Here’s How to Do PR on a Budget
Yesterday I wrote a post about The Silent Benefits of PR in which I pointed out that most young companies I encounter don’t fully grasp the benefits of PR because they are less measurable than product milestones or customer acquisition analyses (like CAC/LTV).
In that article I talked about how PR drives: recruiting, employee retention, biz dev deals, funding and even M&A and that often “attribution” to your PR activities is unknown. It’s like “direct” traffic to your website that seems to magically appear.
But of course it’s hard to advise people that they should do PR without a guide to how to do it on the cheap or how to do it at all.
When to start PR?
I’m generally not a believer in too much PR until you have a product built or at least well designed. This is somewhat changing in the world of crowd funding where people actually raise money so that they can build products but at a minimum your product design ought to be complete and ready to execute. On the other hand several crowd-funding campaigns have underwhelmed in terms of meeting deadlines which damages ones brand so be careful about this, too. The best case I’ve seen is our portfolio company Osmo who had already built the product but used crowd-funding to handle inventory management, supply-chain logistics and perfecting the final version of the product. Contrary to popular opinion I actually believe crowd-funding is best used after seed capital or venture capital. It super charges a business that is closer to product delivery.
The reason I recommend waiting for PR until your product is complete or nearly ready is that on the one hand you want to be sure you actually know what you’re going to build before ramping up the hype factor on your company and number two you probably don’t want to alert the potential or even latent competition too much to your plans until you’ve gotten a good lead on them. It’s why in this article I advise that people “market today not futures” because you don’t want your playbook in the hands of the competition. Who cares if they know what you’re delivering today — that’s all about execution.
So my simple advice is to start PR as early as possible (and certainly earlier than most of your investors will advise) when you have your head around your product plans and are well into execution (or ready to launch) precisely because your recruiting, seed funding and initial user base may depend on it.
And if you’ve ever been a person who has tried PR and failed to get inches please have a read of this article on Why Your PR Campaign Sucks.
But how? I have no money?
There is a lot you can do without spending money. As the CEO you need to realize that doing PR is part of the piechart of activities called “your job.” Many CEOs act like VPs of product or CFOs. The reality is you must be great at HR, PR, finance AND product. So if you have no money then get to work with a small bit of your time building relationships. Put it this way — Upfront Ventures spend on PR per year = $0. I do it myself. If I can do it — so can you. Trust me I, too, have a million other responsibilities. But I know how valuable building a brand is so I put time into it. I invest heavily in relationships with journalists both because I like them and respect their profession and I know that there is a benefit to me in the long run if I’m not transactional in my relationships.
And that’s exactly the point — you can’t just do PR around milestones. It’s a continual process. You need to take months & years to build relationships with journalists. You help them on stories, act as a source, develop real relationships, read their stories and eventually when you have news they’re more willing to have a conversation. They get pitched by so many blowhards that more genuine people who aren’t in it for just a story stand out from the crowd. I wrote about how to build relationships with journalists in this post.
The other thing that tech execs often want to do is to delegate the PR to their marketing person. Obviously you should have somebody that helps you research journalists, gets you meetings, pitches stories, helps prep you for interviews & helps make sure your writing is cogent. But some CEOs then try to have more junior people in the company take the interview. In a startup this is a mistake. Heck, even in a big, successful company like Salesforce.com the CEO, Marc Benioff, still takes many of the interviews himself.
The reality is that a journalist who’s writing a story about you — a relatively unknown entity — wants to hear directly from the founders and/or the CEO. You have to learn how to interact with journalists, understand how to do interviews, understand how to frame a story and get comfortable with the fact that if you want PR coverage you’re going to have to dedicate a non-trivial amount of time to it.
I raised a small seed round. How do I best spend my valuable dollars if I want use a small PR budget?
What do you do when you have finally raised seed funds? Should any money go to PR at all? I suppose it depends how much money you’ve raised but if hiring critical staff, raising VC and streamlining your biz dev or sales is important to you then you might consider putting a small amount of spend against PR.
If you haven’t yet raised an A-round my recommendation would be that you not yet hire a big, well-known PR firm. This is especially true in a booming market (like 2014) where PR firms can charge premiums and be super selective about whom they work with.
All too often I’ve seen senior PR people from big firms come in and pitch for new business to startups while having 22 year-olds who do all the work once it’s won. It’s the opposite of WYSIWYG And even then this newly minted college graduate will be working on multiple clients at the same time. They don’t have enough billable hours to be able to really understand what you do or effectively pitch it. Simply put — if you can’t afford external PR then they can’t afford to put their best staff against working with you. So be careful.
