Autogenerated transcript
How to get press coverage on a startup budget

Alright, so hello, everyone as startup
Founders were all questing to get in TechCrunch
How can we get the press to run our news? In fact
his TechCrunch the right place because maybe journals and
other tech people read it but none of our customers read it So
do we need to pay big bucks to a
PR agency? Can we get PR without that even if we do
pay big bucks to PR agency will we get PR? So
it's a problem all of us have if we don't have
PR we have to spend lots of money with Google Facebook and
others on PPC ads and they've got more money than us
So that's not what we want to do So, is there a
better way?
So whenever I come up with people who doing awesome
things that I think our customers will love then
I love to tag team with them and create a webinar
So let me introduce the fellow panelists
and the experts on this call I'm the the naive
founder looking for help and what
we're going to do over the next  to  minutes The experts
will talk about a range of things that
they think that you need Please pop your questions in the
chat and at the end we'll go to Q&A and
in this video will be available after it's in
for anyone investors All right, so let me start with Tom over
to you Thanks Anthony
Oh, yeah good to me old I'm Tom I found
it mvpr about just under
two years ago My backgrounds in here on
comms I've been  years in the industry I was
most recently at a company called Edelman which
some of you will know as one of
the largest PR companies in the world where between Camille
and I who joined me about four months ago, we helped
build edelman's offering for startups and
it was off the back of the work that
we did there looking at how we worked with I mean really really
massive companies like Kraken and
yeah merge work with Airbnb and we
learned kind of yeah how companies need what
like what early stage started startups actually needed to do
in order to get coverage themselves
And then we built software around that so that you actually have the tools to
do it yourself and also most importantly
perhaps the data that helps you understand exactly which
journalists to show your content with so you're efficiency
You possibly can be and then also what
to share and
Yeah wraps up in a tool that allows you to build relationships with
journalists from the beginning All right So today we're going
to spread all those secret tips and techniques with everybody All
right and over let me hand
over to Sally So Sally's built sold companies
and actually our saw Sally's personal LinkedIn last
night about how to do everything for your company on
it like total budget Here's I spend instead of K spend
pounds So instead of whatever so love
those Sally over to you Thanks Anthony
So I started off Well, I
had a very brief career before I went into startups in
journalism I was a kind of freelance journalist across ITV
News for London and a few different kind
of breakfast shows and things like that I then quit to launch
My Gin Brown which I kind
of had a whirlwind experience and shortly exited after
but the key for me and while I'm now in the
pr space is that PR did everything
so I spent nothing on my
Marketing essentially from launch a short scale
and then an exit and all three of
those things were sort of massively helped by
getting the press press coverage that helped retail
a retail buyers know about my brand and press
directly led to kind of acquisition offers
coming as well after they kind of read about my journey
in the brand in National newspapers, like
Metro evening standard and Business Insider I've
now launched paper round, which is has kind
of been born out of I was working a lot of one-to-one with Founders and brands
on how to do their NPR and I thought right this will be better
in a small group format So I'm now doing some
reading of  to  That's okay
Cool and Camille over to you?
Thanks, Anthony Hi everyone So I work with Tom at
mvpr but I come from the world of both startups
and agencies So most recently I was head of public relations at
improbable the metaverse sort of unicorn and then
before that I spend about eight years in various agencies,
including Edmund running their startup offering for
the UK working with really early stage companies all the
way to their IPO So companies like
extension lilium Kraken kanakara risk, so
companies that sort of small and when big and so accompanying them
on that journey of PR and Communications and what
needs to be done in you know, the first instance and then at the
very end of the spectrum and so yes,
I've got experience across fintech Health that
climate Tech really kind of second agnostic but really excited about
now working with Tom to kind of, you know, lower the
barrier to entry for PR generally because I've always had
discussions with Founders about how expensive you know,
retainers were and and trying to find ways around it
So yeah, that's me All right, cool So
Thank you So now let's cut to a structured way that
we go through the landscape to get to what
is the landscape then you know what you can do So the first
thing it seems to me is like what covers PR
and to me I always thought the pr
is like you're right and Ice article and you send it to TechCrunch and then
you wait for them to run it and they don't run it and what to do next but
actually this quite a lot more to it So let's start with
if you were to hire a PR agency which are
the things they might do and then we'll jump into the subset
of things We're going to focus on here, which is
the pr piece so from my perspective,
I've always thought that you're going to hire a PR agency and
as it says on the term, they're going to get you PR
That's what I found is that that's only a
subset and what they're going to do is they're going to help on your PR strategy
They're going to help your company turn a voice They didn't
create your brand and a few other things and
that's a big package and then you can
expect them to perhaps write the content for you and you're
going to expect them to find incoming opportunities
So the male wants to write something
on the budget change They're gonna write you about your views
on that or on
You know taxi changes or whatever It might be so team
quickly your thoughts on what would
you expect from a PR agency?
And then we're going to dive into the pieces that
we are now going to look to do in a self-service new
way
Tom should we start with you
Yeah, sure So I think if you're going
to choose to work with the pr agency, like one have a really
really clear understanding of exactly what you want them to do It seems
like an obvious thing to say but a lot of people don't know anything about
the pr space and so often in your first interactions with
an agency, you're kind of look to them to set the bounds for
kind of yeah how it works in the way they'll
work with you and often that can mean that you'll end up with just a
lot of like really inefficient resource spent
doing things that don't drive value for you So in
the really early stage one of
the things I've always recommend companies is use an
agency to help get your messaging down and write
your values for you and look at like the
brand proposition and narrative that you want to share That's a
really really valuable piece and honestly, like even
when we did it now obviously pretty much
everything the team as a background doing this it's really
really hard because it's difficult to
separate yourself from the brand that
To create and it's really useful to have somebody external come in
and be like, okay, let's get everyone in a room we can argue about what we
think our brand values are argue about what we think our company's values are and the
messages that we want to share in like specific Channels with specific
audiences, but I would say get an agency
or somebody external can be a freelancer to help you do
that first because then it will
make everything you do subsequently a lot easier
I can go into more maybe let Sally
speak or Camille add to that All right, now you
can
I was just gonna say that kind of in the midst of creating like
my PR training for Brands I spoke to a lot of Founders
about their experience with pi agencies and sadly it was overwhelmingly largely
negative I'd say
about seven of the  of the brands I spoke to had like they overpaid
for a service that was under delivered and
I do feel sadly like there's a lot of people that go into PR
and agencies that maybe kind of Prof they're kind of taking advantage
of the fact that PR does feel like smoking mirrors
simply because it's the kind of active persuading a journalist and building
relationships So it's hard to kind of harder to nail that down There are
PR agencies out there that are good but
I think kind of I guess the focus of this webinar is you know,
how you can certainly start up level You can take the
bus on and be doing things yourself and building those relationships direct and
actually as a former journalist That's what we want when
you had a PR person or an agent in between you'd be
like you get out the way just put me in contact directly with
the business owner the sound of the spokesperson So yeah, I
guess it could be helpful for some people but largely
Say Do It Yourself certainly as a smaller brands?
