A company from India recently put out some PR that made it to my Google Alert trap because of the keywords “digital signage” and because of the release premise – an embedded system for DS – I was interested.

When I first tried the Website was down. Not good, but it happens.

When I gave it a crack today the site was up, but it took me probably 40-45 seconds of poking around to find the stuff I was interested in. Mere mortals probably wouldn’t have stuck with it that long, so there’s lost opportunity Number One. If you issue a press release, it will almost certainly be seen digitally by most people, so include a link in the release that goes RIGHT to the page with your product information.

Problem Number 2. Once I found the page, all it contained was the same information as the release. Want to learn more? Download this brochure! Well, OK, but now I am a little irritated. I don’t need yet more PDFs on my hard disk.

But wait, before you do that, put in your name and email so we we can start carpet-bombing you with email spam. THEN we’ll let you look at what we’ve got.

No. No. No.

Common sense guys. Let people find out about the product first, and then if they are truly intrigued, they will reach out by email, or   maybe agree to getting on some email list. By insisting on registration first, you have to know a pile of people abandoned the page, the site, and your company. You have to provide real value to get most people to agree to register, and a product brochure probably doesn’t qualify.

The process of sending out a press release is somewhere in the middle of the marketing communications process, but too many people seem to to think it’s the last bit. It has to be thought all the way through, INCLUDING what happens when people read it and are hopefully intrigued.

Not so.