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