Marketing for startups doesn't have to be challenging. Juliet Fallowfield, founder and managing director of Fallow, Field & Mason and host of the entrepreneurial podcast How To Start Up, provides public relations tips for startups and businesses short on time and money.
Fallowfield presented online for The Founder’s Institute for her PR Masterclass for Startups with Juliet Fallowfield (watch the presentation here). Here are quick tips from her presentation to help your startup understand different types of PR, manage your time, and craft a PR story for your target audience.
"Advertising is saying you're good. PR is someone else saying that you're good." - Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple executive
Choose Your Channels of Communication
Gassée provides a simple definition of how to differentiate between advertising and PR. Advertising is when startups promote themselves through their own channels. PR is when startups get third parties to promote them through their channels.
Business owners can access PR through three channels of communication: paid, owned, and earned. Paid is where you pay others to promote your business. Business owners control what is said and how it is said because third-party platforms earn revenue from your paid posts. Owned are platforms from your own business that you have control over.
These platforms can be posts from your social media, announcements from your website, or an email newsletter. Recycling content from paid platforms can be done through owned platforms, too. Earned is getting onto unpaid platforms, such as news outlets. It is difficult work to "earn the right to be on a third-party platform," said Fallowfield.
Businesses have limited control of this environment because you are not the content editor. The content could either be positive or negative – or somewhere in between.
Paid: Third-party platforms, the environment of which your business has total control of, usually paid for via advertising (e.g. paid print, digital ads, paid social, native ads, PPC, etc.)
Owned: Platforms owned by your business, where copy is totally controlled (e.g. own website, social channels, blogs, EDMs, your own podcast, etc.)
Earned: Third-party platforms that are "earned" by relationships. This can include outlets from the New York Times to small trades and blogs. There is little control of the environment.
Define What Success Looks Like
Goal Setting. Set realistic, 12-month PR goals. Start with the end in mind and work backward to prioritize goals and define their deliverables.
Prioritize Goals. Examples of goals your company can pursue: drive brand awareness; increase customer engagement; build a community; increase product and service sales.
Define Deliverables. Quantify the outcomes for your goals. Examples include x2 features in print, x10 online, x3 podcasts, x12 networking events, or x5 newsletters.
Business owners can get caught up in goal setting. Fallowfield said she has received clients who falsely believed a good PR goal is to be featured in a prominent editorial, so she asks, "Why do you want to be featured there?" Fallowfield asks clients to consider the publication's audience and whether it meets the business's strategic goals. She advises founders to look beyond a single editorial, channel, or podcast and ask what they are trying to achieve.
Spending Your PR Time Wisely
As a founder, the main thing you need to do is budget time like finances. There are not enough hours in a day to get everything you need done. It is important to budget your PR time into your schedule just as you would budget your money. Once you budget your PR time, what should you do to promote your company? Here are a few tips below:
Read coverage that you want to be in. Reading or watching the editorials or channels can help you decide if that coverage will meet your goals and target the correct audience.
Update a live media list with targets. Follow, connect, and engage with active journalists in your business sector. This will give you a sense of where the industry is going and what the audience is looking for.
Schedule time for your emails. Multitasking is not always productive, so block out time in your day when it is less busy to respond and reach out to people who can help you reach your PR goals.
Fallowfield concludes, “PR is 100% a proactive task so you need to tackle it as such. Map out when you'll read the press, search key angles, map your forward features, and brainstorm feature ideas. Then, be really honest on how much time you need to do it."
Actively plan out and execute on your goals, but also set realistic time frames on when they can be done. Do not feel overwhelmed. “Plan your PR time from a long-term view, to short-term tasks, as if they're not in a diary, they won't happen," said Fallowfield. Budget your short-term goals into your long-term vision to achieve success.
Tell Your Story
Fallowfield recommends that founders do their own in-house PR because it is the founders who best know the story about themselves and the business. A third party would not know you as well as you do. Founders may be busy juggling multiple obligations, so it is up to the PR team to build the capabilities to tell the founder's and their business's stories.
Choose Your Audience Wisely
You do not want to waste time, so it is important to first define your vision and the mission to help you stay on track with your goals. Questions you want to consider:
Who are your target clients?
What are they reading?
Who should your subsequent media targets be?
When doing earned PR, it is important to note that the journalist is the gatekeeper, so it is also important to know why the reader is reading content by that writer. Ask, “Why would the reader be interested in learning more about my brand?” That will help you land coverage in that outlet.
Finally, Fallowfield recommends seeing earned PR as an editorial rather than an ad — never overtly self-promotional — so your PR feels more natural and approachable to the reader.
You can learn more from Juliet Fallowfield by contacting her firm Fallow, Field & Mason | London (fallowfieldmason.com) and listen to her entrepreneurial podcast How To Start Up | Fallow, Field & Mason | London (fallowfieldmason.com)