PR agencies, large companies and small businesses all have the need to announce news through a press release, still a great way to gain media exposure and PR. Once those releases have been written, it’s often a wise idea to distribute the press release over a newswire (which makes your news available to thousands of newsrooms and reporters all over the country and even the world). In today’s media world, newswires also provide you with the ability to enhance your search engine rankings for specific keywords since many press releases can also be found in searches.

Here is my review of Marketwire, one of today’s more popular newswires.

Marketwire is an easy-to-use Web-based platform and becoming a member is also very easy. Small businesses and entrepreneurs will appreciate the fact that there is no annual membership fee that you find with a few other leading newswires. Once you are signed up (application and approval usually takes about 24 hours but can be expedited if you have news you want to get out immediately), the site walks you through a series of steps to make sure you get your news distributed to the right media audiences.

Here’s what you’ll find with Marketwire’s offerings:

Marketwire places your news in front of media, financial analysts and online audiences throughout the country (and other parts of the world) and distributes to thousands of newspapers, broadcast outlets, trade publications, websites, financial terminals and databases in all 50 states, as well as direct to The Associated Press. You can target your news by selecting from 12 regional newslines and more than 20 metro areas.

US National Newsline: Their broadest domestic distribution reaches thousands of media and financial points across the United States. This newsline also includes distribution via the AP Mobile newsfeed to millions of BlackBerry and iPhone users.

US Regional Newslines: Your news is distributed throughout the Atlantic Seaboard, Carolinas, East, Midwest, New England, Northeast, Pacific Coast, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountain States, Southeast, Southwest or West regions.

US State Newslines: Enjoy targeted reach to each individual states, as well as Northern and Southern California and upstate New York.

US Metro Newslines: Distribute your news to any of more than 20 U.S. metro areas, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas/Ft Worth, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami/South Florida, Minneapolis/St Paul, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco/Bay Area, Seattle, Tampa/St Pete, and Washington DC.

Marketwire also has distributions into Canada and all over the world. If you want to get your news in front of reporters in London, for example, Marketwire can do that for you. It’s about $500 to distribute a 400-word press release to the U.K., and $3,000 for distribution throughout all European media outlets.

Hispanic media continues to grow to serve the increasing Spanish-speaking population here in the U.S. Marketwire can help translate your news into Spanish and also distribute to Hispanic media outlets for $800. Marketwire can also distribute your news to Latin regions and news media outlets starting at $500.

Aligning your news with trade media is an effective way to put your messages in front of targeted, highly interested audiences. From automotive to health care, software to the environment, Marketwire knows the value of vertical reach. In addition to your selected geographic distribution, their vertical industry lists make it easy for you to reach trade reporters who keep a vigilant eye on company news, product launches, major contracts and other industry developments. You can easily select any number of trade verticals to be included in your distribution for free. Select one or 20, the price is always the same – free.

Want to include a photo or video in your news? Marketwire also has the capability to embed multi-media into your news release. US Photo Distribution is over AP PhotoExpress, the NewsCom Network and/or the AP Publicity Photo Gallery. More than just a link, embedded video provides a new channel by which audiences can reach you. Simply upload your video when you submit your release and Marketwire will have it hosted on YouTube, where up to 100 million viewers have access to your clip. Anyone reading your news will be able to view the full video without clicking away from your release. In addition to YouTube, your video will be accessible on other video portals such as Yahoo! Video.

Search Engine Optimized Press Releases

Marketwire does a great job of getting your press release included in today’s leading search engines. When you distribute an optimized news release through Marketwire, your messages reach thousands of websites and get top placement on sites such as Yahoo! News, Google News and MSNBC. Your keywords and hyperlinks also drive people to your website and create inbound links that boost your search engine visibility even higher. Here are your options:

SEO Basic

Free with all press releases, Marketwire incorporates coding conventions for title tag, meta tags and header tags to help companies maintain consistent messaging and maximize news visibility on search engine results pages. Optimized press releases are also made available to major web and news search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and AOL, and are hosted indefinitely on Marketwire’s website for continued search engine exposure. Marketwire’s website is known as a source for breaking news and is crawled by search engines throughout the day.

