Newswire service Marketwire will be a first-time exhibitor at the upcoming Ticket Summit to be held on January 13-15, at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York City.
Approaching its third decade in business, Marketwire provides its clients with more than just press release distribution. Additional services include webcasting, conference calling, and access to media contact lists generated either through its Mediahub database or built to a client’s specifications. Media monitoring services allow the client to follow where press releases post and to check on what’s being said about the company out on the web.
Acquired by Canadian corporate news distributor CCN Matthews in 2006 (with the new company retaining the Marketwire name), Marketwire has access to both U.S. and Canadian news distribution channels as well as the Canadian Press Photo Network, and currently possesses the largest media news footprint in North America.
In a recent conversation with TicketNews, account executive Richard Sharp discussed the qualities unique to a service like Marketwire. In addition to distributing multimedia-enhanced releases to outlets like the Associated Press, the company can saturate the market on two more levels.
“We also send to trade and industry media, to editors and journalists across the country of any industry you might think. Third is the online piece,” Sharp said. “We send our news to thousands and thousands of Web sites. Lots of the major news sites will take our press releases and repost them on their sites.”
Marketwire offers search engine optimization (SEO) for press releases, increasing a client’s web presence by improving its release’s ranking in search results. As Sharp explains, “[this is a] search engine optimization boost that you can only get through a wire. The reason we’re able to do that is we’re reposting a company’s content through a number of high reputation media outlets…and a link on one of those major sites is historically seen by search engines [and will] automatically have a lot of traffic.”
And what plans does Marketwire have for its first Ticket Summit? “We’d like to meet as many business owners and representatives as we can at the Summit, hopefully in person, and then have the opportunity to follow up with them,” Sharp said. “I understand there are a lot of ticket companies that are up and coming and have an online element. These are companies that we can help, [we can] market their brand, increase sales.”
As for current challenges the economic climate presents to his and other businesses in the industry, Sharp views the resultant service consolidation in Marketwire and elsewhere as good for business. This consolidation has allowed Marketwire to provide more comprehensive service packages for their clients.
“There have been some budget cuts this year, but we’re also a little bit more competitively priced than some of our competitors, and because we can offer a wider range of services than some of our competitors, it’s customizable,” he said. “We build customized tools, depending on whatever the communication needs of a company are and what type of media they’d like to reach.”