Guide to Public Relations for Startups: How To Hit a PR Home Run

Focus on customer reaction, not investor/press reaction.

• Seek the holy grail: being featured on TechCrunch or Forbes can distract earlier-stage startups from thinking tactically and developing strong, sustainable marketing strategies. Startups will aim for the big win but totally ignore smaller marketing goals.

Get Your House in Order

• Before a startup starts trying to put themselves out there, they need to make sure that they are ready to show the best version of themselves
• The design and messaging of their own website and social platforms have to be on point
• Getting media coverage on a big publication will drive traffic back to their website

Establish Yourself as Experts

• Start a conversation with journalists at industry events
• Look at areas where you can offer expert insights to other startups and ecosystem players. Startups should also start applying for speaker and workshop roles, and keep building your company’s brand.
• Don’t worry about defaulting to your CEO as the spokesperson of your company
• Startups should look at the talent they have on their team, and highlight other members who would be able to impart wisdom on different themes

Offer the media interesting content, not just headlines

• Offer journalists data, white papers, interviews, and insights.
• This will help public relations specialists build an interesting story, rather than just sending them a pitch and expecting them to cover your most recent product launch (e.g. a white paper).

Reach out to specific journalists with a background in your sector

• Don’t follow the spray and pray method of contacting ALL of the key journalists from target publications
• Take the time to highlight journalists who have already covered your particular industry
• Personalization is key
• Show journalists that they have been specifically chosen for a particular theme or story based on their beat

Identify your target audience, then pick your media channels

• Start pitching to industry-specific publications
• Medium-sized regional blogs and news sites like Tech.eu or EU-Startups.com
• These types of publications have readerships in the tens if not hundreds of thousands per month and are open to covering earlier stage companies

Focus on content marketing

• Startups should first focus on getting a steady flow of content out on their ‘owned’ channels before targeting external media.
• Owned channels include a company’s website, blog, social media channels, and also any secondary content channels like Medium, LinkedIn, etc.

Start Building Relationships with Editors

• Build positive relationships with editors at these types of publications.
• Create a media pack or section on the startup’s website which showcases all of their previous media coverage including press releases, press photos, and promo videos of recent products etc.

Increase organic coverage

• Placing this content in front of visitors will improve brand trust and reputation

Host events to build media relationships

• Startups can host workshops, round-table discussions with other industry leaders, hackathons or customer appreciation events.
• These are a great way to interact with an existing community, but also meet potential new customers and employees too. Startups should be sure to invite journalists from local, and also global publications to attend.

Optimize your content with SEO strategies

• Assessing the keywords, the number of backlinks and referring domains of their 5 main competitors will allow startups to create SEO focused content
• This will help their ranking on the search engines and make them more visible to potential customers and journalists.

Start putting yourself out there

• Introduce yourself to the tech community by showcasing on discovery sites like ProductHunt or StartupRanking.com.
• If you have a great product, post comments and interact by answering questions from users on the site and bring their communities on board to maximize upvotes.

Source