What I wish I knew about PR that I know now
If you're starting to think about PR for your tech startup, here are some key ways to prepare and set yourself up to be your future agency's new favorite client.
Introduction
There comes a moment in many a startup’s lifecycle when the idea of PR to spread the message sounds appealing. What could be better than, while working on your existing product, someone in the background is getting your name and website in front of the biggest possible audience?
It sounds good in principle, but like with many facets of marketing, there’s a lot more to it.
In a couple of my past jobs, I’ve had the opportunity to interview and hire PR folks. During that process, I’ve noticed some similarities in those conversations and approaches.
While I have no communications experience myself, I wanted to share this post from the perspective of a company considering their first PR engagement and go over some of the key takeaways that I feel like those initial conversations brought me.
This piece doesn’t cover how to effectively do PR, that would be between the startup and the professionals hired, but just the initial considerations to factor in.
My hope, therefore, in writing this, is that a tech startup considering PR can come to the table informed and be ready to actively engage, rather than being tripped up by common gotchas from the outset.
For clarity, I want to mention that this article only covers working with an external PR firm or contractor, and I’ll use agency and freelancer interchangeably, for the purpose of this piece.
Here’s what I wish I knew then, that I know now:
It can be expensive
Knowing the general price range of something can go a long way in helping circumvent sticker shock in your initial calls.
When thinking about hiring PR professionals, take a good look into your overall budget. PR work can run on average anywhere between 4,000€ to 7,000€ per month in Europe or $10,000 to $15,000 in the United States, although this price can still vary. Nevertheless, it can potentially be a significant percentage of a small startup’s marketing spend. While PR can be an effective tool, any company needs to weigh this investment against the other marketing activities that they could be taking on.
As with any decision, there’s an opportunity cost when choosing to begin or pass on any activity, PR included.
In practical terms, this means that even one-off projects, for example a product launch, require a few months of lead time to lay down the necessary groundwork, such as getting the messaging right, drafting the press release, getting stakeholder buy-in. The launch or news itself, will have associated work related to the embargo and scheduling interviews.
Similarly, there may be a number of post-launch activities, including handling any incoming inquiries post launch.
With the amount of work necessary, there may be some months of commitment necessary when working with PR professionals, and the company should factor this into their entire budgeting strategy.
There’s a lot for PR folks to do
The reason that PR is often outsourced and not done in house is because the agency or freelancer comes with a very specific set of skills and even more importantly, a network. They may see their responsibility as building brand awareness for your firm, and laying the groundwork for this takes time.
Here is an example list of just some of the activities they may focus on:
Refining the press pitch, company positioning, and overall press strategy.
Finding potential press opportunities and briefing the speakers beforehand to ensure the smoothest possible interaction.
Familiarizing journalists with your company and founding team with a longer term vision of building a tighter relationship with relevant media folks. One example of this could be positioning the CEO as an expert in the industry who can share useful insights with the journalist if needed.
Building up the founder(s)’ reputation and visibility in the community through events, podcasts, written content, and other brand-building activities. These may be done online and/or in person depending on the bandwidth of the person in question.
Looking for organic ways to get the company’s name out there. This is especially the case when there may be stories that your company can comment on.
Coordinating and managing media training for the leadership team.
Working with the in-house marketing team to ensure that all the press resources (page, logos, testimonials, etc.) are ready once media comes knocking.
Ghostwriting content to boost SEO and general brand visibility.
Their priority may not be the New York Times
It’s possible that a company may imagine that hiring a PR firm establishes a direct line to a plug in the biggest media outlet of choice.
If that’s the case, it may be worth refining one’s expectations from the outset. While every company would love a feature in the largest possible publication, outlets of that scale would need something huge to take note. A company’s seed round or series A, while exciting for the company itself, would unfortunately not make the cut.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot of benefit to be reaped from exposure in niche platforms. For example, consider what you yourself read or where you find useful information. For highly technical products, trade publications could also be a direct line to the desired audience or for building a brand. I mention this because being mindful of this fact can circumvent two potential pitfalls in an early discussion:
For a highly technical company, a PR agency that promises you every feature in the biggest outlets immediately, may be exaggerating or being somewhat disingenuous. Be wary of a pitch that tells you exactly what you may want to hear without qualifying why your aspirations may not be the most effective way to accomplish your goals.
Conversely, don’t be put off if the agency gently pushes back on your high-minded ambitions. They may direct you to more targeted publications that are indeed more tailored to your audience. Coming prepared for this possibility gives you a better chance to engage with them and get an understanding of their potential strategy rather than be disappointed that they don’t immediately cheer on your “let’s-reach-everyone” approach.
To get better alignment with your potential PR professionals, you can ask to see what coverage they’ve achieved with companies in a similar industry. This would give you an explicit way to evaluate how effective they could be for your purposes.
They want to know two key facts
Some of the first questions that your potential PR agency may ask are:
Who would be the best person to speak publicly to publications?
For a startup, a founder can be especially impactful, as it’s always exciting to tell the story of someone who took a risk to build and launch something new.
It’s absolutely key, therefore, that the company spokesperson has the official company narrative nailed. They should be able to speak effectively to why they took on the risk of building the product or company and what differentiates it in the overall market.
Who are your top customers, or most interesting users, and would they be willing to speak publicly about your product?
It’s always a useful exercise to determine who the top customers are. It’s possible they’re already highlighted on your homepage. It may additionally be worthwhile to highlight any potentially interesting use cases or customers as well (for example, a robot bakery - it may not be well-known but the concept sounds interesting).
Neither of the two questions listed above should come as a surprise from the PR firm in the early meetings. The more prepared a company is for the conversation, the better the more strategic aspects of the process can go.