I often recommend that super early-stage teams hire somebody in-house first — either full-time or possibly a part-time contractor or small agency. You can do this by hiring somebody who has multiple functions of which one is PR, hiring an intern who has PR experience, hiring a consultant 2 days / week or hiring somebody full time. But having somebody in-house means they can do many things like help with website copy, running events, writing training manuals and even handling customer support calls. This person will be way more focused on what your business actually does and will be 100% committed to your success and your success only.
So you can spend $5–10k / month for a small external agency or $50–75k for an internal resource who is full time. I opt for the latter usually.
OK, I’ve raised an A round and want to work with an external agency, but how?
Working with an agency (in whatever capacity) is mostly a waste if you don’t have somebody on the inside of your company who is working closely with the outside firm. You need somebody who is helping push out information on what is up-and-coming in the company. You need somebody who can react quickly to inbound journalist questions. You need somebody who is thinking laterally about how to creatively get extra attention at conferences or trade-shows. You need somebody who really understands your company, its customers and its competitors. And you need somebody who is committed to keeping up your presence in blogs, social media and other online forums.
So while I highly recommend working with an external agency once you’ve raised venture capital I think you’ll waste a bunch of money and be less effective unless you first hire staff in-house.
Once your firm is ready for marketing I personally can’t think of any marketing budget that is more effective that PR. A great PR firm coupled with a business that is doing meaningful things is golden. The ability to get inches in major journals (NY Times, WSJ, The Economist) as well as your industry trade journals and tech blogs in invaluable in shaping influencers. The number of stories that I have in my career about a senior executive who read about a company in a magazine on a flight, clipped the article and then followed up directly are numerous.
And when you work with an external PR firm you can’t keep them on a short leash, trying to measure their immediate impact one whether they got you X number of articles or Y numbers of inches. It will take them time to know your company, socialize your story with the right journalists, wait until those journalists are gearing up to write relevant stories, etc. You need to have a longer-term view on PR results.
And no matter how smart your in-house person is they simply won’t have the same kind of journalist relationships as an external firm. Why? Because great PR firms do it for a career. They are at every conference, they are constantly talking with journalists and they know what the journos are interested in and what kind of stories they’re interested in writing. So if you think of a great PR firm as “distribution” you will do well. But of course great PR firms do so much more like helping you figure out your yearlong calendar, shaping narratives that tell stories versus just pitching product releases and can help you in a crisis.
Some final thoughts on PR
1. Be authentic — Nobody likes being spun. Nobody likes talking to a robotron who spews out corporate BS again & again like a politician on a Sunday morning talk show avoiding the questions. Talk like a human. Give real answers. Show a sense of humor and humility. I notice, for example, that some CEO’s on Twitter never do anything but parrot their companies news. I find this so inauthentic. And then others will send out company info but occasionally show a human side, which is always more appealing.
2. Have a point-of-view — Too many senior executives are risk averse when it comes to talking with the press so they tend to either be milquetoast in their responses or sit on the fence. That’s fine if you’re a senior exec at Apple — you’ll get inches anyways. But for you as a startup you need to have a point-of-view on topics. You need to be wiling to take risks and be out-on-a-limb with your views. I’m not talking about being aggressive against companies, disparaging people or saying inappropriate things to get covered. I see too many people who do that. But be willing to have an informed view about your industry. And the most important advice I could give you is that Point-of-View Marketing is much better than Narcissistic Marketing.
3. Don’t cry wolf — There are companies who send press releases every time they launch anything — practically putting out press releases announcing they fixed a bunch of bugs. And then when they have substantive news they’re surprised that nobody takes it seriously. Make sure you’re not spewing out meaningless reams of press releases. It’s OK to push out extra ones on your website or blog. It’s OK to produce a lot and then selectively push them out via different news sources. Just don’t spam people. Or when you send the good stuff it will get lost in the sauce.
4. Get media training — One of the most useful exercises I did with a major agency was “media training” where they taught me how to do interviews & how to handle TV. It was invaluable and has shaped my press interviews ever since. I’m the kind of person who likes to answer every question in detail. I feel it’s my duty to respond to every question and make sure the person asking understands my answer. The problem with this in interviews is that you can take an interview totally off course of the journalists asks questions that aren’t relevant to your story. Media training helped me figure out how to keep interviews on track and focused on the story I’m trying to communicate. They taught me to keep things simple and repeat the key points to make sure that they come across.
