This is the first in a series of PR for Startups posts by our guest contributor, Kashmira Chawak .
Getting PR for your startup is one of the best ways to get yourself out there and increase your customer base, but how to do it has baffled many startup founders.
You may know how to build apps, but beyond that you will also need to know how to get media coverage. Consumers and investors make their decisions based on many different factors, and one of those things is trust. Trust is something hard to build if consumers can’t find much information or have never read about you.
Journalists aren’t going to start talking about you overnight, especially if you are a startup or a first time founder. So don’t just wait for your funding announcement or product launch to kick start your PR. Your first step in mapping a good PR strategy should be building your media relationships, and the best time to do so is NOW.
Here are a few tips on how you can start building your relationships with journalists before cuing in your press release.
Ask yourself why?
Before engaging in any media activity, ask yourself, ‘why do I need PR?’
Is it a mass branding exercise or are you trying to gauge investor attention? Are you looking for early adopters or do you want to drive traffic to your website and increase your customer base?
Depending on the stage at which your startup is, you will be dealing with one or more of these stakeholders.
Reverse engineer your strategy to figure out the publications or online portals where these stakeholders are likely to read about you. It’s journalists from those publications and online portals you want to be in touch with. For example, if you are a real estate portal, your investors are likely to read about you in TechCrunch but your average user would be someone who reads the local newspaper.
Building media lists
Once you know the journalists you want to reach out to, a simple google search or scanning through publications should get you their email ids. However, while finding journalists is easy, engaging them is challenging. When you start building your startup, work on building your media relationships as well. One of the best places to meet journalists relevant to you would be the events you attend for your business development. Do not hound them to write about you right on your first meeting or your first email to them. Use the opportunity to introduce yourself and your product and try to arrange for a demo. if you are part of an accelerator program like JFDI Asia, make full use of their PR network and contacts to gain access to their media lists.
Don’t go for the Big Guns
While it is tempting to reach out to the big media names, it’s extremely difficult to get their attention. The field reporters are the one that usually bring news to the edit table and they are the ones who are more likely to spend time understanding your product and write about you.
Location
The most important aspect of getting covered by international media or media overseas is finding their local contact. Most international or overseas media will have local correspondents who will cover local news. They are easier to reach out to than their overseas counterparts and will be more interested in your story given the geographical proximity.
Get the journalists to be your beta testers
A great way to engage with journalists and bloggers is to invite them to be beta testers for your product. Not only will you get valuable feedback from them but also by engaging them early in your startup lifecycle, you give them an opportunity to experience your product first hand, this will help elicit their interest when you reach out to them with your story.
Use Twitter to interact with journalists
Follow journalists relevant to you on Twitter. This will help you understand the kind of stories that interest them and help you polish your story accordingly. Engaging in twitter conversations with journalists, retweeting their stories or general tweets about the industry are good ways of familiarizing them with you and they will be more likely to respond to you when you drop them an email with your pitch.
It doesn’t always have to be about your story
Don’t always write to journalists with a pitch. If you think there is an industry trend or a piece of information that they might find useful, write to them about it. Let the journalists know in what other ways you can be helpful. These are good to have karma points
Don’t overdo it
Don’t spam. Don’t stalk. Don’t be irrelevant. Don’t patronize.
The worst thing you can do is to continuously spam a journalist and annoy them with irrelevant emails. Stalking them by commenting on everything they tweet is also not advised.
Always try to stand in their shoes and read their publication to find out what would be most relevant for their audience. Each journalist may also have a specific industry or topic they write about so don’t do a copy-paste when you’re sending them your release or an introduction email. Tailoring it for them will increase your chances of them wanting to follow up with you.
Thinking of starting your own business? JFDI Discover will help you find out if you really want to be an entrepreneur. It will reveal if your team is aligned to deliver results. And it will show you how to solve a real problem for customers who are willing to pay thus moving closer to a “problem-solution fit”. Join JFDI Discover, starting April 3 2015.
This article has been written by Kashmira Chawak. She is a guest contributor to the JFDI blog. She specialises in Marketing and PR is currently heading integrated marketing for JFDI Accelerate alumni scrollback.io.