For a funding announcement or a big product launch, Business Wire is the service to use. For less important announcements, and for clients with limited budget, it might be worth considering other options. PR Newswire and Marketwired are both decent services that provide comparable results, but the high touch quality of Business Wire is pretty unique.
This is a great tool for larger size companies that will have a lot of media tracking they need to do. It appeals to stakeholders involved in PR, data analytics, and helps decision makers know what will have the most impact and where their marketing dollars should go!
The site has a very specific search function that makes it easy for users to sort through the many press releases put on the site each day, making the process easier/more efficient.
The "Media & Journalist Tools" tab is helpful for myself and my colleagues, specifically, the RSS feeds to make sure we're staying on top of business happenings.
I don't use the "How-To" section, though I know folks who have to learn more about writing press releases, and I've heard it's very helpful.
Expensive - distributions cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, with a higher cost for longer releases and additional fees for multimedia content like photos or videos.
Limited number of media outlets specifically in Florida.
Personally I didn't see any. Though I know my boss had a few calls with their team to get the daily reports formatted and presented just the way she wanted them. The team took a few tries to get into the swing of what she was asking for, but they were more than willing to put in the time and effort to customize the reports for her.
I gave it this rating because the Business Wire website is very user-friendly. Being able to navigate the platform on my own without technical assistance made it possible for me to quickly and easily submit news release distributions, which can be critical at times, such as during hurricane season when we need to get information out to the news media and our customers quickly.
The team members are very quick to respond and do their absolute best to help resolve issues quickly. I also like that I can have one of them proofread my press releases before they are distributed. It always helps to have another set of eyes on the content. There have been a few times that they've caught an error that nobody else did so it's worth the extra couple minutes that it takes!
Business Wire is very easy to implement. This isn't a requirement, but it's recommended that you begin to set up saved distributions for different clients so that you don't have to start over from scratch. Rather than doing all this work on the front end, you can just do it as you send out your first piece of news for each client.
Cision PRWeb was not good at targeting the major business community and was not fitted well into our demands. The price of Cision was high and very unjustifiable as there were not enough features in it and was not efficient in its working as well. But on the contrary, if I look at Business Wire then I think it is just a perfect match for our business demands.
I wasn't at the top of these discussions but, I did help make monthly reports that went directly to the CFO and CEO that used these analytics to show how our corporate communications office was doing and all the work we had done for the past month. This is a way to cover yourself and show that we had done a lot of work and good work at that.
