An effective PR strategy can help elevate your brand and advance your narrative, surgically position your company to achieve specific objectives, and build trust with your customers, partners, employees, and investors. That’s the good news. The bad news is that some common mistakes can derail your efforts and relegate PR to a pricey indulgence that wastes executive time, misses opportunities, and creates problems down the line.
Early-stage startups tend to gravitate toward the same mistakes when it comes to PR. The same instincts and behaviors that advantage your company in other areas - like developing with lean methodology, growth hacking your marketing, and putting a little spin into your sales decks - do not translate well to PR. Whether you’re engaged with an agency, an individual consultant, or you’ve brought communications in-house, avoiding these common missteps will help you get more value out of your PR spend.
#1 Being reckless with your stats.
Numbers are powerful tools when it comes to PR. When used strategically, great stats can help a pitch get picked up, demonstrate momentum, or make your company story more compelling. When used recklessly, they can dampen opportunities, overshadow your messaging, and come back to haunt you.
#2 Wasting journalists’ time.
Journalists are exceptionally busy. Most field hundreds of inbound pitches per week and draft up to several stories a day - all while staying on top of social media, research, and sources. Increasing the likelihood of your news getting covered can often be as simple as understanding when to pitch and making it easy for them to cover your news.
#3 Handicapping your PR team.
Getting the most out of your public relations budget is often as simple as getting out of the way. Attempting to micro-manage their efforts (especially if you don’t have deep and up-to-date expertise on the media landscape) will typically get you less coverage, generate more work, and cut into the quality of your campaigns.
#4 Announcing things on the fly.
It can be tempting to think of PR as something that happens at the last minute - a decorative coat of paint to slather on your latest feature that makes people want to look at it. Resisting this urge and shifting to a more intentional strategy is one of the most consequential PR decisions a young company can make.
#5 Skipping messaging work.
The purpose of any press interview is to maximize the inclusion of your message in your coverage, and minimize the inclusion of anything else. Message pull-through is what helps advance your story and demonstrate your company’s trajectory. The only way to get it? Developing clear, consistent messaging for your company in general, and for any individual PR campaign.
As always, I'm available to chat about your PR strategy or anything else marketing related. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me at jamie@fuelcapital.com.