Deliver PR for Rapid-Growth Startups

Many early-stage startups struggle with press relations (PR). It’s not uncommon for a startup to hire and fire several different PR agencies or freelance PR contractors over the course of several years.

All too often, a startup hires a PR agency or contractor, gets an article in TechCrunch or a CEO television interview, and then starts to question the value of paying monthly fees when there is little or no press coverage month after month.

From personal experience, the six PR tips shown here have proven valuable in cost-effectively achieving and maintaining excellent press relations while growing a startup or scale-up from US$1 million revenue to $1+ billion in annual revenue.

(1) Specify Your PR Goals

The first and most important step toward good PR for an early-stage startup is to specify your company’s business goals. What do you want the PR firm to do? Are you looking for brand awareness, industry thought leadership, lead generation, or attention to a new product or service? Do you want your PR to help attract thousands of users for a trial service, help you recruit more top talent, and / or impress venture capital investors for a new funding round?

By itself, PR is not lead gen. Just because the Wall Street Journal writes an amazing story about your startup doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically receive an immediate or sustained increase in prospects that become qualified leads. Together with industry analyst relations, however, PR is invaluable for providing external references that validate how customers are benefiting from working with your startup.

Example year 1 specific PR goals:

• Company profile cover story in an online and print business magazine such as Fast Company or Wired that you can feature at the top of your company.com/media page and buy print copies for hand outs

• Ongoing coverage in technical or industry-vertical publications

• Stretch goals of coverage in national business press such as WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, FT, etc., or a formal target for this if this coverage is important in your market segment

• "Best of show" award at one of the industry conferences where you plan to exhibit

• "Best place to work" awards in the cities where you have a concentration of employees or plan future hiring

When thinking about your specific goals, you will want to identify your target journalists, media outlets and bloggers, and start building your own relationships with them. Schedule a few minutes each day or each week to read their work, and follow them on social media.

When you staff sales people in a new geography or open a new office, remember to update your PR firm and target the local newspapers and television studios there. The Denver Post may not be part of your own daily reading habits, but it can be for your customers or prospects in Colorado.

Likewise, when your business targets growth in a new international geo, consider hiring a local PR contractor or PR firm there who speak the local language(s) and are familiar with the local business climate. At the same time, you may want in year 1 to hire a local demand gen agency for paid campaigns there in local language, and then consider in year 2 to shift this local country lead gen in house and / hire a field marketer who lives in that geo.

As noted in another blog in this series, a SEO checklist for rapid-growth startups, make article backlinks to your online content a formal part of your PR strategy. For social media outreach, include Instagram and Pinterest in addition to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and remember to regularly answer or post questions in Quora.

(2) Consider Your Budget

A boutique PR firm or a solo PR consultant may have a starter plan at around US$2,500 or US$3,000 a month. For a larger PR agency, US$10k or more can be the starting point. Retainers typically require a commitment of a minimum of 3 or 6 months. Alternatively, you can also hire a freelance PR consultant for a specific project, such as a company launch.

Ask your venture capital board members for their PR agency recommendations. In some cases, you may be able to get better rates or more TLC (tender loving care) by choosing a PR firm that represents multiple startups in your VC firm’s portfolio.

PR incidental expenses can add up fast. Be sure to articulate with your PR firm your total monthly budget, including the base monthly retainer, averages, expenses and incidentals. Require written approval for any expense that exceeds your monthly budget.

As part of your budget planning, consider services that allow you to quantify the business benefits of your PR spend. Old-school PR metrics -- such as number of articles that mention your firm -- have less relevance in today's marketplace. Quality of press coverage that reaches your target buyers and influencers is more important the quantity of bloggers and reposting sites.

One good way to measure business impact is to purchase a survey service, that tracks over time awareness of your company by title, size of company and geography. One vendor that I've used successfully for this type of brand awareness survey service is Strategic Oxygen, which Forrester Research acquired and became part of their portfolio of services.

(3) Decide Between an Agency, a Boutique Firm, In-house, or Combination of Internal and External Resources

The benefit of hiring a PR agency or contractor is to foster ongoing dialogue with business press, trade or technical press, and bloggers. Good PR involves not just pitching stories, but hearing from journalists about what articles they are working on, and offering valuable assistance.

PR investments are particularly important for early-stage startups that are selling in a crowded market, are going to disrupt a major industry, and / or have a CEO who already has a history with the press, according to Brew Media Relations founder Brooke Hammerling, in a First Round Capital article “Why Most Startups Don’t ‘Get’ Press”.

