Have you ever wondered why you looked at a report for the distribution of your feature news story that showed more impressions than there are people in this country and yet sales were relatively flat, the needle barely moved on your dashboard and your phone wasn’t ringing off the hook?There could be several reasons for this problem, as follows:
1. Your message didn’t resonate with readers, listeners and viewers.
2. Your story was on a site of thousands of pages; one that contains widgets with thousands of stories being uploaded there
daily, making it difficult for readers to find your story.
3. The metrics on the report are inflated or misleading.
After millions of people allegedly read your story, if it was persuasively written, you should have seen some signs that your business was improving as a result. If you didn’t see much progress, either not enough people actually read it or you didn’t reach your target audience.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. You can get free advice from the experts at NAPS, which serves top PR firms, many large corporations, associations and government agencies. NAPS will help you to transform your feature story into a format that will help you influence millions of additional readers in your target audience. Our writers are the experts at achieving multimedia success in thousands of community news outlets nationwide. For a proposal, contact info@napsnet.com.
Our media relations team has developed relationships over more than 50 years of being in this business, which allow us to provide you with usage from thousands of publications that other services don’t. Editors know us and trust us to send quality material, wonderfully written, that is checked by our experts and given to them in the formats they require.
The publications that we reach are primarily print publications, weekly community newspapers of under 30k in circulation and fewer than 50 pages. Those are much more likely to get read cover to cover because they are in people’s homes for a week and it doesn’t take much time to flip through the entire publication. Sites of hundreds or thousands of pages, or those that have widgets that include thousands of new stories daily, are not as likely to get read in their entirety. It’s much less likely that people will come to an article on those sites, so even though the number of visitors seems high, the actual readership of your article is probably lower than in a weekly community newspaper.
There are few people who believe that 12 million people are reading The Wall Street Journal online when only 2 million are reading it in print, and yet many PR pros would add 12 million unique visitors per month that the site has to the 2 million in circulation that the print publication has to get the total number of “impressions” for a feature article that appears in both the print publication and on the site.
The metrics are not telling the whole story. Unique visitors per month could include people counted multiple times if they log on from different locations, have a rolling IP address or frequently delete cookies. The best measure of success is what people do after allegedly having read your article, as measured by sales or actions taken, such as filling out a form on a site or contacting you for information.