Shout It Loud

Many of the lower-end press release distribution services are now allowing you to specify a distribution time. The main wire service providers have always allowed you to specify the release time and time zone.  With this in mind, a healthcare marketing agency is often asked “what time of day should my company issue a release”?

Unless you are trying to stem a crisis or doing a timed product release that’s linked to an event, we have found 7:30am-8:00am in your “target timezone” to be the most effective.It is early enough in the morning to meet most journalist’s deadlines and late enough to catch them after their coffee. Releasing first thing in the start of the workday will allow you to get to the top of of the Inbox if you are sending releases via email. It also gives the public relations agency the entire day to line up interviews with company executives, if requested.

Note your “target timezone” may be different than the location of your business. If your company headquarters is in New York, but you primarily sell on the West Coast, a 7:30am PST release time would be best. Early AM release submissions have given us the best media pickup. Remember though, you always have to option of sending reporters releases “under embargo” which means you can send them ahead of time and, by ethics, the receiver agreees not to publish until your specified date and time.  However, we find sending releases “under embargo” is not as effective as a timed morning distribution. Some editors and reporters also frown upon embargoed releases or they just simply forget about a release when it was sent to them days before.

For a press release distribution service consider Marketwire.com.Marketwire’s state-only distribution are great bargains if you are a local company.And their SEO-enhanced options at $200 is highly-recommended as anchor-text links remain intact even in online news sites such as Google News and Yahoo! News. If you can’t afford Marketwire for a [national|nationwide] release, then use PRWeb at $80 if you’re really budget-limited, or the $200 PRWeb SEO-enhanced package with anchor text links. However with the $80 PRWeb package, you cannot pick your distribution time - the default is midnight.