There’s a lot of helpful information you can share
The collaboration with a PR firm needs to be a partnership. When initially beginning your outreach to find such a partner, you may find a lot of success and get a chance for company introspection by gathering some key information in advance.
Consider compiling a PR brief to present to your potential PR agency at initial meetings. This can include:
Company Overview
Product details
Best company spokespeople
Competitors and the overall market
Your target audience
Your current positioning
Your short and long term goals (brand awareness, lead generation, etc)
How you’d like to measure success (number of placements, amount of content generated, etc)
Who is in your existing network that they can potentially lean on
Your overall budget
Key upcoming milestones/product launches
Key Customers
A lot of this information may already be available to you in disparate places, but compiling it all together will give everyone a far better overview of what’s needed for your specific case.
Tech products are complicated
In the same vein as bringing as much information as possible to the table, there’s another key piece of information that needs clarifying.
When working in tech, we become used to the abstractions and common terminology of the industry. However, when taking a step back, many tech startups are building niche and complex products in the infrastructure and developer tools industry.
A better way to do Continuous Integration, for example, is not always going to be the easiest thing to explain in a single sentence for an article that is positioned in broader publications.
Thus, once more, it’s worth taking the time when considering PR to reflect on exactly how you can explain your product both to the potential agency, and how they can then translate it for technical, non-technical journalists as they speak about it. In fact, those learning about your product may have different levels of technical knowledge, and being able to present what your startup does in a straightforward way for several levels of understanding will always come in useful.
To dive into this further: while PR agencies may specialize in different areas and thus have a better understanding of that sphere, your PR associates will nonetheless not be developers. Being able to explain what makes your specific product so special will go far in helping them begin to craft the most effective messaging. Once you’ve conveyed the overall benefit of the product, you can of course share a deeper dive, but keep in mind that the agency will often need to pitch the most concise version of the product explanation. Every publication needs the right tone for its audience — a media outlet requires a different approach than the company blog. Your PR partners will help you navigate this.
PR is for more than just getting leads
It would be a wonderful world if hiring a PR company meant money in, leads out. Especially for companies that sell to the enterprise or have a longer sales cycle, it’s easy to tell a potential PR agency that the goal in hiring them is to simply deliver additional leads.
But this is not really the purpose of PR. That’s why I want to mention the fact here. It’s very likely the PR professionals will say that their work is about building your brand. That name recognition here and there will add up and the exposure accumulates.
Therefore, come to the table ready to discuss a wider spectrum of deliverables than leads. This gives both you and the agency a better jumping off point for strategy than being disappointed that news stories and placements can’t simply be counted as ads with a certain conversion metric.
Speed is of the essence
Journalism is a fast paced and competitive field. When working with a PR agency, you may regularly find that queries need a fast turnaround time— the journalists they work with have tight deadlines and a lot of deliverables. The easier a PR associate can make a journalist’s life, the better their working relationship.
As with other implications of PR, this is again a matter of prioritization. If your company will be taking on the investment and expense of working with a PR firm, be prepared for quick replies on emails and to be ready when your PR person reaches out to you. If the nature of key stakeholders at the firm wouldn’t allow for such quick responses, you may want to be upfront about this and also factor this into how effective you expect the PR team to be.
You can help craft the story angle
Journalists, and thus the PR firm, are always looking for new, interesting stories. What I’ve come to terms with in my own experience, is that what feels interesting to a company (a massive new feature), may not always resonate with journalists. A PR agency needs to navigate a narrow path: on one hand, they need to deliver results for their clients, while on the other hand, they need to be useful to their journalistic network. Journalists are bombarded with pitches on why a certain company is the greatest, or why they must write about a specific product.
Thus, while the PR agency will partner with the company to refine the story pitches, helping you choose the most key events and angles that can be effective, you can also begin to proactively brainstorm internally. Stories that speak to big company developments are no-brainers, for example round raises or massive new company expansions, but there may be other opportunities.
Consider for example, the impact of current events, or the general zeitgeist.
A big outage may serve a chaos engineering enterprise, or the general conversation around AI may boost a story about an AI supporting feature. Keep these opportunities in mind for your agency. When you give them something that provides value to a journalist, everyone in the chain ends up looking better and this builds a virtuous cycle.
Next Steps: Finding and evaluating a company
So… you’ve confirmed the PR budget internally, you have your key points and your pitch, you’re ready to start working with an agency.
What’s next? How do you find this agency partner?
First, if your startup has funding, reach out to your investors. This is likely a common question for them, and they know what firms may have been especially effective for their other portfolio companies.
Second, I’ve also found that if you do find a fitting agency that doesn’t have any availability, they may be able to refer you to another suitable one.
Third, asking around in your network is effective. When speaking to other startups, especially those that aren’t competitors, there is a lot of opportunity to get good leads.
There are some considerations when it comes to evaluating a company. To underscore the point, the PR firm’s network is its strongest asset. When interviewing a firm, ask them, who could you get in touch with right now that would be relevant for us? Take time to understand — how many contacts do they have in your specific space?
Onwards and upwards
In the end, working with someone in PR is a collaboration and one whose cost merits a high level of investment from the side of the company and a prioritization of PR within the general marketing operations.
Taking the time in advance to really think through details of what you’re looking for, what you’re able to provide, and keeping an open mind in the conversation, can get your collaboration with the PR firm off to a good start and your company on the way to the boost you’re looking for.
Acknowledgements
Thank you so much to:
Adam LaGreca, Founder at 10K Media
Katharina Heller, Founder at Heller Year Communications
Both provided detailed feedback and suggestions that helped the piece come together!
Get in Touch
Questions? Feedback? Suggestions? Feel free to reach out to me directly: etel [at] hey [dot] com