All right, Camille
I was just gonna add to that and say so a good
way to think about it is strategic versus execution If you
needs you know, you you're going to need outside expertise and
people with PR background for doing the big strategic pieces
the brand positioning the messaging but if all you
need is a little bit of media coverage to get you started get
investors eyes a bit of credibility online for like a couple of Articles
You can do that yourself Absolutely It's like execution is
really easy to implement in
what we call in-house So within your team, you can upscale your
team members to do that themselves and and agencies can
come at a more strategic layer and perhaps maybe a
bit later stage when you need help with say crisis Communications
That's where you're going to need someone who's got like  years of
experience
All right Okay So let's go right back to the beginning
So you're a Founder you're on the call and you've got
a great product There's anyone problem No one in the world knows about
it So now you want everyone in the world to know about it
and how can you do that? What are the possibilities you've got so thing number
one, you can buy ads with Google and Facebook So
definitely don't do that because they've got more money than you only
do that when you've got product Market fits, you've
worked out your customer acquisition cost versus your lifetime value
and the lifetime value is greater than the customer acquisition
costs, but if you are not
Charging it or your lifetime values less
than your customer acquisition cost You just can be giving all your investors
or your money off to Facebook or Google So that's
for later stage So if you can't buy
ads, what's the next thing to do? Well content
marketing for me is always king and you
know, I've written literally hundreds of Articles and if
you can write great articles on the things that your customers
or users might be looking for and Google finds
them
Then that's great But that's got a
few limitations You can't write them all yourself Maybe you're not
the expert Can you get your team to write and we're going
to dive into that in a minute But the next thing is of course
your reach is only finite what
if you could get into other Publications, how do
you reach those? So now let's start with
getting your team to create great
content and then we're going to talk in a few minutes about how
to get distribution So to me the starting point
is some members of your team are domain experts They're
gonna know everything about whatever it is that you
do insurance taxes, whatever but they
may not have the gift of the Gap They may not have be brilliant
writers on the flip side There are
PR companies or brand agencies are
brilliant and writing but they know nothing about your area
of expertise So team
And I'll start with Tom What do you think is the winning formula to
get number one the strategy in
your team to focus on which things to phone
to to work on and then how you get them
to write content for either the
your own distribution or for Global and
have everyone in the company thinking about that as
a driving Point rather than sort of sitting indoors and
you know, just building more stuff on the Apple website
So I think the the starting point for most of
the cons that you do and the way that you should be thinking about
it and sourcing ideas for it is from customer
interviews You're you're never
to be having them Anyway, even if you're
pre-product and so you'll be literally speaking with
customers about the challenges they face and
hopefully Building Product that yeah or Building Services
that helps them solve that problem
but they'll tell you on those calls what their
challenges are they'll tell you like some of
the emotional feelings they have of frustration or whatever
It is around literally the
thing that they they have that you're solving for and cost me
entries are always for me the place to start and then
work out Okay, like we've got
these customers they've got these problems like let's work out what we
can write what content we can create which will help them as Sage the issues
they have and maybe give them some advice on how
to solve themselves which positions
Was the expert of the solution in any case and then
look within your company to see
how you as Anthony said like balanced the load of writing and
a simple thing to do that like we tend
to do with our clients for example is like  minute interviews
where you literally are like,
okay, we've got this customer problem We've got somebody internally as
the knowledge to solve this problem and that can be vertically specific
so it can be specifically about what your company or product
does or it can be what we turn to be like horizontal topics
which are about things like growing a company
or like how to build culture remotely It's kind
of like Evergreen things You can talk about and have relevancy for
as a Founder because you're building a fast Growth Company and once
you've done that then work out Okay, let's have
minute interview a bit like a journalist would which is
like, okay, how do we ask the people within the company questions which
helps us answer?
