Learn from Other People’s Mistakes – The Boilerplate

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About this lesson

If written appropriately, the boilerplate has potential for both branding and marketing your company.

Quick reference

Learn from Other People’s Mistakes – The Boilerplate

If written appropriately, the boilerplate has both a branding and a marketing potential.

When to use

When writing the boilerplate of a press release.

Instructions

When reading the boilerplate, people must be able to answer the 3 questions below satisfactorily:

  1. What does this company do?
  2. Do they offer a service or sell a product?
  3. Who would be interested in their services or products?

Here are a few suggestions to write a good boilerplate:

  • The language should not assume industry specific knowledge (jargon) otherwise the uninformed reader might not be able to understand what a company does.
  • The description of what the company does should be easy to understand.
  • Open the boilerplate with the name of your company followed by a clear and brief description of what your company does (e.g. “GoSkills is an online learning platform…”).
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  • 00:03 Great.
  • 00:05 Let's see if we can keep learning from other people's mistakes.
  • 00:08 And this time, we're going to have a look at the boilerplate.
  • 00:11 The boilerplate has both a branding and
  • 00:13 a marketing potential if we can write it appropriately.
  • 00:17 Let's consider this example.
  • 00:22 Here we've got three questions that will tell us whether a boilerplate is well
  • 00:26 written.
  • 00:27 Number one, what does the company do?
  • 00:29 Number two, do they offer a service or sell a product?
  • 00:33 And number three, who would be interested in their service or product.
  • 00:37 So take a moment now and read the example of the boilerplate below and try and
  • 00:42 answer these three questions.
  • 00:44 You can pause the lesson and when you're ready
  • 00:46 you can continue with the lesson to find out what the answers were.
  • 00:53 Great, so the explanation of the Boilerplate now,
  • 00:56 the boilerplate here assumes that there's industry-specific knowledge
  • 01:02 that the uninformed reader might not understand what ONVIA does.
  • 01:06 So bear in mind that not all journalists and
  • 01:09 editors who come across this press release will have industry specific knowledge.
  • 01:14 So therefore you should attempt to write as clearly as possible and
  • 01:18 to provide an easy to understand description without any jargon.
  • 01:23 Now you might consider preparing two different boilerplates.
  • 01:27 One for knowledgeable readers which you will use when submitting your release to
  • 01:32 field specific publishers.
  • 01:34 And then another one containing a layman explanation for
  • 01:38 people who come across our press release on the website.
  • 01:41 The boilerplate should also be concise.
  • 01:44 It's good to keep it between 50 and 100 words long.
  • 01:48 If the boilerplate is longer than that it would be disproportionate
  • 01:53 compared to the average length of the press release itself.
  • 01:57 So what does ONVIA do?
  • 01:59 After checking on their website I found out that ONVIA is a company that
  • 02:03 provides intelligence for winning more government business.
  • 02:07 Now this sentence clearly describes what ONVIA does and
  • 02:11 who might be interested in their services.
  • 02:14 For example, building societies, engineers, architect, security and
  • 02:17 so forth.
  • 02:18 This message should be clearly conveyed,
  • 02:21 somewhere at the beginning of the boilerplate.
  • 02:24 For example you could say that ONVIA is a company that offers
  • 02:29 insights about government bids.
  • 02:31 Other companies might be easier to describe.
  • 02:33 For example GoSkills is an online learning platform.
  • 02:38 So make sure that you can provide an easy to understand explanation of your company.

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