Study: Audiences favor press releases with visuals
Adding multimedia content can increase by nearly tenfold the likelihood that your online pitch will be opened and viewed.
Include more visual elements in them—doing so can increase the visibility of a press release by nearly 10 times, according to a new study by PR Newswire.
“If you include some sort of visual [in your release], you’re going to get better results,” PR Newswire’s Sarah Skerik told PR Daily.
To conduct the study, PR Newswire looked at 100,000 press releases published in 2011 and 2012 and tracked views and content. According to Skerik, a press release is “viewed” when someone clicks on a headline and opens the press release, regardless of whether it came via email, social media, RSS, search engine, or the PR Newswire website.
Press releases that include a photo are 1.8 times as likely (an 80 percent increase, if you prefer) to be viewed as their text-only counterparts, the study found. Inclusion of a video makes the likelihood 4.3 times as much as for a standard release. Press releases with photos and videos are viewed 7.4 times as often as text-only releases.
Releases with pictures, video, and downloadable content (such as PowerPoints and PDFs) were 9.7 times as likely to be viewed.
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