Their custom issue and then you can you can
plug it into gbt and we had a joke earlier about how
quickly it would take us to come up with a GPD to be
mentioned Right? But like yes, you can do that to build an outline You could
use an external copywriter if you wanted to and they could
write up for you But at least then you pull the knowledge out of the individual that
has it and share it in a way that you already know
is going to be relevant for customer segments because that's what
they told you in the interviews All right, and I
think by the way, that's a genius idea and it turns out
that's what I use for most of my articles I mean many found
slack and WhatsApp groups and when someone asks
the question, I begin typing and answer
then I think wait the scalable solution is to write an
article quickly right an article sometimes less
quickly and then that becomes something both for that person and
for everyone else so if you think about anything that is somebody
else might be thinking and take that
to write an article might start off short and then get
it enhanced later
Then you are if you're
answering for one person You probably have lots of
other people in the world looking for the same thing Sally thoughts
Well, just on what you said at the end there, you know if there's
a question coming in and you know, it's kind of irrelevant and
that kind of brings us on nicely to what is newsworthiness You
know, what makes it into the news and what doesn't and essentially
when you're assessing either
the story there are many different formats, you know, you think about the kind of
news we consume this could all be brought under
the branch of PR there's business news, there's updates So there's more kind
of founder Journeys or what we call the hero story framework where
you talk about, you know challenges you've had and
then overcoming obstacles and but really
the art the question that you have to answer all of them is why
why do I care? Why does someone else care what
and you can kind of get start to get a sense of what stories would be
good to engage or to pitch to a journalist If you kind of actively look
at what you consume and what kind of stories or content
you consume and this is really where the lines become blurred
because content writing podcasts LinkedIn It's
all kind of PR to a degree certainly these
days as well I'm having lots of press
Like the times for example covered through a LinkedIn post
So it's all kind of intertwined But largely
when you say is this relevant, there's certain kind
of humanistic Stories the kind of the underdog things
like that But there's also kind of if you look at wider groups,
you know, who's Incorporated here? Is it an entrepreneurs group
is it cat owners? Is it you know, whatever it is
if there's a significant group and that can even be location-focused So
for example, if you're a London Business you immediately
might be interested as a London story to either
the London news ITV, for example, or the evening
standard, which is a London Focus or kind of a local press
like Hackney is there or whatever so it's finding it's
asking the question of yourself Who cares about
this it is the group significant enough certainly if people
are asking questions and forums and there's a lot of interested in then probably
Yes, the same applies to what a journalist will be interested in
as to kind of how it does on social media for
example or a blog post
All right So thanks for that So now maybe we dive
into like the secret tip that you can give what is
and I'm gonna ask everyone how can
you reach a journalist? I mean assuming that as and and I
think the and I know it's Tom in a few moments but
start with Sally which is let's say you found some
contacting me, you know for journalists
So you've looked them up on LinkedIn or you look them up on Twitter and you'll
tell us in a second which is the preferred way that you see and then
you're going to Ping them something what might
you ping them to get them to respond and and
that is probably like the key takeaway point and then
everything goes from there
So I think yeah, this is one of the key things So first
of all, every journalist, that's a journalist will be on Twitter Essentially
I've almost never met a journalist that isn't and that's
because they also used to tend to use things like
hashtag General requests, which you can search and you can
find journalists that are essentially as a journalist You have like five,
you know, five six stories a week or depending on what format and
you need someone to illustrate the story human beings don't care about a
story unless it affects human being so the example was used is
you know, if there was a polluted part of the coast
and all the fish died people wouldn't care enough until
you profile the fisherman who's lost his house because he
couldn't pay the mortgage because there's no fish to fish So it's about
putting the human the human story
to illustrate the wider news story For example, we mentioned the budget
now, you should not wait This is the thing
when people think about I think this is why PR is so daunting I
guess for a few journalists are people so
think about how you'd talk to a potential customer, you
know, read their work and it's essentially kind
of
Reach out before you need something from them Each journalists,
especially since many so many journalists of Freelancers these
days they almost running many businesses of their own
So how many eyes they get on their story how well that story
performs that can relate directly to kind of more work to
hire pay to desirable kind of job promotions So
you think thinking about them as someone that you can help before
you ask for something from them, so reaching out and just
saying hi, you know, I'm the founder or so and so
in this business we stand for this and here are our customers I'd
love to be helpful or included in
any stories who are writing about, you know, we're affected by the budget, you
know, you can mention ideas that you have keep it short and offer
help in the first instance and that can be done through Twitter or they
often have their emails as well on the Twitter
They are looking for stories So remember this is welcome the
time don't feel nervous about reaching out saying hi,
but just talk to them like a human being not like a sort
of scary pedal store person You're quite not know what to say with
Okay, and I like the idea of reaching out
In fact sometimes well before you've got anything
that you want to go to with you might say you've got a
date or information on something, you know ping me I'm
a somewhat expert on the space in anything you need If you
know then then it's it's a conversation rather
than just a hassle each time Okay, and nine
times top  they'll know what they want because actually a journalist
might not need you now, they might need you next week or in
six months time and when they know you exist and you're looking for press which
surprisingly maybe to some not all businesses are seeking
this kind of thing So actually knowing that person's up
for it They're Keen they kind of you know, they're in a
conversation I've got their contact details that's already putting you
steps ahead most businesses So yeah,
really having a conversation and having you know, there's nothing
that's just stop you from doing that today, I guess and they'll say
oh I have a story you fit into it Do you have anything to say
on this nice and then you're going to find folks in your area, right?
