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PR Lessons Every Start-up Should Know
If you’re struggling to get media attention for your start-up, thinking about hiring a PR firm, or both, check out this great post from The Daily Muse: What Every Start-up Should Know About PR.
We’ve distilled the four main lessons below:
1. Good PR Does Not Substitute for a Good Product
PR exists to build momentum. PR gets your name out there, letting you showcase what you’re doing well and driving awareness of your offering… PR is no substitute for having a great product. Nor is it a guarantee of sales, sign-ups, or funding—if anyone promises you otherwise, be wary!
The lesson: PR alone won’t catapult your company to instant success, but combined with a great product, it can dramatically widen your reach and help you gain momentum faster.
2. You Want the Press That’s Right for You
If you’re a new company trying to get users to sign-up for your services or download your app, the best press you can get is digital press. Think about it: It’s rare that someone is going to read the morning paper, see the name of your company, run to the computer, double-check the story to get the URL right, and go to your site. But if you’re featured in an online tech publication, readers will be able to click straight to your product home page—and that’s much more likely to translate to exactly the type of exposure you want.
The lesson: Know your audience, and know where they get their information. A story in the daily edition of the Wall Street Journal won’t help you much if your target audience gets all their news from Mashable.
3. It’s Better To Be Successful Than Sexy
Don’t try to be cool, try to be successful… More importantly, don’t use PR to try and be something you’re not. If you built a tool that you thought was going to be the great new thing used by every social media enthusiast, but it turns out it’s actually better suited to be a super-functional internal tool for large companies? Awesome. Ditch the “we’re the next Facebook” angle, and shift your focus to getting your name in front of large, corporate audiences.
The lesson: Don’t get too attached to your own ideas about success (social media sensation vs. useful corporate tool, for example). Instead, let your company’s early successes guide you toward finding your niche.
4. Launch is a Crapshoot
It’s impossible to guess how many people will actually read about your product on launch day? Nobody. But that’s the way it is… With so many new companies, and only so many spots to get media coverage, it’s tough out there.
The lesson: If your launch isn’t as successful as you’d hoped, don’t let it get you down. Launch day alone won’t make or break your company. It’s how you create and sustain value after the launch that really matters.
What would you add to these tips?
What is Your Brand’s Origin Story?
You probably know how your company was founded, but do you have an origin story? A feel-good narrative that speaks to your roots and your mission?
Your origin story is a powerful way to create an emotional connection between consumers and your brand. And if you do it well, you don’t just tell this story once – you can reference it again and again in your PR and marketing efforts as a way to reinforce your company values and deepen consumers’ emotional attachment to your brand.
Here are three brands with great origin stories, and the lessons you can learn from them:
- TOMS Shoes: The idea for TOMS Shoes was born when founder Blake Mycoskie was in Argentina in 2006 and witnessed the struggles of children growing up barefoot there. He wanted to help, so he founded TOMS and the One for One Movement (for every pair of shoes sold, another pair goes to a child in need). TOMS has since given over 600,000 pairs of new shoes to children around the world. The lesson? Connect your origin story to a greater movement, and inspire your customers to build that movement with you.
- Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his college dorm room and later dropped out of Harvard. At close to one billion users, Facebook has now grown into one of the most powerful and influential companies in the world. Whether you love Facebook or hate it, its origin story is as inspirational as it is unlikely, and journalists love to tell it. The lesson? Find the inspirational and unlikely elements of your origin story, and lift them up for the press.
- Amy’s Kitchen: Amy’s Kitchen was founded by a husband and wife who were frustrated by the lack of healthy, vegetarian food that was easy to prepare. They decided to create their own line of vegetarian frozen meals and are now a leading brand. The lesson? Amy’s Kitchen offers a story we can all relate to – the desire for healthy, convenient food that tastes good. Think about your own audience and the things they care about, and speak to those things in your own origin story.
What is your brand’s origin story, and how do you weave it into your PR and marketing efforts?
Your Press Release Is the Beginning of the Story, Not the End
Your press release is out the door. You’ve crafted a great story that provides real value to your audience, added lots of great multimedia content, promoted it across all your social media channels and sent it to the newswire, as well as key industry contacts with whom you have a relationship.
Now what?
If you think you can just sit back and let the press inquiries roll in, you’re probably in for a big disappointment. Your press release is just the beginning of the story you wish to tell in the market. Here are three things you can do to gain momentum after your press release has hit the wire:
- Follow up. A quick email follow-up to your press contacts a couple of days after your release can make all the difference. Be polite, not pushy. Most importantly, be helpful. Journalists are very busy, so you need to prove that your story is worth retelling. Understand their pains and the things they write about, and show them how your release fits into their regular beats (and if it doesn’t, you shouldn’t be pitching them anyway).
- Utilize multiple channels. In the days and weeks following the release, use other channels to tell your story from multiple angles. Some examples might include writing a blog post on a leading publication or your own company blog, speaking at an industry conference, or publishing a white paper. Don’t go about it haphazardly, though. Make sure that everything you publish is relevant to the original story you’re trying to tell.
- Enlist your biggest fans. You don’t have to do all the work. Enlist your biggest fans to help you tell your story, and reward them for doing so with public praise and recognition, or perhaps an exclusive perk or two. It isn’t as hard as it sounds – if you aren’t sure where your best fans are, your social media channels, account managers and even your customer support team can help you find out who’s engaged and passionate about your brand.
How do you follow up on your press releases? What successes have you had?
PR for a World in Flux
If you haven’t seen Fast Company’s recent article about Generation Flux, we highly recommend it. The gist? The future of business is chaotic, and you’re more likely to thrive if you embrace this new reality.
This got us thinking – where does that leave PR, one of the most traditionally risk-averse industries out there? Here’s how you can apply the lessons from Generation Flux to your PR initiatives:
- Accept uncertainty. The “new economy” isn’t just a passing fad. Social isn’t going away. The pace of technology isn’t going to slow down. Your next big PR crisis could be just around the corner, completely unforeseen. Accept that you have no crystal ball (no one else does, either), and open yourself up to uncertainty.
- Look for order (and opportunity) within chaos. The world is chaotic, but that doesn’t mean it’s random. Always be on the lookout for new patterns and trends, both inside and outside your industry, and think about how they might be relevant to your PR efforts and your business at-large. A new social technology might hold an opportunity to gain customers in an unexpected way. Changing consumer behaviors could offer a new perspective and context for your latest press release. Once you learn to spot trends within this seeming chaos, you can treat them as opportunities.
- Embrace agile PR. Gone are the days of big, once-a-year announcements and predictable product cycles. Your PR team needs to be agile and ready to turn on a dime, should need or opportunity arise. Try a mixture of traditional PR, social PR and a handful of new things that just might be crazy enough to work (or fail spectacularly). On that note, don’t be afraid to fail (because you will). In fact, celebrate failure! Just fail quickly, and use your failures as a way to learn, iterate, and get better.
- Invest in curiousity. Your ability to continue learning and acquiring new skills is the single most important thing you can do to thrive in a state of flux, both as a business and as a professional. On the business side, invest in people who are curious, and empower them to follow their curiosity. If you lead a team, build a culture of curiosity by embracing new ideas, sharing information and encouraging exploration, even when (not if) it occasionally leads to failure. And of course, lead by example and start by investing in your own curiosity.
How have you adapted to a world in flux? Is your organization comfortable with chaos or are you still struggling to navigate it?
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