Crafting the Perfect Company Boilerplate Description for Your Press Releases
Small business marketers often struggle to find the perfect words to describe their organization, mostly because they lack a proven recipe for putting one together. Even the best product strategists tend to focus on developing a ‘catchy tagline’ or ‘pithy elevator pitch’ as their approach. However, this strategy often times falls short because you wind up with a meaningless phrase, instead of a clear, concise and compelling description of the specific value your company provides, and to whom.
Using press releases to market your business is a smart marketing basic for any small business, and the key to writing effective press releases is to start with a solid message. Your company boilerplate plays a key role in your message, and should always be the last paragraph of any press release you create. By including your company boilerplate in every press release you issue, you ensure that you are communicating a clear, concise and compelling message about your organization.
To create a company boilerplate description, small business marketers need to ask themselves a few basic questions to identify who they are, what type of company are do they have, and what type of solutions to they provide and to whom. The answers to these questions provide the inputs into creating a concise, compelling story about your firm.
TEMPLATE: Drafting up a company boilerpatle description does not have to be a daunting activity. Below is a quick and easy template to follow. Take a few minutes to think about how you would complete each field in brackets […], as it would apply to your small business:
[Company name] is [company type] specializing in [keyword phrase] for [target industry or customer]. Rather than using [alternative product/service], [Company name] enables [specific role, or end user] to [specific user benefit] without [a negative repercussion, such as adding staff, incurring extra costs]. Since [year founded], [Company name] has helped more than [total number of customers] successfully [key business value]. To learn more, please visit: [company website].
INGREDIENTS: A good boilerplate description features these key ingredients:
[company type] – what type of company are you, a technology provider, a law firm, a non-profit, etc.
[keyword phrase] – how might people search on Google for your type of company? What common terms would they use ( i.e. accounting software, family legal services, food banks).
[target industry or customer group] – who will benefit from your service, for example, law firms, or the construction companies.
[specific role/end user] – specific staff titles or roles within an organization that will use your product or service, such as an attorney or paralegal, a operations manager.
[negative repercussion] – a common objection or misperception a prospective customer might have about your offering, such as it is too hard to learn something new, or too costly.
[key business value] – what problem do you solve, or value do you provide? Think of a short phrase that starts with a verb, such as ‘reduce costs in managing legal documents’, etc.
EXAMPLE: Imagine a fictitious technology solutions company, named Dander-Mufflin that provides software to the legal industry. Their products help law firms to manage and track the thousands of legal documents for each of its clients. They have been around since 2000, and have a proven track record of clients. Using the template above, their company boilerplate would look something like this:
Dander-Mufflin is a technology solutions provider specializing in document management software for law firms and corporate legal departments. Rather than using manual, paper-based filing systems, Dander-Mufflin enables attorneys and paralegals to quickly categorize and locate legal documents without increasing client billing costs or adding administrative headcount. Since 2000, Dander-Mufflin has helped more than 50 legal firms successfully reduce document storage costs by 50%. To learn more, please visit: http://www.dander-mufflin.com.
Try following this template to create your own boilerplate, and feel free to comment on how it worked for you in our comments section. Remember, having a clear and concise description trumps a fancy slogan anytime! It’s more important that your reader take away from your press release a clear understanding of who you are and what you do.
MORE TIPS & TEMPLATES:
For more templates and tips on creating professional press releases, check out the Press Release Primer – a small business guide to writing professional press releases. This 23-page guide details how to build your own release, describes how to create your company boilerplate description, and provides 3 different press release templates for announcing: 1) a new product or service; 2) a new customer win; and 3) an award or special recognition.
Smart Marketing Basics 