So if you do tea you're gonna start I mean
you
Crunches may run your funding round, but you probably going
to talk to whichever mags cover that and be a
source of whatever it is that that journalist is looking for Okay Cool
Camille over to you
Thanks Anthony I think Sally like covered a lot
of stuff to add to that the so that
there's different Dynamics with media, right? There's relationship building So it's
like saying hi I'm here I do this I know you do that that
sector I'm part of it I'm happy to chat that's kind of relationship building
Then you've got the journal requests Dynamic that
Sally mentioned which is okay The journalist is looking for a source you're
you know, if you're quick about it and you get some really good comments
over to them they will use it That's kind of like transactional
almost and then I guess there's a third way which
is you think there's a really interesting story to be told about
your sector and no one's talking about it and you want
journalists to be talking about that So that's kind of the trickiest
of the three because you don't have an entry point necessarily
you can just say you need to pitch a story And so
when those when when thinking about those we see
a lot of startups not really understanding what
makes the story a proactive story So we kind
of have a few ingredients that you can use to kind of
almost like a filter for which you're around your content to be like
Is this a news story is this a mediast media friendly story
and one is data So using data, you
don't have to provide it yourself You can find it on on other sites
as long as it's like relevant and recent using data
puts things into perspective and it's really important for journalists
because they need to be quoting data to get eyeballs on
their articles the human element that Sally was mentioning is
equally important make it human don't make it like a
dry BB story because even in BB the other person is
a human It doesn't matter if the subject
is technical they still want to hear about kind of human emotion And then
you need you need the story to be relevant to
that journalist audiences back to this idea of like reading their
previous articles and kind of inquiring about what they're
subscriber list include is it is it's CFOs Is it
cios? Are you writing for that audience or you just writing because
you're you want to say something about your company without caring much
about whether the audience wants to hear and then another another
big element is that is
using influence So if
you have even just one well-known partner or one
employee who's got like a great like LinkedIn profile
high profile in their own kind of little industry use those
names because they have their own network and that
multiplies the visibility for your content So those kind of
like four ingredients are good to bear in mind when you're like writing
content for a journalist or pitching a story to adrenas
It sounds actually very similar to pitching to investors
you, you know, you can get
a warm intro That's great You want to come up with the
human story, but then of course the difference
with the journalists is you the things
you looking that you want them to run off and
the opposite of what they want to run see legal's
launches new website Totally no interest from
anybody Right? We've launched new website We've changed
our pricing plans Like why doesn't TechCrunch want to
run with that? So you say take
us very quickly the things that you
may find interesting
That a journalist will want to pick up and run with with verse
the ones like don't waste your time and
it'll all come up with something that will get it over the
line So I just found that funny because yeah, this is always
a dilemma of
businesses like
you yes, I want sales I want credibility I want people to
buy my you know product or whatever and this
is where I guess being a bit more clever about it is if
you send that to adjust or no one's probably bloody interested in
that I'm not running it and that's an immediate way to get closed down So what
you do is you bury it in a more interesting
Story, I guess you either have
you maybe you find out a pain point about your customer or you
connect it to the cost of living you're looking at a wider
hook which is why timing is very important But you
know, for example with Anthony's example, if you
did a kind of found a story about the trials
and tribulations of building seed legals and the passion
piece and at the end you go see legals has
just you know, it's it's the secondary bit that you get in
there at the end But actually it's not just about the journalists about
the region If you create a compelling human story
there about ambition and Relentless kind of
dedication and blah blah and then someone will
read the to rewards the end of that article We will actually get a mention
of the price of your service or you're good and how they can
get, you know the link through to the website So it's kind of crucial not
just for it's for everyone basically the success of the story
the effects of the pr Etc It's all intertwined with
telling something that's a bit more interesting
Okay, cool, Tom Thank you Tom I
completely agree I think it we often I
mean obviously where with a lot of startups and yeah, we
all we often account companies encounter companies is
like very much similar to Anthony, you know where we've changed our brand and
we want to let everyone know or we've updated our website and we think
it's like super important or our pricing and I think is a general rule
of thumb generally speaking Nobody cares that you've changed your brand
because it's it's not as Sally said
it's not an exciting story unless you literally talk through the process and
challenges that you had Yeah, maybe you
know finding a decent like brand agency you're coming up with new ideas or finally
domain that like is even available like those kinds of
things then make it more human, but generally speaking as a
rule of thumb don't you press announcements about your brand because it'll be
a waste of your time to be honest, but there
are things that are a lot more news than that
and but I think Sally touched on it and and talked
about it and sort of Camille in terms
of understanding what kind
Content is going to be relevant for journalists and Sally mentioned
a minigo Look at what they're writing about as a
rule of thumb It's really good to one always
your research into journalists analyze
what they've written about so on our platform, for example, we analyze
trailing  days So we look at trailing
days of what a specific journalist has written
about and we look at the unique topics very granular within that
and we use that in order to understand exactly which
which companies we've got on the platform will be
relevant for those journalists because we know we've got companies
writing about specific topics or wanting to talk about specific topics And
then we've got a ton of data on journalist specifically
that are literally writing about the things that our companies
want to talk about
And as a as a starting point, we
look at the companies, I guess
ICP ideal customer profile and goes back to your like custom
interviews and the kinds of customers you're looking
to reach and then we run the same analysis on the journalist audience
because journalist is not the like end
game The journalist is effectively like a
gatekeeper to an audience that is you're hoping
is going to be interested in buying your product And so
Generally speaking is a good rule of thumb is is the
is my ICP the same as the
audience is similar to the audience The journalist is writing for
And if it is similar, can I
write content that will provide value
to that audience and if you can do that, then you're
interested in the journalist interest will be aligned and
if they're aligned then there's a good chance They're going to want to know
about user company as Sally said they might not want to write about you
right now, but they're definitely want to know about you because you'll have
domain expertise It's relevant for them and their audience's and
ultimately a Sally said, yeah, a lot of them are small
businesses in their own right or running their own
Publications, but publications of businesses They want,
you know, more subscribers and they want people to spend longer on their
pages and to engage more because they get to charge more advertising
revenue And so if you're if you're
insure that whatever you're writing provides value to the the journalists
readers and you can make sure that you're Alliance you
your incentives are aligned with the journalists, then they're more
likely to write about you but a
lot of that could be solved by kind of deep Yeah deep Yeah deep data
analysis
It's gonna add a small you quick anecdote I just
thought of the example while and you guys are chatting We had
a p course on the on the brand training We
just did we had on session three it was how to write press release and we
had an example press release from the brave kind of
cohort and that was a pH just
launched peacos kind of supplement brand
essentially and the press release I was
forwarded to kind of have a look at and rework was all kind of it
was you know, here's the thing It's been launched lots of lots of
facts and we reworked to that because this woman this female
founder had an incredible story We actually she'd been
told at  that she probably could never have kids because of
this Pecos diagnosis and then she went through kind of
all this traditional kind of medicine failed her
and so on so forth and then she'd gone this journey to retrain as a new traditional
therapist and then launched this line which then enabled her
to feel like for pregnant within just three months So this
there's so many crazy stories behind people's Brands They
they almost don't know until someone works out of them
Then that immediately got got picked up actually and went
straight straight out was picked up one of the first journalists she reached out
to so the story is really really crucial But I think
deep Tech with what mvpr is doing is really useful
because it's doing that piece I think it's quite time consuming to
sit down and look at what journalist has written week on
week or day on day so having that kind of that Tech Tool alongside
is incredibly useful I would say
For Brands and kind of anyone involved in
that sector really
Okay, so thank you So what I'm hearing throughout is,
you know for everyone on the call you think you're here
and you know PR of press journalists are there
and there's an insurmountable Gap that no, you can reach out find somebody
on Twitter LinkedIn whatever and reach
out and do it a few times and just like investors You have to reach out
potentially quite a few before anything bites and it might
also be a relationship that gets built over time that if you find the
right ones and nurture it then hopefully they'll
call you or you'll find the right point to to call
them
So I did like the idea that the mention of doing your
research So in many Publications in anything
online the journalists or the writer's name will be a
hyperlink and you can click and see all the other articles they've written
and in the same way when you're doing investor Outreach
you might write an investor going Hey, I saw you
invested in this you want you want something that personalizes that
something that sees them seeing you've
done the research and wants to reply because
you put the work in so if you've
been in my take if you find a journalist is written on
something adjacent or related and you reference that
you're much more likely to get a response from them
and they see that they're going to go back to you afterwards So
Let me talk very quickly and change the subject to attributions
So this is what article
makes sense and
is worth doing because here's what I find in your
mind that your new product launch and all the
features of it and so on but actually like no one's realistically going
to run that what the article that will be run is
something that doesn't even
link to you or just mentions your name or maybe
mentions your company name, which is great I got in
some publication but there's no click link back to
me So what I'd like to explore for a few minutes is
how do you balance the the big you know,
TechCrunch is going to link to my site and my product
great unlikely, but awesome if they do first
these  Publications with
less traffic than my own site mention
me and all my product with no backlink
What what makes sense What should
you pursue? How much time should you put into each Pol?
