5 Questions to Ask. Before Launching a PR

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Georgiana Murphy
6 years ago
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1 5 Questions to Ask Before Launching a PR Campaign For startups

2 As an entrepreneur, you know this story well. You ve spent the better part of a year prepping for this launch. You ve put in place all the legal prerequisites. You ve secured the right sales partnerships to get this thing off the ground. Your engineers haven t slept in a week, fueled by Chinese take-out and enough Red Bull to kill a moose. Before launching a PR and marketing blitz, it s time for a quick reality check. Having worked closely with companies to launch countless new products and services, we ve seen a few trends emerge, and the most successful companies aren t afraid to ask themselves a few questions up front. The time has come for the big unveil. Now you re ready to open the floodgates. Or are you? These questions are more than boxes to check off. In many ways, they are determining factors for success. Here are five of the most essential: What s your story? Not the boilerplate on your About Us page. The one you tell clients every year at the holiday party. The one that answers the question, Why do we exist? Cisco co-founder Leonard Bosack was working at Stanford when he wanted a better way to communicate with his wife. He found a way to connect a pair of local area networks (LANs) across campus, and the idea for Cisco was born. They came up with the company name a shortened reference to San Francisco while driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, which is symbolized in their logo. You aren t Cisco, but you already have a go-to narrative for the sales process, and you probably have a story that s resonated with investors. It s a story that needs to show (not tell) what you re all about and just as importantly, what problem you solve. A good PR firm will help you articulate this story. They ll be able to distill it down to a 30-second sound bite, or even into a 140-character tweet. They ll help you get it in front of the right eyeballs. But at the end of the day, it s your story, and you need to embody it. 2

3 What kind of ammunition do you have? Once you have your story, you need a strong plan outlining how to tell it at the right time, to the right audience and with the right key messages. What tools do you have at your disposal? First: your people. The nature of a startup is that many employees wear multiple hats, and you probably have experts in multiple areas sales, UI/UX, product design, customer service and so on. Your PR team should be tapping into these resources for pitch-worthy story angles and knowledge sharing, and even calling on your employees to help tell your company s story through interviews with the media. Second: your clients and customers. We ve all read about the great lengths Zappos customer service reps will go; at this point, their story is practically required reading as a case study on building company culture. But the stories that go viral are the ones told by the end user the best man who arrived at a wedding without his shoes, only to have Zappos overnight a free pair. Your customers, clients and partners are your best brand advocates, and they can help you tell a story in a way that s more authentic because of their perspective. Things like: Promo video on the company or product, and B-roll if you plan to work with TV media FAQs Product spec sheets High-resolution photos and Web/mobile screenshots Testimonials from beta users Custom landing page(s) Whitepaper and blog content A compelling video isn t going to extend your runway three months or define the line between success and failure. But the more ammo you can provide your PR team, the better chance of success they have. Have you noticed a theme? It s that PR doesn t operate in a vacuum. Instead, it s layered across the entire business, and the best firms function as an extension of the companies they represent. Pre-launch, marketing and PR need to work together on resources and collateral for the campaign. 3

4 How will you measure success? Now you ve got a compelling story, and you re thinking about campaign collateral. How are you going to quantify these outputs? Trusting your gut won t cut it when it comes time to evaluate the success of a product launch. And if you try to measure retrospectively without clear goals in mind, you ll resort to using metrics that are either outdated (like ad value equivalency) or artificially inflated (in the case of impressions) to measure PR. Instead, measure backward from your goals. In terms of PR, this typically includes some combination of: Growth in sales of one or more products/services Sales or conversions from referral Web traffic Qualified inbound leads through contact form Web traffic growth to target landing page(s) Growth in prospective client list (if you don t already have a capture mechanism, set one up through a service like LaunchRock) Number of media hits in tier 1 outlets Social media conversation volume and sentiment over time If you aren t tracking KPIs like these, how will you know what s working, and just as important, what isn t? The beauty of both PR and marketing is the ability to fine tune to grow results over time. Take advantage of it. Are you ready to lose control? Control of your brand, that is. There s an adage in business that you don t own your reputation your customers do. And your customers are active on Twitter. They re reading TechCrunch, Forbes and Business Insider and, while discerning, they are influenced by what they read. As a result, you have a vested interest in being active in PR and social media so that your voice is heard and accounted for. If shipping a dozen products off to media for pre-launch reviews isn t the most vulnerable position an entrepreneur can find him/herself in, it has to be near the top of the list. It s a scary thing to put that much trust in a largely unknown outcome. The truth is, it s a false pretense to think you ever had control to begin with. Part of losing control is being open to criticism. At this stage in the game, you ve already encountered criticism from partners, investors, employees and customers. You may even endure some criticism both fair and unfair from media. What s telling is how you respond. PR isn t a zero sum game, but it s close. When your company or product is featured in a story, that s a leg up on the competition. And a good PR firm will help ensure that when your competitors are mentioned, your name is right there alongside them. 4

5 Do you have time to devote to PR? Whether you plan to handle PR in-house or decide to engage an agency, putting a dedicated public relations program in place is an undertaking that requires an investment of your most valuable resource: time. This time can be spread out throughout your organization. For example, it s best to assign a marketing director or in-house PR guru to act as the main point of contact for an outside agency. All too often, entrepreneurs engage with a PR firm expecting to create a plan and then turn the team loose, entrusting them with the organization s most powerful asset the brand with little to no guidance. This type of engagement requires, at a minimum, several hours a week, typically spent on some combination of the following: If you re working with a firm, give them direct access to people in your organization. When your firm gets a technical question from a journalist needing a technical response, they shouldn t be a stranger to your dev team. Weekly meetings with the firm or in-house PR rep Conducting interviews with media Reviewing press releases, articles and other written materials So there you have it five questions to ask before launching your PR campaign. Any questions? Give us a shout at startup@walkersands.com. About the Author Andrew Cross leads the startup practice area at Walker Sands, where he works with early-stage companies to launch, establish credibility, build an audience and gain market share. Andrew serves as a mentor to the Techstars Chicago program and has contributed to numerous media outlets, including Entrepreneur Magazine, Tech Cocktail and PR Daily. Follow him on Twitter 5

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