a press release, in order to better understand which mass media respond and publish your materials, the predicted coverage of these publications, and in what context your information reaches the end consumer.
You no longer need to waste time manually collecting posts from Google or directly from news portals. Now all publications will be collected in one place for your convenience. Also, you can set up mailings for yourself and see analytics based on campaign results.
Work for tracking a press release can be built like this:
1. Set up press release monitoring;
2. Track the press release in dynamics and set up mailings;
3. Working with analytics;
4. Create a final campaign report.
✔️ Step 1: Set up distribution monitoring for your press release.
Determine which words journalists will use when publishing your press release – these are the main (key) words that contain the essence of the press release, they can also be words from the title of the release, mentions of key brands, persons, accents, etc. Based on these keywords, build a search query, with the help of which you will be able to find out about the publication of your press release in various sources (more about creating search queries – by link).
If you are new to Semantrum, create a topic based on your keywords. A topic includes a set of keywords that describe exactly what you are tracking in the media space and the types of media (online media, social media, radio, news agencies, etc.) that are being searched for.
If you already have a topic in Semantrum that collects mentions of your brand (which also appears in the press release), create a saved query based on it.
Thus, in a separate topic or a saved request, you will see the appearance of new publications based on your press release.
✔️ Step 2: Set up notifications (alerts) for new publications of your press release.
Of course, you do not always have the opportunity to check the appearance of new publications in the system. Set up alerts for your topic or saved request to automatically receive notifications of new messages
You can receive alerts on a convenient schedule (one or more times a day, including or excluding weekends) or in real-time, immediately after publications enter the system, mail or Telegram.
✔️ Step 3: Evaluate press release distribution results «on the fly».
The «Graphics» mode in the Semantrum system provides access to quick visual analytics of publications based on selected filters. In graph mode, you can make both a preliminary assessment and a final analysis.
We advise you to focus on such quantitative indicators:
total number of mentions (can be compared with previous press releases, if you have such data);
which types of media have more response (including in social networks), which media distributed the press release;
which media holdings these mass media represent;
how the release spreads in dynamics, were there any peaks of mentions;
what is the share of large media in the total number of sources that wrote about you.
In addition to the quantitative results, you should also pay attention to the audience coverage (number of views) received by publications based on your press release. You will be able to get information about the estimated audience coverage of this or that publication directly on the publication card, and you can also use data from the exports of publications to Excel or order the service of setting up an interactive dashboard in your account.
When analyzing the results of press release distribution by coverage, pay attention to the following points:
overall audience coverage (can be compared to previous press releases if you have such data);
compare statistics on the number of publications and coverage by types of mass media. Determine which types of media and social media can be most effective in terms of audience coverage/posting effort ratio.
view the rankings of sources by number and by audience coverage. Draw conclusions about the sources that should be planned to work with next time.
✔️ Step 4: Create a final report based on the results of the press release distribution.
The simplest and most common report on the results of a press release – press clipping – is the texts of publications and data about them. Such a report can be generated automatically in the system using exports to Word. To create an analytical report, depending on your needs, you can:
download a ready-made automatic report to Excel or export a list of documents to Excel o generate a report according to your own template;
download the graphs and data you need in different formats from graph mode or from the dashboard to create your own report;
download an automatic Word report in which you will receive basic statistics with a text description, as well as data on forecast audience reach (dynamics, total coverage, top sources).
You can present the received data and reports in your company and use them to plan future campaigns.
Well done! The task of monitoring and analyzing the results of the distribution of the press release has been completed, you are incredible. 😊