Before You Write the Press Release, Find the Story
If you work in health and wellness and want media coverage, there is a temptation to start with a press release.
You have a new service, piece of research, product, book, clinic or campaign, so you sit down and start writing. Company introduction. Background. Quotes. Credentials. Maybe a statistic or two.
Three pages later, you have a perfectly respectable press release, but do you have a story?
After more than 30 years working in PR, one of the first questions I ask is not “what do you want the press release to say?” It is “why would anyone outside your organisation care?”
That matters enormously in health and wellness PR, where journalists are offered new products, experts, treatments, surveys, trends and claims every day.
A press release is simply the vehicle but the story is what makes someone want to get in.
What makes a health and wellness story newsworthy?
The starting point is rarely the announcement itself, it is the reason the announcement matters.
You may be proud of a new service or product, but pride does not automatically equal news but at the end of the day, a journalist is looking for something that matters to their readers, listeners or viewers.
That could be new research that challenges what we thought we knew about menopause, sleep, ADHD or chronic pain. It could be a patient story that makes a complicated issue feel real. It might be an expert who can explain a trend people are already talking about, or new guidance that changes what parents, patients or professionals need to know.
Sometimes the story is not the thing you are launching at all but rather the problem behind it.
Start with the person reading the story
If you have developed a new supplement, the story probably is not that the supplement exists, it may be why more people are struggling with a particular issue, what the evidence tells us or what consumers need to understand before spending their money.
If you are a psychologist launching a service, “psychologist launches new service” is unlikely to make a journalist stop. The story might be the relationship problem you keep seeing, the behaviour parents misunderstand or the hidden processing difficulty that explains why someone who appears capable is struggling.
This is where media coverage becomes useful, because the story is no longer about promoting your business, it is about helping an audience understand something that affects them.
Health PR needs evidence as well as headlines
A dramatic headline might get attention, but if the claim cannot withstand scrutiny, that attention can damage trust rather than build it.
Health journalists want to know where evidence comes from, what can genuinely be claimed and where the limitations are. They are alert to questionable statistics, exaggerated promises and experts whose credentials do not support what they are saying.
You can create a strong health story without frightening people, oversimplifying a condition or promising something a product or treatment cannot deliver. In fact, restraint can make a story stronger because journalists know they can trust what they are being given.
You do not always need a press release
There we go, I said it because not every media opportunity needs a formal release and not every release is a media opportunity.
Sometimes a short, targeted pitch is more effective and other times the opportunity is expert comment on something already in the news. Sometimes it is a case study, a piece of research, a founder story or an expert who can make a complicated subject understandable.
And sometimes the strongest PR advice I can give is: this is not a story yet and while it doesn’t mean that’s all the case, it does mean we need to do more work before we expect a journalist to care.
Find the story first
Before writing your next press release, ask: why now? Who does this matter to? What is genuinely new? What can we prove? What is the human impact? What is the headline hiding inside all the background information?
Once you can answer those questions, writing the press release becomes much easier.
More importantly, you are no longer sending journalists pages of information and hoping they find the interesting bit for you.
At Natalie Trice Publicity, I work with health and wellness experts, founders, organisations and brands to find the stories within their expertise, evidence and experience, then take those stories to the media that matter.
If you know you have something worth saying but are not yet sure what the story is, that is often the best place for us to start.
Natalie
