PR for Tech Start Ups – What can PR do for you?
When people ask what Vantage Communications does, we answer that we are in the third party recommendation business. We mean that we liase with the people that influence your customers, partners, VCs, etc. This has two key benefits. One is that your audience is getting information about your company from someone that they trust, which increases its credibility. You can talk about yourself (aka advertising), but people tend to discount or even ignore people saying great things about themselves. After all, what else would they say?
The other benefit is extreme efficiency. By interacting with a small number of editors, analysts, and bloggers, you can reach millions of people. That efficiency also applies to a B-to-B start up that is not trying to reach millions. By targeting the right publications, you can open the doors to potential customers and partners that are unwilling to deal with companies that they never heard of. We had a client that was trying in the worst way to directly contact a potential customer. After an article about them ran in a trade publication, the customer contacted them and became a flagship customer!
One thing that start ups underestimate is how many people are part of the buying decision in a business. We had one potential client ask why he needed PR when he knew someone at all of his potential customers. So I asked him how much product he was selling at one of the larger potential customers. The response: “Nothing yet. The guy I know is in sales and he needs to speak to someone in engineering who needs to speak to……”
Implicit in the PR process is identifying your potential partners and customers and determining where they get their information. This universe is expandig rapidly, with the rise of blogs and web publications (and the decline of mainstream media). Since start ups have limited resources, they need to be efficient in their PR efforts. If your customers are reading Engadget or Light Reading, it makes sense to focus your efforts there. But the assumption that getting on the cover of a business publication is going to make your company does not really hold water unless your audience reads the publication. And the wasted time and cost can divert valuable marketing resources.
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Tags: PR for Tech Start Ups, Start ups