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By Amanda Larson Outreach

Public Relations 101: Wire Services

7 minute read
Public Relations 101: Wire Services Featured Image

Now that we’ve uncovered if your story is newsworthy we now want to discuss the different ways in which you can disseminate your news. Depending on your release topic and your PR goals you may be asking yourself, “why should I pay $150 a release to have my content distributed to outlets that will never even pick it up?”

Wires have been a fundamental aspect of the PR industry for quite some time and with a wide array of distribution platforms it can be difficult to choose which one is right for you. Wire services exist to syndicate our news across thousands of sites online. In the rest of this post in our PR series, we’ll review some of the most popular free and paid wire services, and provide our recommendation on the top four PR platforms financial advisors should consider.

Ranking the Best Paid PR Platforms

In order to rank these distribution services, we turned to G2Crowd for an analysis and here’s what we uncovered:

1. Marketwired

In 2006, Marketwired and Nasdaq joined forces to further enhance communication tools and intelligence to better serve investor relations and public relation aspects of the corporations they serve.pr services for financial advisors

Best Features: 

  • Offers the ability to add images, video and audio to news releases to make them stand out from the crowd. Embed hyperlinks to drive traffic to your website. Use hashtags and post directly to social media to drive your news into relevant communities and conversations.
  • Specialized distribution channels give you the ability to create and integrate custom lists allowing you zero in on the industries, geographic regions, online portals and individuals particularly interested in your content.
  • Offers a suite of financial communications solutions.

What to Know:

  • Syndication is not guaranteed. However, they average syndication is about 200 media sites.
  • Typical cost is around $460 for a 400-word press release. Additional charges may include $150 for every 100 words in excess of the limit and other fees may apply for adding photos (about $50), search engine optimization (about $99) and audio/video (about $99).

2. Business Wire

As a Berkshire Hathaway company, Business Wire has a lengthy history as a distribution service and is well regarded as having a strong SEO component.

pr services for financial advisors

Best Features: 

  • Business Wire’s InvestorHQ services allow you to manage, share and distribute your investor relations communications from a central and secure investor center.
  • Offers delivery into newsrooms using a multi-channel network that includes access to the platforms of AP, Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg and dozens more.

What to know: 

  • Although they tend to be more expensive than other platforms some consider Business Wire to be the enterprise service of the group.
  • Business Wire is known if its strong editorial team, which is an important factor to consider. Choosing a platform that has a strong in-house team that can edit and provide feedback on PR can help optimize the performance of your announcement.

3. Newswire

Although this platform is still somewhat new, Newswire provides premiere syndication to various leading news outlets.

pr platforms for financial advisors

Best Features:

  • Readily available pricing starting at $159/mo or $99 for single distributions
  • Premium network distribution of 250+ channels
  • Google News inclusion and Yahoo News!/Yahoo Finance for Premium Plus members

What to know:

  • Ability to easily share your story on social media. Additionally, your press release becomes part of the Newswire RSS feed, which is included in dozens of RSS directories.
  • Registration is free and fast so you can get started sharing your content in minutes.
  • Do not offer any specific investor relations communications

4. PR Newswire

Recently acquired by Cision, PR Newswire delivers end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content — and then distribute and measure content results.

pr platforms for financial advisors

Best Features: 

  • With the recent acquisition, the platform can be used to distribute press releases (via PR Newswire), and also to monitor print and online pickups and locate information about media outlets, journalists and editorial calendars.
  • Extensive social and analytics tools in a single platform.

What to Know:

      • Distributes to a network that includes more than 4,500 websites, nearly 3,000 media outlets and more than 550 news content systems. The network also includes more than 36,000 PR Newswire for Journalist members at more than 9,000 media organizations.
      • Offers IR and compliance products to meet compliance requirements by leveraging our global content distribution network for timely and direct news delivery to disclosure points, editorial systems and financial news organizations.

Ranking the Best free PR Platforms

It’s true, free press release services do exist! These platforms do serve as a great learning opportunity for financial advisors to get their toes wet. Utilizing them will help you hone in on your writing and distribution techniques before moving to one of the above mentioned paid distribution services. Here’s a quick rundown:

 

Stay tuned for the next PR discussion in our series where we’ll cover how to get media attention with a guest appearance by Marie Swift from Impact Communications!

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