Securing PR for your startup with no budget

Here are three things you can do to get great PR for a startup with no budget.

Be relevant

At the seed stage, investors are buying into the founder and their vision. Founders need a voice but the reality is, there isn't much that a growing company does that is inherently newsworthy.

You need to think beyond what your startup does to pique the interest of the media.

Just ask Jo Candy, Crowdcubes Head of PR & Communications:

“Lots of startups make the mistake of simply telling people what they 'do'. Instead, you should be looking out for topics and themes in the news (newsjacking) which you can offer opinion or an expert comment on. You have experience and intel as a founder that few others have. Share it.”

Here are some key questions that you might want to ask yourself to "be relevant"

• What is your brand story and role?
• What is your key message?
• Who are you trying to reach??
• What problem are you trying to solve?
• How does your product or service relate to current cultural context/trends??

Be clear on what you are trying to achieve before you start and be honest with yourself about what success looks like.

Your first attempt doesn't need to blow the doors off!

Test, learn, tweak, repeat.

Contextual outreach

Now...contacting the right journalist, at the right time, with the right story, IS as hard as it sounds.

But what can you do to ensure that the outreach has the highest chance possible of landing some column inches??

Basic email etiquette is a given but you have to stand out.

Give them what they are looking for; a relevant story to interest their readers.?

• Follow the journalist on Twitter
• Learn what they are writing about
• Tracks trends in your industry

Can you leverage an industry trend /cultural moment/event to create a hook?

It's easy to say but, journalists are human beings with little time, make their lives easy by keeping your pitch short, punchy and timely.

Use the email subject to land the hook and remember to offer time with relevant spokespeople.

If you don’t hear back, pick up the phone or message them directly on social media to gauge interest, again keep the dialogue tight.

Be smart and think about who are your top targets and focus your time on converting these leads.

Just in case you aren't buying my waffle, I asked Lucy Godding, Director at Edelman, the world's largest PR agency to share her view on the topic.

"Simply put, journalists are professional storytellers and you have to adopt this mindset and take an audience-first approach when outreaching to them"

If you are not succeeding, ask yourself the key questions again and think about how you can tailor the story angle.

Startup groups

There are tonnes of groups and threads that are set up to allow you to respond to briefs, chat with your peers about possible opportunities & generally share experiences about what is and isn’t working when it comes to landing a story.

If you don’t know any that is relevant to you then find someone who does, they are there! Promise!

Here are a couple of examples on Twitter to get you started!

#journorequest #prrequest #travelpr (if you’re in travel for example)

Follow these three steps and you are well on your way to making PR easy & achievable.

A final consideration once you have mastered the basics is to make your wins repeatable...

Tracking the impact of your PR is fundamental to scaling its impact and the best example I have seen to enable this is BoldLens by Boldspace.

The Boldspace lot has created a way to track paid, owned, earned, and social media activity, all in one place.?

The ongoing challenge for PRs is tracking impact and this does exactly what it says on the tin, allowing you to be far more targetted and repeatable with the area of focus.

And that's it! Good luck.

I hope you enjoyed reading this week. Please do like, share and comment ??

See you next time.

JK