Top strategies for timing your tech news

Whether a tech PR team has months to prepare for the launch of a product, or weeks to promote the rollout of a new platform, selecting the day on which to announce the news is not something to be chosen lightly. Determining when to reach out to a tech journalist with a press release requires a lot of forethought, along with a bit of research. After all, you only get one shot to announce your news, and you don’t want your news to be lost among a flood of other announcements. Once the information has been released in any way on the internet, it’s out. And journalists don’t want old news.

There’s a lot of competition among startups to get the attention of tech journalists, whose inboxes are constantly overflowing with emails and whose social media accounts inevitably fill up with DMs from companies in search of coverage. To make sure your news gets noticed, there are some timing details that should be taken into consideration when you’re putting together the PR strategy for your announcement.

Be mindful of time zones

Our world has become increasingly decentralized, thanks to the rapid increase in remote work. This is true for reporters, as well. The location of your company and the location of the reporters you want to target is important, as these can be several hours apart. Always be aware of where the journalist you’re pitching is based, since oftentimes, they’re not always located in the same city as the publication they write for. You want to make sure you’re pitching journalists when they are at their desk, because they tend to get hundreds of emails per day. That’s why tech companies shouldn’t be sending emails to journalists while they are asleep. If you’re caught up in the slew that accumulates overnight, your message may end up in the bin. Most email software offers scheduling features, which makes timing pitches easier.

Choose the day of the week carefully

A recent survey of PR professionals found that the best day to pitch is Monday, with Tuesday coming in as a close second. Startups should keep in mind that contacts could be planning their publishing schedules for the week on Monday, but they also need to remember that these contacts are coming back to a full inbox after the weekend and emails may get lost in the shuffle. If you have a bigger announcement or embargo, it can be strategically better to target those to go up earlier in the week, so that the stories stay in the news cycle longer. For other types of announcements, and with everyone targeting Mondays and Tuesdays, it could be better for your tech company to choose another day of the week. That said, this is a constantly changing metric. Reporters are busy, so it’s important to be flexible when it comes to your outreach.

Pay close attention to holidays

In determining the right timing for a tech announcement, startups also need to be aware of major bank holidays and religious holidays around the world. Lots of journalists will be out of the office these days. You should even pay attention to summer holidays -- August is typically a tough month to try to contact journalists, so you should avoid launching anything important during that month. Additionally, announcing anything in the last two weeks of the year -- around Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Eve -- will likely be fruitless, as most journalists will be out of the office for much of that time. 

Thanksgiving may traditionally be considered a U.S. holiday, but Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become global events. Some major European cities even celebrate “Black Week” with consumer specials and incentives over the span of several days. When journalists are at their desks the entire week before Thanksgiving, just about everything they write will be about e-commerce and shopping deals.

Watch for major tech announcements

Companies like Apple and Google have turned product announcements into major events, giving press advance notice and generating buzz around their special days -- such as Google Cloud Next, Google I/O, and Apple Unleashed. Even promotional events like Amazon Prime Day tend to suck every tech journalist into the vortex of their PR spin cycle. Trying to get a tech journalist to cover anything outside of a tech giant’s announcement is futile. Give at least a couple of days buffer around these events when scheduling your own news release. 

The same applies to major industry gatherings, as well, such as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Web Summit, Mobile World Congress, and so on. If you follow tech journalists on Twitter, you’ll likely see them tweeting in the lead up to these events and during them. If a reporter is at one of these major shows, they will not be covering anything else before, during, or immediately afterward.

With all of these considerations to keep in mind, it may seem like there are only a handful of days left on which a tech startup can make an announcement, but this is not the case. At the end of the day, the goal is to maximize coverage for your specific target audience -- be it about a new NFT project, a metaverse platform, DeFi news, or anything in between. Timing any release requires as much forethought and planning as choosing which outlet and reporter to pitch. Therefore, it is definitely worth staying flexible in your scheduling and taking the time to ensure your news has the best opportunity to attract the attention of journalists.