Build, Don’t Buy: Why a Good PR Strategy for Startups is Vital

Having been a marketing team member at a startup, I know what it’s like to work in one. Money is tight, everyone is taking on additional roles beyond their assigned job, and things move fast. When it comes to marketing or finding customers, you’re often hoping your investors can introduce you to the right people or that the business development manager can make something happen.

Relying on outreach calls, drip campaigns, and paid advertising will work, but how much money will you burn in the process? Marketing managers might convince themselves and their leaders that their current CAC is just the going rate. These same marketing managers might write off PR as an unnecessary expense, unable to draw a straight line to revenue from it. In today’s digitally driven world, the right PR strategy for startups can be a critical asset for growth.

Build, Don’t Buy

Startups often employ SEO and ad agencies to run five and six-figure ad campaigns on LinkedIn or other platforms. They get plenty of leads but fail to build meaningful connections with their potential customers. Instead, they spend thousands of dollars creating sales assets that guide them through a series of actions taking weeks or months, and buy expensive CRM software to track it all. Yes, this is a proven method that can develop good relationships between you and your customers, but again, at what cost?

For cash-strapped startups, leveraging a good PR strategy can be just as effective at a fraction of the cost.

Build a Strategy

A good PR strategy has an objective, goal-based approach. No, trying to get into as many articles as possible is not a goal you should strive for. Startups need to look around the PR and marketing world and see what they can afford, and that’s social media—specifically, LinkedIn. The platform is a treasure trove of professionals who utilize it daily, and it’s a sea of potential customers. Improving your LinkedIn presence should be your goal. Whether that’s measuring new followers, your impressions, or even the engagement rate on your posts, building a community of followers that consistently engage with your content is priceless. Unlike paid ads that pad your follower count, organic followers are genuinely interested and want to hear from you. If you develop enough trust, your followers won’t penalize or turn you off for making occasional sales pitches or asks. Furthermore, unlike paid media, these followers will stay tuned to your page and content.

Now that we know what we’re trying to build and what platform we’re building on, we’ll need content.

Build Content

There is a difference between sales assets and PR assets. As stated, sales assets are designed to have a reader take action, whereas PR assets are meant to encourage organic engagement and build trust. Creating PR assets isn’t hard in today’s digitally driven world—all you need is a phone and a computer, which I’m sure you already have. I’d recommend buying at least one quality microphone and a quality camera. However, the most difficult part of creating content is getting buy-in and participation from company leaders. It’s as simple as putting your face in front of the camera and being interesting—that’s it. I’d recommend talking about your product or industry, but more and more, “warmer” content is driving engagement and traffic to profiles. A good diversity of content will quickly earn you a loyal following. Here are some examples of simple, easy-to-build content that will boost your LinkedIn presence:

• Posting a news article and providing a unique insight
• Posting about a conference or event you attended
• Posting about a challenge you encountered at your startup and what you learned
• Posting about employees
• Videotaping a meeting you held (sensitive info edited out) to show what a meeting at your company looks like
• Taking pictures or videos of product testing
• Posting company announcements and corresponding press releases

How does PR play into this? A good PR strategy leverages all of these assets and turns them into media, podcast, or conference opportunities. It will take time, but after you’ve established a solid foundation of thought leadership and content, podcast hosts and conference organizers will start to take notice. They’ll notice your willingness to provide insightful opinions and the community you’ve built. These opportunities will lead to bigger and better opportunities.

Build a Process

A good PR strategy must have a thorough process to capture the value creation of your assets. For example, if the CEO just put out a blog on an industry-relevant hot topic, we’ll need to post that on the website or on LinkedIn’s native blog platform to drive traffic. We’ll then take that article and send it to relevant journalists and third-party bloggers to amplify it, but also to make them aware of your CEO and his opinions. Next, we’ll take that same asset and send it out to a few podcasts to see if they would be interested in having the CEO on to discuss it. Finally, we’ll create a few graphics featuring engaging quotes from the blog and link to that on LinkedIn. From that one piece alone, we have the potential to create five engaging assets that will drive meaningful traffic on LinkedIn. These actions should be put into a standardized workflow to hold everyone accountable.

Time is the New Currency

CEOs and startup executives have very little time, but without drawing traffic and eyeballs to your company, you may not be in business for long. Devoting time to building an engaged community of followers on LinkedIn, without spending much, is more valuable than a six-figure spend that yields a handful of enterprise leads. A good PR strategy will save you money, and when efficiently executed, time.