a quantity is just like a really good
rule of thumb like
use workout exactly what you want to drive So I
mean really this is a very very long Yeah, maybe
we can even use we probably take up the entirety of
the rest of this webinar talking about this but I think
as a starting point, yeah
Only go for the stuff that really drives value in for the
things that for the things that you need to achieve against your marketing objectives,
which should ladder up against your business objectives So
for things like yeah as much
Anthony says for like, you know, I mentioned in an article in TechCrunch
or versus like a thought leadership piece that
you have placed in a publication That's as you said,
like maybe has a lower readership and then your own website
Think about the kind of business you are and go back to your ICP and
work out who you're trying to sell to and then work out whether they actually exist
in those kinds of audiences And so if you
are a tea brand for example as the example was earlier
Your customers probably not reading TechCrunch So you've been
mentioned in TechCrunch has almost zero impact on your ability
to sell tea to different people now investors read
TechCrunch and lots of investors scrape the internet and
have big data houses And yeah, like data
teams that will pull that information in into their sourcing
so that you register on that radar and there's no doubt
getting mentioned in TechCrunch or one of the big Publications is a
really good signal for investors
So if that's your purpose then yeah getting
mentioned in TechCrunch makes a lot of sense Even if
it's just a mention It doesn't have to have a backlink in
it And so that will still drive value But if you're
looking to sell tea
You're much more likely to actually find customers in
the consumer facing lifestyle media If
it's you know, Boutique T brand for example,
you want to go for the higher end So, you know like
Tabloid newspapers like maybe not the right place but
like a GQ would be and so if that is
the case then obviously yeah prioritize, you know,
you working out exactly which journalists at
a broad spectrum of Publications are interested
in like writing about Boutique tea brands that have
audiences that will drive customer acquisition for you and
focus on that instead and so really as long
as it always links back to the objectives that
you have as a business and that could be yeah could be
to get investment or it could be to sell your tea prioritize based
on your own objective internally I think for a
lot of Founders What often happens is you have
an opportunity come in or you have the opportunity to write something
you read something like oh my God I should I should definitely comment
and then
and then you have that inertia and you get stuck It's like oh, I just
want to tell I want to say everything rather than
really focusing on like the message that is
gonna hook and provide value to the like
customer or the the Persona that you're looking to
attract
And then delivering it Okay All right
So it seems like this there's a big piece about thinking
strategically This one is about brand building I don't
need backlinks This is about selling a product I
want to backlink This is about thought leadership and then
also, you know, ultimately you want to get customers,
but well before that you might want to get investment you
have anything built the product? Yes, and you know
certainly funds
Have the bigger ones have got teams internally and they
Scout the internet or use AI or tools or
whatever and the more mentions you're getting in the more prominence You get
the more incomings and I've seen if we get an article somewhere
suddenly the like  investors write
you it's awesome You don't even raising Investments It's
great and you then you try and figure out what articles somewhere
led to this interest if you can get
those that inbound then life is much easier
for you So can I
switch quickly to it was
mentioned PR news wire So question for
the panel, which is doesn't make
any sense Is it worth using tools like PR news
wire and others to try and send messages
out or is that paying for nothing and no
one uses those? What's the best way I mean, we've said, you know hitting up
people individually on LinkedIn I guess mvpr would
be a site to find
all those news peonies wire
type things worthwhile discuss
and so I I wrote in the chat actually, I
think it's different It's different tools for different purposes
Right? So PR news where I was is the probably one of
the best tools out for like PR press release send out
but it's mostly to build your SEO So
you want volume and you know, you're not gonna get it through any other
way because your news is for instance launching a
product or your website or something, you know during this and
not gonna be interested in so you're not going to be able to get it your coverage
through the what we call the earned media route So you have to pay for
it So it's good SEO building but it doesn't do
much for the credibility piece because most people
know that those articles are paid for and they've not,
you know, they've no Mets the kind of threshold for Quality that
you have when a journalist writes about it So I would say yes
if the purpose is to build SEO and presence and
and you can use them They're pretty efficient, especially if
you want to go in different countries and you know, you know,
you don't have a team on the ground You don't know anything like PR news
has a good like International capabilities, but
it's if it's a really interesting story and you have a
future in this contact you could write about it It's probably better to do like an
exclusive interview with your best contact and then
they're right an article and then other scholar
Okay, so I think that sounds like you know
in your strategy map of why you doing it if you're
an investor and you Google the person and the
company and look at you know, Google news and and
the  mentions of them in
the last month That sounds like a great signal So for creating
that sort of noise for people who are searching for
your company for news This
might be a good strategy, but in terms
of getting customers, it's complete waste of
time most likely because they never looking at those Publications They're not
looking at Google news on you They're looking at something about
your products and and looking for something
that you can give them as utility All
right So on that journey, I
think of newswires is
like a backstop
So like basically you run
through the triage of how relevant is this content?
