Sell the Product and the Person at the Same Time

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The press release is basically a sales tool, selling a product, a person or an event or any combination thereof. Often, you need to sell two or even three things at once. For example, if you’re selling a product, you may also need to sell the company, its credibility, reliability, innovative ideas, etc.

If you’re selling an event, you may also want to play up the persons or products that the event features. When you’re selling a product, or creation of an individual, such as artwork or literature, you need to sell the credibility of the creator.

This can present a tricky problem, as the press release must be short and succinct. It’s difficult enough to sell one main product in so short a space, no less two. The connection between the two must worked into the body of the press release in a natural marriage of words. Thus each noun, each verb, each adjective, must be well thought out so that the finished product is like a fine verbal tapestry, words woven with care.

This continuing feature series will give illustrative examples from actual press releases that we’ve done for our clients. By showing examples of these, you will be able to see the dynamics that have shaped successful press releases. So let’s see how to make the connection between the person and the product.

For example, recently Press-release-writing.com was commissioned to write a press release about an author and his book. To see how our staff of professional writers worked the release to sell the two together, let’s take a look at how we made the connection to play up both the author and his book.

Mike Current, a former NFL football player, has recently written a book about -you guessed it – football. So how do we begin to grab the reader’s interest about another (ho-hum) football book? We first sell the author. We talk about his credentials, his greatness, and his unique talents on the field. We make people want to read about this famed and fascinating football player.

We start the ball rolling with the opening paragraph, “Mike Current played hard and tough for 13 years as a National Football League star. He butted heads in Pro Bowls for the likes of the Denver Broncos, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the Miami Dolphins.”

Okay, you might say, so how does that connect to being an author? Our next sentence makes the connection with a natural-seeming easy transition between football and writing. “Instead of a helmet and body blocks, he now wields a pen, a mighty weapon in the war of words.”

We’ve now connected his weapons on the football field to his weapon with words, the pen! Sound easy? It’s not. But if you think of the connection as a one-sentence transition between two unlike things, then it gets easier. War on the football field can be connected to the war of words, a familiar phrase. Now we’ve made the connection.

Next we explain the connection. “The former football great has taken his talents to quite a different playing field, the literary marketplace. Writing books seems a natural progression for Current following his glory days of brain and brawn.”

We talk a bit about the book in the body of the release, selling the product just enough to entice the reader into buying the book but not so much that he won’t feel the need to read it. We then close with a connection between the writer and his product. “‘Remembering Life in the Trenches’ tells his own story as a boy growing up in Ohio…Few writers are more qualified than Mike Current to take you inside the real people and the real game of football.”

You, too, can make the connection and sell the product and the person at the same time in your press release.