5 ways to raise your startup’s PR game

There’s a lot of noise out there. The ability to effectively communicate can make or break your launch. It will play a role in determining who wins a new space — you or a competitor.

Most people get that. I get emails every week from companies coming out of stealth mode, wanting to make a splash. Or from a Series B company that’s been around for a while and hopes to improve their branding/messaging/positioning so that a new upstart doesn’t eat their lunch.

How do you make a splash? How do you stay relevant?

Worth noting is that my area of expertise is in the DevOps space and that slant may crop up occasionally. But these five specific tips should be applicable to virtually any startup.

Leverage your founders

This is especially important if you are a small startup that not many people know about. Journalists don’t want to hear opinions from your head of marketing or product — they want to hear from the founders. What problems are they solving? What unique opinions do they have about the market? These are insights that mean the most coming from the people that started the company. So if you don’t have at least one founder that can dedicate time to being the face, then PR is going to be an uphill battle.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to do to support these efforts. Create a list of all the journalists that have written about your competitors. Read those articles. How can your founder add value to these conversations? Where should you be contributing thought leadership? What are the most interesting perspectives you can offer to those audiences?

This is legwork and research you can do before looping founders into the conversation. Getting your PR going can be like trying to push a broken-down car up the road: If the founders see you exerting effort to get things moving on your own, they’re more likely to get beside you and help.

Here’s an example: It may be unreasonable to ask a founder to sit down and write a 1,000-word thought leadership piece by the end of the week, but they very likely have 20 minutes to chat, especially if you make it clear that the contents of the conversation will make for great thought leadership pieces, social media posts, etc.

The flow looks like:

1. You come up with topic ideas based on research.
2. The founder picks their favorite.
3. You and the founder schedule a 20-minute chat to get their thoughts on paper.
4. You write up the content based on those thoughts.
5. Send the draft to the founder for approval.
6. Set it free!

Think of journalists as customers you care about

For a lot of startups, the main reason they get a PR agency in the first place is access to journalists. Whether you’re interacting with the media via an agency or not, you should constantly be thinking about adding value for reporters.

Good PR is like good sales in this way. That’s why I dislike the notion of “uniform messaging” — each situation is different. A reporter with a business beat is going to care about different things than a reporter with a trade beat, so how you frame the pitch and what you choose to emphasize should reflect that.

In general, you also have to stop thinking that what you are up to is interesting. Let me say it again for the startup in the back: The media does 👏 not 👏 care 👏 about what you are doing unless you are FAANG, Tesla or Robinhood — or you are raising a lot of money. Journalists are sometimes pitched up to 100 times a day. Why should they care about what your startup is doing?

Because you fit into a bigger picture and can demonstrate, within the first two sentences of the outreach email, that you understand exactly what they are interested in. That makes it a lot easier to sell how your company/perspective/product has value for them. It’s a subtle, but nonetheless important, shift in tone.

Stop trying to force your story into the world and think of journalists as your customers. Understand what they care about and add value.

Be very picky about your PR agency

Let me address the in-house-versus-agency discussion real quick. If you’re coming out of stealth and just want to have a coherent launch with some attention, it’s quick and easy to contract an agency.

After you’re settled a bit, I think it’s a flip of a coin. For a long time, I was the guy who came in, got rid of the agency and brought the PR operations in-house. If there’s someone experienced and available, then why not? But these people are pretty rare. So if you can find an agency that feels right and can become a long-term strategic partner, then that’s an ideal situation.

Now, how do you know if you’ve found the right agency? Well, there’s a little bit of a “when you know, you know” feel to it. But here are a couple red flags that indicate you should keep looking:

1. They try to have you sign a long-term contract. Or the contract has some unreasonable out clause where they need 90 days notice. No. If they want you to immediately commit to six months or a year, run far away. My suggestion is to angle for a month-to-month engagement. If it’s not working out, it shouldn’t be complicated to uncouple from your PR agency.
2. They promise things that very likely won’t actually happen. Sure, maybe they do know someone at The New York Times or Wired. Doesn’t mean those publications are going to cover your Series A announcement! I mean, just go to the technology section of the Times right now. Do you see them covering the Series A of anyone? This is the largest newspaper in the world and you are a company no one has heard about.

So if the agency in question touts Tier 1 media outlets during the evaluation process — when in reality you are just not on that level (and won’t be for a long time) — then what you likely have on your hands is an agency that is going to suck money out of you for a few months, deliver disappointing results and then churn (after taking $100,000 from your company).

If, however, the agency has a good track record with companies that are similar to yours; if they talk in terms of base hits and tiny wins; if they speak about long-term relationship-building — without making unreasonable guarantees that can’t be guaranteed — these are good signs.

Open up your internal communications

I’ve worked with some startups that have very open internal communications and others where the majority of the important conversations happen in private, siloed Slack channels. Without a shadow of a doubt: open communication wins for startups.

This is for countless reasons outside of PR. But in the context of this article, the simple truth is that good ideas can come from anywhere. Kind of like a vacation, where the places on your itinerary were meh, but that dinner you had when you turned an unknown corner was the best of the trip. You have to allow for those moments.

Suffice to say — advocate for open communication. And get your PR team/person involved early and often, even if it’s with an external agency. Get them in the marketing syncs, put them in the product channel on Slack. The increase in noise is a small price to pay for open communication between the people building things and the ones responsible for letting the world know those things exist.

Remember it’s not the same as marketing

No, we can’t ask TechCrunch to add a tracking UTM to the link. No, we can’t draw a straight line from the articles to conversions. If you’re the head of marketing and want to up-level your external comms, then you may need to take off your metrics hat for a bit.

You may also need to stop obsessing over whether everything is resonating with your Ideal customer profile and start caring more about the publication’s ideal target reader. Giving a quick scan of recently published articles should give a sense of whether the story you want to pitch is something they’d feasibly want to publish.

Lastly, remember that this is about awareness. It’s very top-of-funnel and it’s free advertising for your company, so, no, don’t ask them to fix that typo. I barely want to correct that blatant factual error! I want you to come off as grateful to the media, as you should be.

Do interesting things. Tell interesting stories. Get your brand out there, build hype, be provocative — and ultimately be a brand people love.

One CMO’s honest take on the modern chief marketing role