Getting the story to potential investors, customers, and partners is a crucial part in the early stage of growing a startup. Owned channels such as a website and social media accounts provide platforms for announcements, but media will broadcast to a much larger audience, allowing target stakeholders that you don’t have direct access to to discover and get interested. Dealing with the press can be time consuming, but very manageable once the startup team invests in a lean system. Here are a few steps to set up a systematic approach to press relations, once you have crafted your narrative and finished your press kit.

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series 1

Crafting Your Startup Narrative: A Guide for Success

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the essential steps to create your first PR material and set the stage for success.

The Journalist Golden Circle

Construct a comprehensive list of journalists, complete with their contact information, whom you wish to engage with during significant milestones. Classify these journalists according to their areas of interest and the specific audience stakeholders they can help you reach. Identify which media outlets are best suited for reaching investors, and which journalists are most effective at informing customers about new products or features. Depending on your available resources and specific needs, concentrate your efforts on a select group of between 5 and 20 key journalists.

Once you have your set of PR tools, the narrative and press kit, the understanding of the press and your Golden Circle, you need to get ready to communicate systematically with the media. We’ll go over the proactive approach and the reactive media relations, both which any company should be prepared for.

Planned communications

The proactive approach encompasses all future-oriented communication activities. Here’s a refined guide on how to strategize:

• Define Your Business Objectives: Be explicit about your business goals and their order of importance. Are you focusing on a particular customer segment in a specific region for the upcoming quarter? Are you seeking to raise capital from a targeted group of investors? Are you in the process of hiring engineers? If you’re utilizing OKRs, these are your business priorities. Your communication campaigns should be tailored to bolster these objectives.
• Identify Key Milestones: Compile a list of significant events for your startup, such as funding announcements, new hires, product launches, customer acquisitions, technological advancements, and trade events you plan to attend.
• Prioritize Relevant Milestones: Determine which milestones are likely to pique the interest of stakeholders, categorizing them by stakeholder groups. Which milestones will enable you to engage with the customers, investors, or partners that are currently your priority?
• Develop a Plan for Priority Milestones: Given the challenge of planning for an entire year, it’s advisable to work with quarters. Plan in advance for each milestone and initiate a plan as the milestone approaches. Here’s an example of what a quarterly timeline might look like:

• Plan Campaigns Individually: A campaign is a set of communication activities all aimed at influencing the targets of a specific business objective. For instance, if your business objective is to double the number of clients from the banking sector in Singapore, your campaign will be crafted to captivate the key stakeholders in these target banks and narrate the compelling story they need to hear to become interested in your product. Here’s a template for a campaign plan:

• Remember to prepare to face journalists.

Related reading:

series 2

Unlocking the Power of Press for Your Startup: A Strategic Guide

How do you ensure that your startup’s voice resonates beyond your immediate circle? The answer lies in leveraging the most powerful channel available: the press.

When journalists come to you first

Communication opportunities with the media often arise spontaneously, independent of a startup’s planned activities. These can stem from a chance meeting at an event, a journalist working on a story in your industry, or even unwanted attention due to unforeseen circumstances.

Being prepared for such interactions is crucial. An inappropriate approach to responding to media inquiries can have catastrophic effects on a young business. However, it is rather easy to be prepared and adopt an approach that satisfies both the needs of the media and the startup.

A comprehensive media relations guidebook should be readily available to all members of the company. This guidebook, often incorporated into the startup’s onboarding process for new employees or partners, should be regularly revisited by all staff members.

When a startup representative encounters a journalist working on a story, the representative should inform the journalist about the company’s internal process as outlined in the guidelines. They should collect the journalist’s contact details, note the nature of their inquiry, and assure them that a representative from the startup will respond shortly.

The media relations guidebook should provide clear answers to the following questions:

• Who is authorized to speak “on the record” to the press? Are there designated individuals for different topics (product, funding, technology, etc.)?
• Who should be notified of the inquiry, and who is responsible for responding to the journalist?
• Which topics are we open to discussing, and which ones are confidential?
• Who makes the final decision on whether to accept or decline a journalist’s request for an interview or comment?
• Do we work with an agency, and if so, who is our contact there?
• What are the approved materials (press kit documents) we can provide to journalists, and where can they be found?
• What are the pre-approved statements we can share with journalists for frequently asked questions?

Once the communications become a little overwhelming for the team in the startup, and once you have gained a good understanding of how the media work, you can consider working with a specialized agency like Influence Matters to run all your communication campaigns, or hire a fractional or full time communication specialist. At Influence Matters, we also propose a model in between the agency and fractional CMO service specially for startups, handling communication strategy, campaign planning and management with our efficient methodology. Get in touch to learn more.