I was chatting with a friend who’s a freelance journalist the other day, and I asked him what he prefers to hear about the most in a pitch from PR people. His response:
“Explain to me why I should care if I’m not getting paid to.”
Well said, sir. Publicity is a tricky thing. Contrary to popular belief, one cannot just wave a magic wand and make a glowing feature story on the cover of the New York Times appear.
Sorry, but as good as your Kool Aid tastes, not everyone is drinking it.
The reason that many companies don’t get the media coverage they want is because they haven’t done anything to earn it. This is particularly important for startups because publicity can play a big role in shaping your company’s story and the way the public perceives you. And let’s face it – you’re a startup, so you have no “proven track record.” You need validation from an unbiased third party.
So how do you earn great media coverage?
Publicity vs. PR
The first thing to keep in mind is that PR is not publicity. Publicity is what media relations falls under. PR consists of much more – content creation, speaking, events, awards, data-driven campaigns, etc. – and should work in conjunction with a publicity strategy. Note the word “strategy.” Bursts of news announcements every now and then don’t constitute a strategy.
Without a strategy, you’re just asking people to forget about you. Content moves so quickly today – your news announcement is old within hours. It has to be an ongoing process where you can shape your story over time.
Consider: Where is my company today? Where do we want to be in a year? Five years? What’s the story we’re going to tell then, and how are we going to start communicating the journey now?
At the end of the day, you want people to care about what you’re doing. You want to build an emotional connection with your brand. You want to be considered a thought leader in your industry.
Well, that’s not going to happen if you mass blast a press release to a list of contacts that you’ve never communicated with before.
It’s also not going to happen if you keep trying to shove the same marketing speak down everyone’s throats.
So How Do You Get People to Care?
- Take a “quality over quantity” approach: Handpick the target media organizations that specifically cover what your company does. Get to know them and what they write about. Develop a relationship. Craft a story exclusively for them. Do they prefer to dig into the business model? Do they focus on the entrepreneur behind the business? Are they looking for tactical startup tips? Find out and then assess whether you have something valuable to add to that conversation.
- Don’t be selfish: This goes back to the definition of earned media. Not every story is going to be all about you and what your company does, especially if you haven’t done anything new/different in a while. You have to give to get something in return. Maybe that’s your expert point of view on a story that isn’t about you. Maybe it’s a behind-the-scenes look at how your technology works. Or an exclusive Q&A where you give advice based on your unique experience. No one wants to listen to someone who can’t step down from the soapbox.
- Find a way to be relevant: What is the headline of the story you’re trying to get a journalist to write? That’s always a great place to start. Can you envision it? If not, can you explain why you’re telling this story now? Is it new? Does it affect millions of people? Does it tie in to a larger societal trend? Let’s put it this way: Would you read the story if it wasn’t about your own company?
- Don’t be a robot: Meep jargon meep jargon meep. Leading provider of meep meeeeeep. You get what I’m saying. Earn your media by telling a story in plain English. But what’s more than that: explain what it means for the end-user (in the media’s case, their audience). Talk about the benefit, not the features. How is this product/service making someone’s life easier or better? How does it fill a void in the marketplace? Why can’t I live without it?
The trickiest thing about publicity is that there’s never a guarantee. All you can do is make sure that you’re always trying to provide something valuable to others and not just yourself. If you do, you’ll find that PR will end up accomplishing exactly what you wanted it to.