Grade your press release (for free!)

HubSpot's Press Release Grader is a free application that evaluates your press release and provides a "marketing effectiveness score". The score is based on the language and content of the release, plus advanced factors from Internet marketing experts at HubSpot such as links and search engine optimization characteristics.

Wow. This is such an awesome tool. You’re hearing about it here first, but my guess is that this will become a popular little application in PR circles.

Press Release Grader is totally free. All you do is copy and paste press release text into the tool, add a few other things like your company name and URL and it takes just seconds to produce a score. But you also get detailed suggestions for improvement.

Press Release Grader even checks for the gobbledygook words I identified in my Gobbledygook Manifesto. How cool is that?

You can watch a short video on the site to learn how it works.

I asked two people from HubSpot - Dharmesh Shah, Chief Software Architect & Founder and Mike Volpe, VP Marketing - why they created it.

"It's unclear whether press releases are effective these days. But, if you're going to be creating press releases and putting them on the web, you might as well get the most value you can out of them," says Dharmesh Shah. "Press Release Grader checks to see if you're (generally) doing the right things. It was created with the same general motivation as our popular WebsiteGrader.com tool. Help people get a quick sense for where they're deviating from best practices. Press Release Grader will not make your press releases more interesting -- but it will hopefully give you some quick tips for getting more value out of them."

"The best way to grow your business today is through inbound marketing – creating remarkable content targeted at your buyer personas, and enabling them to share that content with others," says Mike Volpe. "We have no idea if Press Release Grader will be a big hit, but under the new rules of inbound marketing, you act more like a publisher - create lots of content knowing that some smaller portion of it will be a big success."

If you write press releases, you need to check this out.

(Also note what a great viral marketing concept Press Release Grader is for HubSpot).

Disclosure: I am on HubSpot's board of advisors and I am speaking at the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Conference in September.

Comments

[Mike Volpe]

Thanks for the write up!

We're hoping a lot of your readers will leave comments here or use the feedback from on Press Release Grader to tell us the good, bad and ugly.

It is a NEW tool, and we really want some feedback from the marketing community so we can make it better.

[Kevin Grossman]

Very interesting, David. I just tested for the first time and although it missed the fact an About Us was included (said it was missing when it wasn't), it did rate with "0" Gobbledygook words. Yeah! Some of the other comments were valuable too. I'll keep playing and will probably blog about it.

[Mike Volpe]

@Kevin - We'd love to fix that bug about the "about us" section. If possible, can you either email me the press release or the permalink URL for the report you ran?

mvolpe [at] hubspot [dot] com

[David Meerman Scott]

Kevin. Congrats on the zero for gobbledygook!

[Allen Mireles]

Hi David,
Read about the Press release Grader and just gave it a try. Really interesting and helpful.

Question: if you are writing a press release for your buyer, does it matter if it runs long? Especially if it contains information the buyer may be looking for?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.

Warm regards,

Allen

PS Enjoy the reunion!

[Christopher]

This looks promising David. I love the gobbledygook checker. We too got a "0"...yeah

I think the word cloud is also a nice touch. I was surprised at a few words that were more prominent than I thought.

And this video is sure to go viral ,esp. with the helpful tips surrounding Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V

[David Meerman Scott]

Allen, I wouldn't go too long. 500 or 600 words max (but even that might be too long. My preference is to quickly get people from the release to a landing page on your site and that's easier if the release is short. David

[Joe Pulizzi]

Very cool David. Hubspot has it nailed with free tools such as this and websitegrader.com. Giving away content tools such as this for free is perhaps the best way to grow a business in today's marketing landscape. jp

[MarketingTwins-Randy]

Too cool! I took one of my past press releases . . . I took some advice that was generated from the first review and I went up 12 points!

I also scored "0" on the gobbledygook which surprised me.

I also ran into the ABOUT US problem - because on the press release (I guess I didn't use "proper" format) I didn't actually say: "ABOUT 1429 CREATIVE" - On my original, after the first ### I just started the section "1429 Creative is a . . ." - so I guess the reviewer is look for the magic words "ABOUT _____" - that's easy to change. And I had not put in my phone number before, just email address and web addresses. Small things make a difference!

Thanks for the tool HUBSPOT and thanks David for the link!

[Andrew Bruce Smith]

Neat. Perhaps people may start putting their Press Release Grader scores on their press releases ie this press release rated 87. And maybe journalists will only view releases that have Press Release grader scores on them - and only read ones that are rated 85 or above......

[Brad Shorr]

Wow, this is an awesome tool. Thanks for pointing it out, David.

[Bruce Colthart]

Such a gift! A terrific and useful tool! I played with it last night, using a press release (my very first!) draft that I've been sitting on for weeks. I even went so far as to posting it with PRWeb.

The fairly well-written release itself was inspired by my recent reading of David's *New Rules...* book.

I'm happy to say that my first go around with the tool gave me a 68 score. I then added "About" and proper contact info and it jumped to 86! Readability was "2 years undergrad" which pleased me. Again, I feel I have David to thank for preparing me to draft a decent release.

Gobbledygook filter caught the word "unique" I absentmindedly used in my self-description (d'oh!).

I am still a little confused though, by the comments I received about links; I'll have to watch the video again or search for documentation. And I'll actually provide feedback to the developers too.

Again, what a great press release "coach" this is!

Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[Shannon Golladay]

I just tried the new press release grader. I love it! It is so helpful. HubSpot is doing great work!

[Todd Ebert]

Cool tool. Tried it on some of our releases and liked it so much I blogged about it too. A fringe benefit was the link to your manifesto which introduced me to your blog. I've sent the manifesto to my PR team and copywriter since we are guilty of using too much jargon. Great stuff. Thanks.

[KathyGS]

Thanks David. I just tried it. Very cool tool! I was relieved we got a zero on the gobbledygook scale but we have things the the tool caught.