PR, journalist, marketing, all of it comes down to stories. Working to put more story into your pitches and press releases will produce better results, even for news that might seem straightforward on the surface.
Voxus client Coding Dojo recently announced plans to add three locations in new cities. They had three separate goals for the announcement. first, it wanted to drive students to its new locations to sign up for classes. Second, it wanted public recognition of its growth and to be included in conversations about the coding bootcamp boom. Third, it wanted coverage that would impress venture capitalists.
So one release needed to appeal to three separate audiences. And at first look, it was just news about new locations – not the most interesting thing in the world. But Coding Dojo wasn’t just opening new locations – why these locations, why now, and what was it trying to achieve by growing? There was a larger story around the news and Voxus had a chance to tell it.
Voxus dug into some of the statistics around coding bootcamps, college computer science programs and job predictions for 2016 to craft a story that was about more than just a few new campus locations. The final release’s headline was “Coding Dojo Grows 300% as it Strives to Meet $500B Market for Skilled Developers,” and positioned Coding Dojo as part of a larger story about the shortage of skilled developers in the United States. Voxus presented Coding Dojo’s expansion as a way to fill this need and included an attention-grabber that Coding Dojo planned to train 100,000 developers in the next five years.
Of course, the release also explained the new locations opening in Dallas, Chicago and Washington DC and pointed out some nice statistics for investors, like the fact that Coding Dojo had a 300 percent increase in revenue over the last year and a 700 percent increase in applicants. Remember, statistics are your friend!
Outreach produced excellent results. Coding Dojo’s expansion was covered in each of its new markets and at home with stories in publications like DCInno, Built In Chicago, Texas Tech Pulse, and The Seattle Times plus hits in larger software and investor pubs like SD Times and Xconomy. Many of them picked up on bits of the larger story, like DCInno calling Coding Dojo a “massive coding school,” and Xconomy discussing the coding bootcamp explosion with Coding Dojo front and center.