Is it is it providing value? Is
it likely to be covered like you basically
and when you get to the bottom of the stack and it's like okay, we exhausted
most of these options Maybe it's maybe it
maybe it is your brand announcement Maybe you know, which we know is not
relevant for but yeah for most audience unless you wrap it into a
like a longer story Maybe it's yeah, you're launching
into a new market and you don't have any like contacts
already there those in those
circumstances I think newswires can be
an alternative the challenge to be honest with newswires
is they just add to the noise in a journalist
inbox and they spam to high
heaven journalist inbox, which is a massive problem and
actually in my opinion leads to a lot
of really interesting I mean the collective of everybody using newswires
would mean that yeah, I mean frankly Jonas would
just turn them off because
So much news to Source through I
mean some of the Jonas we work with received like three or  emails a
day Like it's just not a realistic number of
like pitches to get through and especially when a lot
of them are news wise the newswires will just get ignored I'd say that I
% ignored PR news for her things in my inbox
when I was a journalist So just to make this really clear the other issue
I think that we discussed is crafting the story and PR
news one and things like that They just almost take
what you give them half the time and just put it straight out So that story isn't engaging
so it's almost like in name only you've got
PR and honestly the other key thing is
as a journalist One of the big things about journalists is
what is news is whether who's who's covering it?
So once you do get, you know, press in a recognize
and respected newspaper, whatever it
is Media outlet and you go and what this was my personal strategy
was going Oh, hi Metro I've just
been featured in the evening standard Are you interested in covering the story and they
go Oh you've been featured This is almost like a weird plucker
This is newsworthy because someone else thinks it's newsworthy It's
the same at ITV We were like, oh the BBC's covered it will
have to cover it now so you can take that But if you go without being
PR newswire, no one's really going to look twice at that almost
the name puts you off because you're always going spammed by them So I'd say
yeah, I wouldn't say it's something to go
after I say so I like I like the fomo or
you know, they did it So so you're missing out if you
don't
It is like it works
That's actually a really like that That's not something we've covered
out right but Camille and Sally kind
of touched on it earlier, but if you have an audience already, and we talked about
it with the influence a little bit, but if you
haven't audience already, of course journalist looking to actually add to
their own so that's why often, you know, when you when you have
something published a journalist will then want you to share it on your own social platforms
and that's because they're looking to basically bring what
the audience that you have already into themselves
And as I said get into subscribe get them to engage
and so fomo is a big thing Yeah
for sure If one journalist has covered it
It's a really good it one it's evidence that you have an audience already and
that you have an Engaged one at that a publication that
is credible It means that you're more likely
to get more coverage in the future But yeah,
okay in terms of you know
Stories the journalists are looking at there are
a few Facebook groups I think there's a paid one I forget which it
is Maybe you remember the name and you can join and journal
Ago, I'm looking for an article I need three people in Hull who've
been affected by asteroids or something like that And and
if you happen to have a story on that, I've joined
one of them but there was
so much noise in there It's like you can't do a day job
So Sally's busy nodding any thoughts to
those make sense it Yeah I think I
know it's one of talking about and honestly, I'd say
% of the people on there don't have success now
It's almost a victim of its own success because there are so many Brands out
there and so many Keen Founders and one space you have a journalist saying
I'm looking for one case study and they get maybe a hundred replies which
is why having an inn and a personal relationship
and an email thread with a journalist one to one You can
be that first person they go to because you're hearing
it direct once it goes out on a group, especially like the
one that you mention I think is light bulb It's you
know, you're just fighting too for now It's so many
other people that want it in a heard about it So I say there's
yeah, I think it's an okay
It's useful to get the names of journalists as well and kind
of be able to reach out to them separately and at six pounds a month
or whatever It's not it's not a bad thing to have I'd say certainly worth
your investment more than the pr newswire things
But yeah, it's you want to try and get some sort
of bespoke relationship going there because you're not going to have that much mock
success I'd say even if you join for a month
and like hang out for two days, I think
it's a valuable insight to see how things work and
what people are looking for and then looking at the responses from
other people like to do that So lame, I would never run that
as a story Okay great learning point don't do that All
right Camille thoughts
Yeah, I tend to agree with that I find those things particularly
helpful to like take the Pulse of the media kind of
new cycle to be honest, like on our platform like during
March We had perhaps like % International women's
day request We're like across BB like
super deep tech company Media company
to like the tech rentals and sifted everything was
about International women's day and I I didn't really know before that
This was such a big deal like in my PR days I would be like forget the,
you know World War today World environment day
like there's never there's too noisy You're never gonna cut through but actually we
saw like last month that journalist really
really want content around certain things So even
just to look like the trends of what journalists are
interested in that's also super valuable
Okay, so let me talk very quickly
about on the record off the Record when talking journalists
and then we're going to talk about who writes the content So let's
do on the record off the Record So you've managed to
reach out to a journalists and you know
in the tech space journalists are generally
good everyone has to work together and no one's looking
to generate to write a bad news story It's an
ecosystem and and everyone depends on each other the
journalists want companies to talk to them So they're not
going to just the company and the company is looking for
You know PR so they're going to talk to the journalists But of course
if you talk to the mail, it might be very different So give
us everyone quick
tips on what on the record and off the Record mean and what
you should and and shouldn't say and I'm quite
amazed that one of our politicians gave
a journalist all his WhatsApp messages
with an NDA I mean, it's insane I've
you know, you don't need  bit
encryption or not If you hand over
the all your WhatsApp messages, this is
gingerly protected within NDA It's mental Anyway, what
give us a quick update on the record? Which
things should you blab about? Which one should you not which
ones should you blather that to get a call and then shut
up over to you
I think it's a general rule Like if
you're speaking with the journalists, everything is on the record Yeah, unless
it's it's something about super sensitive and
like you very very clearly like defined in advance
that is is completely off the record I think yeah I
know that sometimes Founders will say on it This
is totally off the Record you're on the call I think if you
have a verbal agreement and you know with a journalist in advance that
it generally is but you don't get to like be you don't
