How to make PR work?

It’s always tougher to maintain a relationship than start one. How does one keep it exciting enough for all parties involved to stay interested?  You have taken on a PR agency and/or have an in-house department. Its starts off well with good output initially.

Usually after a while PR exercises tend to lose steam. You take your PR agency/in-house department for granted. PR is an engaging exercise. The success of the agency/dept depends largely on the depth of involvement of the two parties. I’ve seen good PR agencies fail simply because their client servicing team is not spending enough time interacting with Business, Marketing and Sales teams.  It could be because they have too many clients to handle and therefore too little time for a client. On the other hand, clients also assume that PR will self-run and agency/dept will keep getting results out of thin air. It eventually doesn’t work out.

So what can you do to make it work?

For You

• Be sure you need/want PR in the first place, not because your competition or friends have a leading agency on board
• Stay committed and get your team’s ‘buy in’ to the concept. PR and its impact has to be understood by the teams in house first, else there will be no knowledge sharing.  I’ve this seen this several times, the last one being – a new sales team that had no clue of PR – was asked to manage the PR agency and include PR expenses in their sales budgets! Needless to say, the sales team soon decided they don’t need PR (for a growing brand)!
• Get your agency/department to spend time with your key people across teams educating them on PR
• Share business progress, challenges and achievements with your PR team lead from time to time. It will help formulate focussed and meaningful strategies.
• Stay focussed and involved in PR. You need not spend as much time later as you did in the beginning but one has to keep an eye on monthly plans, reports and success rate. It will help if you ask for these and review progress regularly so it’s not too late before you realise it’s gone off track.

For the PR Agency/Dept

• Push the client for inputs even if you feel guilty about taking their time away from other important work
• Do not wait for inputs/info. Go find it. Talk to key people in the organisation. Build relationships with them so there is an easy flow of information. It will be easier for you to spot opportunities and ideas where company personnel may not be able to.
• If you think there isn’t enough dough for PR, have an open chat with key people stating the challenges and find solutions. It also does help at times to take third party expert opinion. Stay connected/clued on to customers, media, competition regularly – you may be able get insightful ideas.

Only a long-term perspective and commitment makes PR really tick (this I say for both clients and agencies). This goes hand in hand with business goals. Short term targeted spurts are nice as long as they are in sync with long term objectives. After all, brands are not built in a day.

PR For Startups – How to start and stay visible in media

PR is about common-sense – give the target audience what they want and how they want it but you decide what information to give them. The key is to figure that out so it’s a win-win for everyone. You are a start-up ready to make your first announcement – what and how do you do it?   There are two options – either have someone handle it in-house or take-on a PR agency.

If you’ve decided to do this in-house you need to note the following – your target audience and therefore a media list i.e. what media do they use daily and geographies to be covered. Media list will also vary depending on your announcement. I recently helped a tech start-up make a funding announcement – the most important media – key financial & tech media – print and online. We decided to give exclusive interviews to a print business print daily and to one popular online media. It was then picked-up by lot of other media. Since it was also a US based company, we decided to give an exclusive to the most frequent site there as well. This was then later followed by some in-depth interviews in trade media. One can maintain visibility by regularly organising either – news releases, guest articles or interviews in media depending on the announcement and the target audience. In PR please remember there is no ‘one size fits all’ situation. Every situation even within your company will be unique and will be required to be handled differently.

If and when you are selecting a PR agency here are some pointers.

• Call for a PR pitch from at least 3 agencies after briefing them. Go through references from other entrepreneurs you may know.
• Choose the agency based on their past experience in your space (not necessarily top priority), your comfort level with the servicing team, team background, companies they have worked with, any references they can provide.
• Sign up for a long-term (12 months) contract with 1 month exit clause and a serious review every 3 months. That way you have their commitment and interest in working with you.
• Give a detailed brief and ask them to prepare a specific 3 month PR plan. You can usually get them to achieve this in almost half the time.
• Giving a Brief to the PR Agency – Company Background, Key people/spokespersons background, Geographies covered, specific Target Audience(most imp), Key Messages(most imp), Overall business objectives
• Target media and story angles will be suggested by the PR agency accordingly
• The PR Agency will send you a weekly/fortnightly report and a dossier of coverage. They will track/monitor direct coverage as well as competition and industry.

Here are some ways to evaluate a PR agency

• Coverage received can be evaluated quantitatively (in terms of value of article space if you had placed an ad) and qualitatively (if key message(s) have been covered in articles).
• Has Target Media been covered or has the agency covered mostly irrelevant media?
• A survey amongst target audience can also be conducted before/during/after the PR exercise

How to maintain visibility

• A Press Release every 3-4 weeks or so
• Keep company website updated
• Spokesperson profiling
• Guest articles
• Quotes in industry articles
• Speaking ops
• Media fam meetings
• Regular Newsletters to media, customers, potential customers

Once you gain familiarity with the process and media, it will get easier to gauge what works and what doesn’t. So get started.

  

PR for Startups: How to get the word around & build credibility

Being an entrepreneur is tough. I’ve been a part of and worked with several startups over the years and seen their sheer grit to get things done and see things through. During the early days and the growth phase, public relations exercises have made a tremendous difference to companies in building more credibility, standing out from competition and even attracting talent. PR helps lend that aura around a name.

One of the most important aspects of PR is to be honest about who you are, what you do and to highlight that. Once, I was called in to help build visibility for a mutual fund that was the black sheep of the industry when it started. They refused to pay distributor commissions and sold direct to the customer without levying entry loads, thereby saving on their expense ratio. SEBI, of course, eventually abolished entry loads charged by mutual funds. Since there were no advertising budgets, we used media relations as a tool to get our point across. We reached out to all journalists who wrote in that space and met with them. We did newsletters and guest articles that brought home the point of view of the mutual fund. We simply focussed on talking about what they did, why they did it and how the customer benefitted. Soon, the company was being quoted and talked about in most mutual fund articles. It was a small mutual fund standing up against industry giants. But everyone took notice.

No matter how small you are, you can still reach out and find that someone is watching and listening. Most startups have very little to spend on marketing. If you don’t have the budgets you can still manage your PR. Contrary to popular belief that PR means high visibility in media, public relations actually encompasses all of a company’s existing and potential audiences – customers, employees, investors and partners. All entrepreneurs dream of their name being splashed across the front page of leading dailies and magazines. Please remember that media/press is a tool, a medium to influence your larger goals.

What you will need is just one thing that is most scarce – time. You and the team need to sit down and chalk out a plan on what audiences you need to reach out to and how. If you don’t have the bandwidth, focus on what’s most important to you at the moment and make short-term plans. Focus on a few key outcomes that you want to achieve.

A few pointers include:

- Write down outcomes you want achieved for each of your target audiences in terms of perception and key messages

- What media would you need to reach out to them and how will you use these

- Timelines for the communication activity and who will lead them internally

- Contribute time, effort and patience

For example, one of the key messages for potential investors could be strong team background. For this, one medium could be press. You could do team profiling via guest articles by the team. Another medium could be events and in terms of speaking ops for your team. One could focus on these activities for a period of 3-6 months and then, use other media and tools.

It’s important to remember that PR is cheaper than advertising, has better credibility and all it costs is your time. PR is not just for the biggies. Startups can be seen and heard too. You can develop your own unique do-it-yourself formula and win.