It’s an infamous TV ad: A sweet, gray-haired woman holds up a bottle of Frank’s RedHot and says, “I put that sh*t on everything!” It’s Frank’s RedHot’s way of saying its hot sauce has uses beyond Buffalo wings and jambalaya.

That’s pretty much the same principal we apply to PR content.

Press releases are typically the first means most companies use for news dissemination. A new product or technology advancement; a new CEO; financial results; or an important new customer. There is tremendous value in a great press release. The mistake some companies make, however, is using the press release as both their starting and stopping point.

If you’ve got a good story, why tell it just once? If you’ve got a new customer, link that press release to a case study about how that customer is going to use the product or generate a blog discussing why the customer chose your product. Tweet about it. Share the blog intro with a link to your full blog on LinkedIn. Perhaps generate a video blog with an executive or subject-matter expert along with an executive from the customer’s company. Or have your customer pen a guest blog for your site or vice versa. It’s all about telling the story different ways to capture the interest of a broader audience.

A product announcement can work in much the same way. Tell the basic facts in a press release. Provide more details in a link in the press release that takes the reader to a product spec sheet. Have the CEO pen a blog that describes why the industry is ripe for this technology now and which industries will benefit most. Create a case study on a beta user. Use social channels to tell the story with links to anything that is relevant. Create an e-book that looks at product highlights with graphics that tell part of the story (such as testing statistics, speeds … whatever makes the news unique and helps separate this product or service from competitive products or services). If the news is truly groundbreaking for the industry, generate a white paper that provides even more details for prospective customers or write a technical article explaining the breakthrough for a leading publication in your key market.

It’s not only press releases, either. If someone from your team speaks at a trade show or participates in a webinar, that’s generally worth writing about. Post the video (if allowed) on your website. Create a Q&A along the same lines for a blog using the same subject matter expert. Create multiple social messages before the event to help draw a larger audience and then create more messages after the event to steer interested parties to the video or blog. Take a deeper dive with the topic and create a longer technical article or thought leadership column.

It’s also worth revisiting important news. Remember that customer you wrote about in a case study? Now that they’ve been using your solution for six months, perhaps they are willing to participate in a discussion about how they are using your technology to help their customers at an industry event or in a joint webinar. They might have some metrics to share about improved productivity, faster deployments, or cost savings.

Throughout all of this, tone is critical. When done correctly, each piece of content will influence a target audience – whether the press, analyst community, OEMs, end users/consumers or others. Each piece of content generated should reflect the audience to whom it is addressed. Some content is focused on generating in-bound views – such as the company blog, tech spec sheets or a LinkedIn post. Others are geared to external audiences, such as signage for a trade show or technical articles. In nearly every case, however, if you want RedHot content, use that sh*t liberally.