Smart Engagement: Public Relations Tips for Startups

By Anne de Forsan (@adeforsan) Jun 1, 2011

Startups have nothing but an uphill battle when it comes to raising awareness in the market. A smart public relations campaign can go a long way, but many new companies have a poor grasp of the PR basics.

PR done well (and cleanly) helps organizations raise their profile and awareness, and promote new products, services, visions and ideas — ultimately providing a direct impact on sales.

And while this sounds perfectly feasible for any company, the truth is, companies are not treated equally by the media. This is all the more true when the company at hand is a startup — how can you be heard, listened to and understood by over-solicited journalists, when you're so damn disruptive that you're doing nothing less than providing the world with its new Alpha and Omega?

Here are some hints and a tentative guide to "PR for Startups", based on my 20+ years of experience in setting up public relations and communication strategies for innovative companies. The guide is unfurled in three major steps:

Smart strategy — aka SmarTegy
A survival kit of basics rules to create your announcements and engage with editors
How to leverage external PR professionals.

As with any other project a company starts, PR needs a strategy. This is not Strategy with a big “S” and big $$. It's strategy, as in smart — observing existing market tenants, and as in clearly defined goals.

Observation of Existing Tenants

This will bring you the scope of what is being said in your market and, more importantly, how it is said, who says it and how often it's said.

This intelligence work will unveil:

The name of your competitors: Keep in mind that they may not be those you would expect.
The name of the journalists and bloggers writing about them: Probably good people for you to talk to.
The frequency at which a company is mentioned / covered by the media: In order to get a precise idea of how often journalists may write about one of your topics. Be careful — if your company is in a market in which MS or HP have offerings, make sure you carefully identify only those of their clippings related to your market.
The key words used in your market: You probably would like to use a couple of them to be legitimated as part of the market.

Define Your Objectives and Set Timelines

Your company's PR success might be defined by having the founder(s) plastered across the front page of Wired or Entertainment. Or perhaps your success is measured strictly on the number of visits to your website. Whatever the objective, define it precisely and give yourself a feasible time to reach it.

Defining your objective will help you:

Focus on the right media and journalists
Save both your energy and your resources

Once this bit of SmartTegy is done, you'll need some basic rules to stick to, in order to leverage your PR efforts.

Rule 1: Position your Company

It will help you refine your media list and will help the journalist understand your offering.

Define your activity: software vendor, integrator, web service provider
Define your market: senior care, ethnic fast food, mobile apps, etc.
Define your target: B2B, B2C, international, local, etc.

Rule 2: Use Buzz Words with Caution

Press releases are, by and large, too full of buzz words. These often mean little to the public at large and tend to annoy journalists who must work through them to get to the facts of the matter. Keep your vocabular practical and useful.