get to say oh this is off the record and then say it and
accept that like a, you know journalist might not run with
that because you said out loud I think it depends
on your audience Right? Like there are different kinds as
you related to kind of the male and there are different kinds of
journalists and different kinds of yeah
news outlets Etc and
I think
Generally speaking You shouldn't be afraid of speaking with journalists most
journalists The majority of journalists are not out
there to get you they want to pause like they basically want
to share positive news with their audience that will ultimately engage them
They're not looking for you know, yeah like
Comments on you know, layoffs and stuff like that because there are
specific kinds of journalists that cover news like that But if you're
doing a Founder profile, for example, like chances are
if you know take callanburroughs of
Business Insider, like he speaks a lot of Founders all the time very friendly
journalists He's not going to be digging like behind the scenes for
for things that's gonna be like, you know inflammatory because
it's just not the kind of journalist he is right and so it
depends but like generally speaking most journalists are
not out to get you or to fight like that underneath the story
and publication as well Right Tom and also
just any relationship like in the relationships and your life
and business do you trust that person and how much do you trust them? I'd
say if you have a long standing relationship with some of the kind
of journalists, I have relationships would have been over three or
four years now and yeah, I've done off the Record kind of industry bits,
I guess just to inform them of bits
that are going on And so yeah, so I'd say
it's very much depends and some Publications which I wouldn't name
Maybe someone the Tablo
be very very careful about saying things that you don't intend to
get out there
I learned this at the BBC wave, you
know form of my career You've been working
super hard to get any mention in a
publication and it would be about some new product you've done
and in the best case you get some mention and
in the BBC like two days in like the people in yellow
bar has it suits for testing against DRM and
Anthony they'd like to interview about the license fee It's
like holy money what just happened I'm totally unprepared
for this anyway changing subjects
to who writes the article So
let's let's explore quickly because it's
of two ins and the Spectrum one of them is
You can engage with the journalists They're going to tell you
some things that they want You're gonna have a call with them probably give them
a brain dump and a lot of things we're going to talk about that in a
sec what to do and what not and how long to talk for but on
the other hand of the spectrum you get excited about
something you write an article and now you're shopping the
article around one tip for me before I go
to you, which is hackanoon the next web and
other Tech Publications so long as
it's not self-promotional for you will often will run
those you can sign up on hakanoon in
particular and Tech the next web as
a content provider and they give you all sorts
of tips and tools and so on so you may find that
writing an article
And then going for distribution is good The
question then for the panel is can
you put on your website first or not? How
long do you give it before? No one takes it before you give up
and put on your website just put on LinkedIn and and
social to get leads to it So let's talk quickly
about you write an article and then you looking for
distribution for your article
I think it depends on the publication So what
we call lower Tierra Publications, very specific
trade media often will want you to have it
on your blog because that expends Their audience as well
But if you're talking to someone let's take French of sifted They will
absolutely want what is called an exclusive on your content and
they will not want you to have it on your blog before so it's kind
of determining what the target audience is And generally
if you're publishing an article
in a in a even a higher chair media,
you can always make something out of it the nuances do
you post it as is on your blog and you can do that
with Liberty Publications, or do you repackage it into something different and
for repackaging existing content without spending lots
of time writing something new you can definitely use Trinity Beauty and brainstorm
ideas on how to expend on the point in the article
to have something on your own channels that has
been published elsewhere, but it's slightly different or gives a different point of view
Okay, cool Any questions from the
audience team that you'd like to pick out? We've had
a fantastic chat session going I think there's been a parallel
conversation right there any anything
to pick up on for now?
So email as one sorry
time someone's just come up on an email on the length of how long
what's the best press have you put together a press release which by
the way, there's lots of kind of templates and things I'm sure so MVP
all kind of helping that department You can get free press
release templates online, which is where I started How do you send that
over? And what's the best what kind of what you looking at in
the actual body of the email? Well, if you're reaching out specifically for a
story, I would keep the email bit really short to the
point I have a story that might be right for your ex publication
address them by their first name flattery always
goes Well remember journalistic human beings Yeah brilliant art
school And so but keep it short Snappy because journalists have
the shortest attention spans and as Tom and can
we have mentioned hundred emails and your inbox? So it's a story
about this Here's the journeys and obstacles or whatever
you're selling Would it be of interest short and snappy and
then press release attached below images and interview
available and request So you want to keep the email sure
and the press release should also be maybe one to
pages with the story in a shorter short sentences
lots of spacing low block
text and a little buyer at the end which is who you
are and what your company does and who the target audience is
Okay, so my story in that space by the
way is when we started seed legals I wrote to Mike Butcher the
editor TechCrunch back then say see
legal is exactly in line with TechCrunch readers
I've got a you know, will you
run something on on the launch and he said wrote back
very nicely saying send me information
that do not send me a press release The
press release is dead By the way when I said do not send me a press release
and then he sent me to an article he wrote which you
can Google Mike Butcher The press release is dead And the
idea is the press release is, you know, today we've
done X, but he says this is complete waste
of time what you should do
He's got about a dozen questions, which is
why is this important? Why does anyone
care? How are you making money who your
competitors? Why is the timing now and a
few other questions? And so I said, thanks
I'll get back to you in a few days and took me three
months to have two more versions of the website
before I was actually happy that I had good
answers to those questions So actually if you Google
Mike Butcher the quest the press release is dead It's
valuable not only in in coming up with good coverage, but
in fact essential for coming up with
your website and product messaging because it's teaching
you what people are looking for where else
they might be going And if you can't answer the host
questions actually probably don't really have much of the business
So getting that right first and then everything else helps afterwards
I think it just thing though
I would I would definitely argue against their but don't
when you don't need it You're having a conversation don't drop present
Someone unless they ask for it, but what it does mean is a
journalist is I don't have to keep going back and forth You know, you might have
a tight deadline I need to know the five W's so who