For a bootstrapped or Series A startup, or a later stage startup re-evaluating your approach to PR, you may want to begin with a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to PR. You can write and publish your own press releases with a subscription to Business Wire, PRWeb, PR Newswire or a similar service. You’ll pay a few hundred dollars or more per press release depending on which options you pick. While there are free press release sites, most will give you little if any benefits for search engine optimization (SEO). You can manually build a list of press people who cover companies similar to yours, or consider purchasing the Cision "Help a Reporter Out" (HARO) service that lists journalist contacts.

As PR agency Meltwater points out in “How to Hire a PR Firm”, “... the bigger clients generally get the A-team. If your budget is modest, you may want to consider a smaller boutique firm”. A US$15,000 monthly retainer at a boutique firm could make your startup one of their major clients, while at a large PR agency your company would be one of their small accounts.

Even when you are working on a limited budget, there are several valid reasons for considering a large PR firm. Large PR agencies can bring the most experience and the widest range of contacts. If your company has operations and sales in multiple countries, you may want a PR firm with regional offices or global scope.

For most early stage startups, the head of marketing will manage the PR firm. Eventually, as your startup grows in revenue and market presence, you will want to hire a head of PR.

There are benefits from hiring a PR pro in house. According to the previously cited Meltwater article, “… a PR firm that isn’t managed by someone who understands PR will never fully realize the firm’s full potential. A PR firm needs brand and product knowledge and most importantly, access to the right internal people for both strategy and execution, and an internal PR person makes this possible.”

(4) Undertake a Request for Proposal (RFP) Process

Going through a RFP process with multiple PR firms can be a major time commitment, but it will often be worthwhile when done right. After you arrive at a list of between 5 and 10 prospective PR firms, you can contact them to invite a request for qualifications (RFQ). This step can help you get a feel of each firm's level of interest.

From there, you'll want to pick around 3 PR agencies or freelance consultants to formally meet with you and pitch for your business. Ask the agencies to only send those people who would be actively working on your account. Ensure that the entire PR agency team for your account participates in person, versus only meeting with the team lead. If a member of the agency team is not available that day, then ask the agency to reschedule. It's important to establish chemistry, so that you are working together as a team.

Ask each agency to send the "About Us" materials in advance as a pre-read. You don't want to spend more than a few minutes at the formal meeting going through canned slides.

Each agency will pitch one or more sample campaigns. Listen for innovative ideas that excite you.

When you pick your first choice of agency, take time to read the contract and redline it with your proposed changes or questions. I would also recommend having your corporate lawyer look at it.

(5) Add Business Value to Your Weekly Cadence of Check in Calls

One mistake is when you hold a weekly call with your PR agency, to get drawn into the tactics of pitch to xyz journalist and # number of social posts without carving out time for business objectives.

If your goals change, be sure to communicate the new objectives with your PR agency or contractor. One of the most common complaints by PR firms is that they are kept out of the loop on changes in company direction or priorities.

If your PR agency or contractor is located in the same city as your HQ office, consider inviting your PR agency lead or team members to spend one day a week working from your office. It can be a great way for the PR firm to be close to your extended team, and benefit from in-the-hallways conversations that PR agency staff may miss if they are almost always working remotely.

Remember to have a bunch of people read your draft press release before publication. You don't want to have grammar errors, misspell names, or make other mistakes that hurt your brand just when you are trying to get your company noticed in the marketplace. Even if you have a PR agency, be sure to copyedit their press release, especially if there have been several rounds of changes; all too often I see startup press releases with misspellings and grammar mistakes that the client approves & the agency publishes.

(6) Sign up for Media Training for All of Your Spokespeople

Media training is an excellent way to get each of your spokespeople on the same page in how to communicate your go-to-market messaging. Media training will help your spokespeople lead with customer stories instead of product features. Videotaping the sessions is helpful, so you can see how you come across visually. Practice is helpful even for experienced public-facing evangelists; everyone can benefit from independent, constructive feedback.

It's great to have media training by a PR pro who has experience working as a journalist. This will help prepare you on how to answer "gotcha questions". You'll learn to remind yourself that you need to stay on message every second you are with the journalist, whether it's sitting together in a lobby or riding beside each other on an elevator. Anything you or your colleagues say within earshot of a journalist may find its way into print or an online article.