10 insider secrets to getting your aerospace news published

This week we are pleased to bring you a guest blog written by Jeremy Parkin, publisher of HeliHub.com. Jeremy has generously provided us with highly specific, actionable advice about what journalists do and not want from aerospace marketers in their PR outreach efforts, and his guidance is spot on. Read and follow these 10 tips and your media profile will improve — guaranteed.

Editors are busy people, but you want your news item to get read and used. The more your stories, images and videos can be seen, the more your organisational profile will rise and be recognized compared to your competitors. Journalists could be out of their office, so these tips will help you reach people who may work for extended periods of time off a smart phone or tablet.

A key part of the process is to present the information in the most accessible way, and from my experience launching and building the world’s first helicopter industry news website, I hope these tips will guide you to better success in promoting your news. I also have a significant background in the IT industry, particularly social media, and I hope these insights assist in that arena, too.

1. Document formats The text of your press release needs to be easily accessible by an editor.  You want them to cut and paste quotes from your key people. We are much less likely to use a PDF press release and will prioritize a Word document. Better still, put the text of your press release in the body of an email like Airbus Helicopters does. Avoid sending press releases as attachments, and don’t send multiple languages of the same text in the same email – our automatic translation software gets very confused when Turbomeca (now Safran) send English and French in the body of the same email message. These rules apply irrespective of whether you send emails direct, or use an email marketing system such as MailChimp.
2. Multiple stories If you are sending two stories, send them as separate emails, ideally a week or more apart, and ensure they are distinctly different. A few years back, Bell Helicopter took to issuing a new press release for every single country that approved a higher MTOW for the 429 model, in some cases countries where they needed lots of optimism to even sell an aircraft.  That soon became a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” situation and we exercised the [Del] button.
3. How many images? Every press release needs an image – the saying, “A picture is worth 1,000 words” still holds true. Some say multiple images mean bigger (and slower) emails which could be quarantined by an email server, so consider supplying images via a link to a public-access folder on Dropbox.com like MD Helicopters do.
4. Image File Format  As HeliHub.com is entirely online, we prefer JPG. Media outlets that encumber themselves with hard copy issues may prefer PNG but will still be able to handle JPG.  Images embedded into a PDF are ignored as too difficult to extract, even if it is technically possible.
5. Image Size  To present your image at a quality level which can be used, the minimum dimension should be 2000 pixels. With many smartphones capable of taking images or 3-4000 pixels, there is no excuse. Over half the images we receive are 1000 pixels across or less, and we ignore them.  Be careful using a wire service. as some of them restrict image size and force the reader to sign up to something to get full-size images — the chances they will sign up are low.
6. Presenting the subject in an Image  Flying means wings or rotor blades, and these make for landscape images (wider than height). But the editor may have a portrait (taller than width) gap to fill.  Leave “editing space” around the subject. At HeliHub.com we post two news-related images to Instagram every weekday, and that usually means square images. We also change our Twitter header image weekly – and that needs an image three times wider than its height.
7. Lighting and weather  We ignore dreary photos unless the subject is really important. Improve your images using free software such as GIMP. Very recently the image of the third AW609 tiltrotor prototype needed editing time as it looked like it was taken in a rainstorm.
8. Corporate image bank  Sometimes an editor will prefer to use your corporate logo, and you should have these available on (or from) your website, along with head shots of key people in your organisation. Consider using a free service like OpenBrand.com to host these, like Helipaddy does.
9. Video format/location Press release video is still rare, but the click-through to a video online is remarkably high, so the cost may be worth the effort, even if the video is less than 60 seconds long.  Minimum format is HD these days, and some in 4K. Only a few aviation organisations are using 360-degree videos, but this will be the way ahead for aircraft interiors or to show details of an equipment installation. Do not save videos on your own website, but instead on YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia so they can then be embedded easily into a story online. The vicarious benefit is the extra views from the search traffic of those sites – remember, YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine.
10. Compressed file formats Do not submit ZIP files; they are too much hassle. People who ZIP a JPG file are demonstrating that they don’t know that JPG format is already a compressed file format.

Interested in more information about working with the aerospace and defense news media? BDN has compiled a complete PR toolkit full of tools and tips to improve your skills and your results. Tons of other free aerospace marketing resources are also available for download. View the entire library here.