what where why how all that information
I'm just going to come up and ask So if you can anticipate then
yeah that key information I think it's still
useful it just by whether it's required or not
So okay funnily enough
We I actually I have wanted it might
join us but we we with
mvpr we basically have companies fill in
a it's a press kit essentially when when they on
board onto the platform and a part of that fun enough has insights in
it, which literally are mapped against Mike's questions, which Anthony
says are things like, you know, what problem you
solving in like two or three sentences What traction can you demonstrate who
are your competitors something that nobody wants to share but
I can tell you we have obviously with journalists view
the Press pages on our site and we track what
they engage with on the page that we can feed their
back to companies and educate you on how you can communicate with journalists
in the future based on literally what
they've engaged with on your page But a
part of that is obviously tracking across the whole
across all of the startups that we work with what
gets engaged with the most and every single time It's the model
which has the competitors in it And the reason for that
is because
It really helps the journalist to understand the audience
that you and that the landscape that you sit within when
they understand who you deem to be competitive because then they
already know Okay, we've we've covered similar companies in the past It's
been well engaged with it follows that if I talk about this company, it
will be well engaged with now All right a small
small like a tip it on like which I
think you're probably thank me for he loves receiving plain text Do
not include a PDF because journalists spend
ages trying to transfer remember they've got us they've
got a Content management system they're plugging into so they can publish
the article they spend hours like literally take
trying to extract text from PDFs and stick it in
their content management platform So, yeah, if you do something to Mike, then
you're playing text email and he'll eventually thank me
for that
And cool All right So now the hour
has flown by amazingly fast What I'm
going to do is turn to each of you and say, you know, what's the top
takeaway Point tip and then why people
should contact you afterwards Camille over
to you
So my top tip is before you think about
doing any PR at all Just just think about is your
product and website ready And do
you know who your targeting with your efforts? And is there a
specific objected underlying the prf it's there's way too many sort of
doing PR for the sake PR and it's just a waste of time and money
If you don't Focus before doing the kind of like the
deed, so yeah and then in terms
of communicating with us, maybe I'll let Tom see that with with
this founder founder had on
Tom
something we've we've sort of talked about but but
not covered in kind of any detail any depth
of detail anyway is
Looking at how you improve your efficiency doing PR over
time If nothing else in terms
of in terms of the way, we touched on measurement earlier and I could
go into Yeah, I could probably speak for about five or ten
minutes on how to ladder up the pr efforts that
you have So they track against your marketing metrics Like yeah total
piece is not a piece of coverage for example as like
the starting point and then looking at domain Authority looking at link like
link clicks Etc as like a much more
Yeah scientific approach to actually measuring PR
but on a high level make sure
that every single PR I say
Activity but really track all of the different kinds
of content you share
And track how efficient you are pitching the
journalists against every single piece of
type of content So if you've got a partnership announcement that you
need to share look at the journalists you pitch look at
how many look at how many like open your emails how many actually publish
articles do the same for your higher announcements the same for
your product launches do the same for your opinion pieces any funny announcements You've
got track how efficient you are and if
you're working with an agency make them track how efficient they are because I
promise you they're not tracking how efficient they are And once you
do that you what will allow you to do over time is
get more efficient doing PR you'll bring down
the effort that you have to put in in order to increase the results that
you get
And that will be really valuable to you and you'll learn over time
It will also allow you to collect what we call
our basically a press list or sweetheart list build a
list of journalists that you want to engage with over the
next two three years of you building a business and work
out like you would any like, you know, significant Partners
or investors how to get in front of them and then
consciously proactively build relationships
with them over time so that you increase all of
those metrics that are directly associated with
how efficient you are because in an Ideal World So our
one of our driving metrics on the platform is how many
messages get sent from companies to journalists and how
many responses get sent back from journalists to companies because ideally
You never want to be one-to-one because you know, then that you're
not pitching enough journalists, but you want to be as close
to one to one as you possibly can be so that you know that every time
you send a message to a journalist They'll send you something back and
at least give you feedback or publish the thing that you've
sent them That would be my my guiding it
might last last advice All right
Yeah, I make it short and stuffy on my
one because it's own aware of the time I'd say personally for
me I'd say a scattered on approach is
never beneficial it's time heavy lots of
the leads that you put out There won't come back I've probably had
one journalist provide five or six articles over a couple
of years So I say look at your competitors build
a few relationships, maybe five six and that's gonna
mean that like along the time the top
time far less effort far more results
as you kind of, you know, you understand and then the other thing is on be
able to describe who you are what you care about
and what your business does in  words or less because conciseness
is so key when you're talking to a journalist
the time or they need the key information so that would
be a
Starting and everything else Everyone said has been great as well fully All
right
Thank you So my take is
As a small startup and even when you're not that small
your goal is to appear to investors and customers
much bigger than you really are and I take inspiration
from I think apocryphilly Napoleon was
surrounded was outnumbered
by much greater enemy Force
So he sends a few soldiers up into the surrounding Hills
and they lit bonfires and the enemy at night and
the enemy went Oh my God, we're surrounded God completely demoralized anyone
the battle So would you want to do is you want
to with your very small resources light a lot
of fires on the internet so that when investors
search for you instead of seeing nothing, they see
you popping up everywhere you getting listed and so
what is the most efficient way to do that? Well paying somebody
for that you don't have the money and you should be spending on
development this this whole session was
all about
You know don't feel afraid get out there make it newsworthy
go and whether it be content writing
yourself putting it out on Publications you your
own site medium social and then
getting in other Publications and then getting in ultimately when
you can the biggest Publications and
and working that formula to be appearing for
your investors and your customers bigger than
you are and of course getting the traffic as a result
I hope this was beneficial I think
you've got all the contacts on the Eventbrite already Thank you
so much and any questions reach out and
we're here to answer them Thanks all look to see an article from
you online soon by all