Comparing PR Newswire, Businesswire and PRWeb: 2021 Buying guide

Generating and publishing informative and relative information about your company and having it disseminated across the right platforms is a crucial aspect of a successful Public Relations and Marketing strategy. Companies such as Newswire, Businesswire, SiteTrail and PRWeb all offer effective channels through which to publish your company’s news. 

Although all of the aforementioned companies are reputable and reliable, there are some key differentiators that distinguish these companies from each other. We’ll unpack the various characteristics and what is offered by each company so that you can make the right choice for your business.  

Having a great press distribution service can make a material impact on the performance of your content and eventually your company’s bottom line. The right pieces, written the right way and placed in the right kind of publication can grow your business’s reputation, visibility and even profits and so it should be an area of the business that is taken very seriously. 

All of the companies listed above are major digital distribution platforms for online press releases and they effectively publish pieces which are both locally and intentionally aimed at reaching the most number of people for (hopefully) the smallest cost. Often companies will hope for what’s called earned media, where journalists will form good relationships with the company or agency and use the company’s published content to either generate their own stories from or republish the information all together. 

What services do these companies provide?

When comparing PR Newswire vs Businesswire and the rest, the key areas that need to be considered are your; target audience and preferred media outlets, how much you are willing to spend in this area, the distribution options available through the company and finally, where you would like your communications to be distributed geographically. Simply put, you’ll need to look at price, features and reach.

PR Newswire

PR Newswire has a demonstrated history of professionalism and has managed to maintain an excellent reputation throughout the years. They are an international and well established media company, offering a variety of additional features such as image releases. They offer good expertise, customer support and a range of additional features, but with this wide network and excellent product offering, comes a slightly heftier price tag. PRNewswire is certainly the more expensive company on the list and despite their excellent service, you will need to watch out for the supplementary fees that accompany the additional features offered. PR Newswire is not suited for small businesses with limited budgets, but if you have the extra cash to spend, they’re a reliable and effective company and you really do get what you paid for with them. 

Business Wire

Business Wire offers the most inbound links, and has a wide media reach as well as offering free graphics and logos, social media monitoring and translation into over 50 languages as well as good local and international geographic targeting. They don’t provide full writing services, but rather editorial ones, and Business Wire is Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) compliant and has good relationships with publications like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today and so Business Wire would be best suited to financial institutions and advocacy groups. 

PRWeb

PRWeb is a company that mostly aims at publishing press releases for smaller businesses who wish to increase their brand and product awareness and they offer a tailored approach to where your press releases are sent to and has a tiered approach for their price offerings and therefore offer small businesses a chance to leverage as much media coverage via PRWeb as they can afford. They also offer a unique range of social media networks off which clients can leverage and don’t impose a restricted word count. 

Sitetrail 

Sitetrail is able to offer all of the core service offerings of the other companies, and are reasonably priced and well connected, but are able to set themselves apart in two areas; by offering authentic editorial news access, which is when authorship can be declared over a piece and there is therefore an authority and respect automatically given to articles. Without this authorship, the press release would be considered a “cold” one and is not considered to be as reputable as a result of the growing amount of content stored online today. Having factually accurate news that an individual is able to assign their authorship to will provide greater authority to your content and will benefit you in the long run. You will be more visible and your business will benefit in the long run. Another differentiating factor that Sitetrail offers is expert writing by in-house journalists and copywriters. By allowing Sitetrail to write your content for you, you can optimize your content placement geographically as well as digitally through writing specifically for SEO. 

Christophe Rude
Christophe Rude
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