PR tips for a start-up

Well, don’t worry! Here are our five top tips for generating greater brand awareness, that you can implement yourself:

1.Identify your target audience

Who do you want to target? Is your product/service pitched at consumers, or businesses? Over 55s or millennials? These considerations are extremely important when creating a PR plan. Once you’ve nailed this, you can then begin to think about what content they like to read and where they read it.

Example publications may include consumer and/or B2B titles, local, regional, or even national press. Once identified, you can then start to build a ‘media list’, full of journalists’ contact details. Take some time to find the specific reporters that write for these outlets, read their work, and follow them on social media.

2.Think about what makes your story newsworthy

We often find that companies don’t know what constitutes ‘news’. The rule of thumb, is that nearly every event that happens within an organisation, is newsworthy. For example, this might include any funding you’ve raised, employee appointments, contract wins, and more.

So, scribble down a list of ‘what’s new’ within your business, and cherry pick a couple of the most interesting. Be mindful though that sometimes the news, if overly promotional or without a wider media ‘hook’, may be best placed as a blog, as opposed to a press release – it’s important to sense-check this before you start writing.

3.Draft a press release

There aren’t enough hours in a journalist’s day to write constantly fresh content for their publication, whether it’s in print or online. So, that’s where you come in. Draft a well-written press release, and the chances are, they might just use it. We recently penned a blog about how to write the ‘perfect press release’ – read it here for some helpful tips.

4.‘Pitch’ your press release/feature idea

Once you’ve written the content, next you have to send it to the journalist. Don’t send a generic ‘copy and paste’ email to each publication you want to be featured in. Reporters get pitched to, at all hours of the day, and can spot this technique a mile off. So, it’s important to personalise your message, using their name and media title at the very least.

And, what’s relevant for one publication isn’t necessarily relevant for another. So, for example, if we were pitching a story about Scriba to a local journalist, then we’d write ‘Huddersfield-based Scriba PR’, in the intro. But if we were emailing a national title, the fact we’re based in Huddersfield is less relevant.

5.Try, try, and try again

The key to great public relation skills, is to be tenacious. Remember that journalists are very busy, and might not always respond at all, never mind to an email. So, be prepared to pick up the phone, or send a Tweet. Perhaps even try to connect on LinkedIn – but again, a personalised invite is important.

Finally, monitor the publications you’ve sent your release to. Just because they haven’t replied doesn’t mean they haven’t used your story.

We hope you found these tips useful, but if you do need some help getting started, then pop us an email – via office@scribapr.com. We offer a variety of PR and communications services, and we’re happy to chat about them.