Business Wire vs. Coveragebook

For a funding announcement or a big product launch, Business Wire is the service to use. For less important announcements, and for clients with limited budget, it might be worth considering other options. PR Newswire and Marketwired are both decent services that provide comparable results, but the high touch quality of Business Wire is pretty unique.

Incentivized

Coveragebook is great for any organization that needs to regularly track client media coverage or even just trending news stories to send to clients in a professional looking report. It is ideal for small, medium, and large PR and marketing firms. For firms or companies more focused on internal communications, this would not be a regularly used tool. For those focused on external communications, it's a must-have tool that helps save time and makes it easier for people at every level of an organization to create branded coverage reports that are easy to download or link to and share with clients

Incentivized

• The site has a very specific search function that makes it easy for users to sort through the many press releases put on the site each day, making the process easier/more efficient.
• The "Media & Journalist Tools" tab is helpful for myself and my colleagues, specifically, the RSS feeds to make sure we're staying on top of business happenings.
• I don't use the "How-To" section, though I know folks who have to learn more about writing press releases, and I've heard it's very helpful.

Incentivized

• Screenshots of each article for the entire length of the site. It allows viewers (internally) to get an idea of what the webpage looks like.
• Can include offline media.
• Creates a slideshow presentation quickly and easily.
• Each screen grab has a URL back to the webpage to read the article.

Incentivized

• Expensive - distributions cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, with a higher cost for longer releases and additional fees for multimedia content like photos or videos.
• Limited number of media outlets specifically in Florida.

Incentivized

• More ability to customize cover (title page) of report
• Provide total (collective) backlinks for all pieces of coverage as a metric (currently you can only do one at a time)
• Allow custom metrics for the offline coverage (currently, you can only add add'l info in the comments section so it looks like a quote vs. numerous metrics on the slides for online clippings)

Incentivized

It's the best service we have used. We have tried a competitor and everyone prefers Business Wire.

Incentivized

I gave it this rating because the Business Wire website is very user-friendly. Being able to navigate the platform on my own without technical assistance made it possible for me to quickly and easily submit news release distributions, which can be critical at times, such as during hurricane season when we need to get information out to the news media and our customers quickly.

Incentivized

The team members are very quick to respond and do their absolute best to help resolve issues quickly. I also like that I can have one of them proofread my press releases before they are distributed. It always helps to have another set of eyes on the content. There have been a few times that they've caught an error that nobody else did so it's worth the extra couple minutes that it takes!

Incentivized

Coveragebook is incredibly easy to use--so easy to use that we've never run into any issues that required additional support from the Coveragebook team. In the event that there is an issue, they have a detailed help section on the website with answers to FAQs to assist professionals at every step of the process.

Incentivized

Business Wire is very easy to implement. This isn't a requirement, but it's recommended that you begin to set up saved distributions for different clients so that you don't have to start over from scratch. Rather than doing all this work on the front end, you can just do it as you send out your first piece of news for each client.

Incentivized

Cision PRWeb was not good at targeting the major business community and was not fitted well into our demands. The price of Cision was high and very unjustifiable as there were not enough features in it and was not efficient in its working as well. But on the contrary, if I look at Business Wire then I think it is just a perfect match for our business demands.

I didn't look too closely at the other services above because it was quickly apparent that they do different things than Coveragebook. We were looking for a reporting and valuation tool but didn't need help creating or distributing releases or finding client mentions. (Our PR programs are very targeted towards relevant trade press; we aren't looking for thousands of mentions in any/all media outlets.) Coveragebook accomplishes all the tasks we required at a reasonable price.

Incentivized

• Staying updated on business news in my team's industry
• Helps my team generate story ideas for our publication, allowing us to do our jobs more efficiently

Incentivized

• The ROI is mostly on time. I used to spend hours upon hours designing and inputting information for reports. Now, Coveragebook does all of the hard work for me.

Incentivized