Startups are emerging everyday. A lasting impact of the Great Recession is the number of people starting companies on their own. One of the key things that these new companies need is publicity.
Why?
- It gets the company’s name out to the public, creating brand awareness.
- It allows the company a chance to attract investors.
Yet despite knowing this many startups struggle over what they need to do to achieve publicity. Sometimes they launch a publicity campaign before they are ready for prime time or other times they try to incorporate a variety of components in their publicity campaigns instead of concentrating on the two most important pieces of startup publicity – media relations and the company blog.
Media relations and the company’s blog are without a doubt, the most essential public relations pieces for any startup. Without those two pieces nothing else matters, in terms of publicity.
Media relations is quite simply news stories featuring the startup and its founder. It informs the world of the new company and the wonders that it can do. Beyond that, a successful media relations campaign should position the founder of the company as the expert in the field the company specializes in. The founder should be in all news stories dealing with his or her field and offering solutions to the problems that the media is discussing. This implies a third party endorsement by the media. Media relations must be ongoing to create a sense of awareness and repetition. Media relations is the most efficient way to create public brand awareness and draw the attention of investors.
The company blog is the other critical public relations component for a startup. Why? First every blog post attracts traffic to the company’s website and also helps in search engine results. Beyond that, just as with media relations, it sets the company up as an industry expert that helps in the long-term branding of the company. Finally, it converts leads into customers.
Public relations is critical to the success of startups. But knowing what to put the emphasis on in a publicity campaign can determine if the startup succeeds or fails. Every start-up when executing its public relations campaign needs to emphasize media relations and the company blog.