SEO Enhanced

A great, low-cost way to further enhance online visibility and gain market intelligence, SEO Enhanced allows you to embed live hyperlinks in your release, select your own SEO keywords, and receive a visually engaging, interactive report that helps you refine the text of each subsequent release and improve the effectiveness of your online communications.

Marketwire also offers Social Media 2.0 Plus – which gives you the power of a traditional press release along with the ability to reach thousands of online influentials in the world of social media. They offer a North American newsline that includes social media tools and search engine optimization while leveraging the power of the Internet. In its simplest form, Marketwire’s Social Media 2.0 Plus is a great way to get your news release in front of the tens of thousands of bloggers that may be a critical audience for your news. Here are some of the features:

–Create two-way feedback via an in-release comment box that feeds directly into your company-moderated newsroom.
–Add an audio summary headline of your news that extends your reach to 70 million Apple iTunes visitors.
–Amplify your messages with video, audio and images.
–Provide 50 bookmarking and tagging options that carry your news to online social networks and communities where people can find and talk about it.
–Get real-time, in-release performance stats so you can see what people are saying about your news – and who posted your release.
–Reach social sites Second Life, Twitter, Pheedo, YouTube and Photobucket.
–Add user-friendly options like RSS feeds, permalinks and keyword cloud navigation to make it easy for people to interact with your news.
–Benefit from links to the largest social media tags tags: Digg, del.icio.us, newsvine.com and Technorati video, audio.
–Up to 50 Bookmarking and tagging options.

Marketwire offers its Social Media 2.0 Plus with the choice of a Basic or Enhanced distribution. The Basic distribution includes all of the aforementioned features while the Enhanced version also includes the following:

–Company-moderated social media newsroom that receives visitor feedback directly from a comment box in your press release.
–500-character audio summary headline that rolls up into a category podcast made freely available to the public via the popular Apple iTunes.

Reporting

When you send a release with Marketwire, they provide a detailed report of where it’s been republished, as well as distribution profiles by publication date and geography and links to your news as it appears on leading websites. I think they can use some improvement here since the links they provide often lead you to the home page of the news site, not the actual news release. So if you click on the link a few days after receiving the report, you may not be able to see the actual release. This can be somewhat problematic if you’re a PR agency trying to show good results to a client, or if you’re a small business wanting to see your news actually as it appears on the site.

News Dashboard monitors:
–25,000 major wires, television and radio stations, daily and weekly newspapers, trade journals and magazines from 107 countries.
–7,000 US, EU and state government sources.
–4,000 policy sources, including think tanks, trade associations and advocacy groups.
–370,000  Pre-screened blogs, including those focused on news and industry sectors.

Pricing

The cost to use Marketwire for getting your news release in front of reporters varies depending on which distribution works best for your needs. There are a lot of different variations, but here are a few of their basic offerings:

Nationwide Distribution: $460 for the first 400 words, $150 for each additional 100 words.
Regional Newslines range from $160 - $330 for the first 400 words ($45 - $90 per additional 100 words).
State Newslines range from $140 - $250 for first 400 words ($40 - $65 per additional 100 words).
Entire World*: $4,600 for first 400 words and $1,150 for each additional 100 words.

*You may never have the need to send your news to the entire world, but I felt it would be nice to provide some pricing perspective here.

Summary

Overall I think Marketwire is a very good newswire distribution service with lots of wonderful and highly effective tools. Although they’re considered to be one of the newer players in this space their services rival any that’s out there. Initially I questioned their ability to report full results back to clients but they’ve since made some great improvements in this area. I’ve been selected to work with them to make even more improvements in this area. Marketwire is also very strong with SEO-enhanced press release technology (and I even think it may be among the best of all the newswire distributors here). Furthermore, Marketwire is extremely competitive on pricing and, for what you get compared to any other newswire distributor, I would argue that Marketwire has the best pricing available.

To learn more about Marketwire and to find a newswire distribution option that fits your needs, click here. Also, download the PR Toolkit to learn some great ways to write compelling press releases for your company. Let us know if you have used Marketwire and if you have any opinions of its services.