Preparing for PR: 5 Hot Tips for Startups
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Be ready to discuss
Be ready to discuss your company and industry in general
It’s important to remember that if you pursue media coverage you’re actually also inviting scrutiny so you need to be prepared beyond just what you want to say about your product.
Are you ready to talk about the industry in general are you ready to talk about any potential contentious issues?
Do you have a go-to market plan a distribution channel? Do you have a revenue model ?
All of these things and more may be asked of you.
Have others who can
Have others who can endorse you
Credibility is essential and a great way to establish that credibility is to have other people third parties who can endorse what you’re doing and and and talk about their experiences with your product or your company and the value that your company brings.
Those third parties can be customers, partners, experts in the industry in your field – but what’s important is that they understand what you’re doing they can speak on your behalf preparation is key when you’re going out.
Preparation is the keyYou
Preparation is the key
You need to take the time to do your research and find out who the media are in your industry, what they cover, what their interests are what the recent articles have written.
And what the conversation is in your industry particularly in the media from there you need to prepare your pitch and your story and and make sure that it fits well within that conversation that’s happening and that you’ve got something new and interesting to contribute to that discussion.
And then once you have your pitch developed you need to make sure that you’re well prepared for any interview opportunities that might come your way and that means being ready to do those interviews quickly in order to meet journalists deadlines but also making sure that you have your key messages close at hand and you’re ready and prepared for any difficult questions that might come up as well.
What you’re doing when
What you’re doing when you talk to the media is you’re you’re really laying down a foundation of of thoughts and comments that will be a permanent record so you need to make sure that you’re really fully and truly ready to go out and talk about not just your product and service but your whole company.
Have something to interest the media
When you talk to the media you have to be prepared to talk about more than just yourself it’s great if you have a product or a service that’s changing the market that in and of itself is interesting but it’s not enough to be your full news hook.
You need to have an interesting perspective or point of view market research trends there has to be some additional information that you’re making available in order to be a more valuable source.
Have the right materialsEntrepreneurs
Have the right materials
Entrepreneurs don’t have the luxury of a reputation or a brand to build on. You need to help media understand who you are and why you’re qualified to be doing what you’re doing.
So it’s really important for entrepreneurs to have a number of things in place – for example a website (that’s the first place most media will go to learn more about you).
You need to look at developing biographies of the key founders or the people that are running the company, who are they, what’s their background, why are they doing what they’re doing.
You need to look at having sales materials, fact sheets, company background etc that will allow media to get up to speed very quickly on who you are what you’re doing and what you hope to do with your products.
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