PR for Startups: The 10 Step Process I Use to Get Press (2018 Update)
10. Perfect your Landing Page
Nothing worse than getting lots of press mentions and getting that dreaded 99% bounce rate. Get Optimizely[43] to A/B test your landing pages to see which copy is more effective at getting your audience to take the desired action.
Also, your design approach strategy should be to stick to a “one page, one conversion goal.” As in, your landing page should focus primarily on guiding your visitors to perform one action – whether it be downloading your app, signing up for a trial or leaving their email. One action.
So as you can see…
How to do PR for startups is a complicated process. But it’s doable.
There are many, many angles from which you can present your company to get press mentions. Whether you are in a boring industry or your company is the hottest tech startup in the Silicon Valley, you need to go through all these steps to build a successful PR campaign.
The beauty about taking control of your PR outreach is, you know exactly who is responding, what is working and what isn’t. Instead of waiting for your PR firm to circle back at the end of the month with “we’re on the cusp of a breakthrough if you just stay with us another month”.
The other beauty of running your own PR outreach is after you finetune the process to the point it starts to reliably deliver results, you can automate many parts of it. For example, you can get a virtual assistant to populate those press contact lists.
Once you have sent several pitches that have gotten good open and response rates, you can simply start tweaking and re-sending that same winning template over and over again.
Ten PR tools for Startups
PR tools make it far easier for you to execute all these media relations activities. Rather than try to build relationships and pitch journalists manually, use tools to do PR at scale.
I have tested and selected 10 tools for startups. These have worked GREAT for me in 2018 and I will use all of these more in 2019.
1. JustReachOut
Doing PR Outreach on your own can be tricky. You might need to buy a bunch of PR tools, and somehow make them work together.