Strategies: Early-stage Communications & Media Relations

TL;DR:

1. Engage with a comms pro to pressure test your messaging and value propositions long before you intend to reach out to the media.
2. Think through the real and impactful story behind your company or product that will resonate with readers —this is what wins over reporters.
3. Define your goals. Hint: it shouldn’t be “building buzz.”
4. Communications, and even more so media relations, is about the long game, not just one day of announcement coverage.

As an early stage company, you likely spend most of your time heads down focused on getting your product to market. Inevitably, sometimes in the last minutes before a launch, someone will ask, “So what’s our PR strategy here?”

Unless you’re one of the handful of Most Interesting Companies on the Planet, there won’t be a gaggle of reporters just waiting around to amplify your news. You’ll need a communications strategy (also sometimes called a media or a PR strategy). This is when young companies typically turn to a comms consultant or agency.

But what exactly does a comms pro or agency do, anyway? They articulate narratives, define audiences, maintain deep relationships with media, and develop multithreaded strategies to get your story told. We called on industry veteran Jessica Williams for insight on what this looks like for early-stage teams.

Jessica Williams helped establish the media strategy track at The Outcast Agency, the Silicon Valley-based agency that has produced many of the top communications leaders in tech. During her 24-year tenure, she worked with dozens of what are now large enterprise technology companies to launch their communications strategies and—and this is the point often misunderstood—lay groundwork for future media successes as the companies grew.

When we connected with Williams, we asked her how early-stage founders should prepare for their first media-worthy launches. We started with how focused pros can be leveraged to build strong and lasting momentum. At the core, Williams says, founders want to avoid thinking of their relationship with the press as dictatorial, adversarial, or just situational. It should be a relationship built strategically and nurtured carefully—and consistently—over time.

“It has to be a mutual value exchange,” Williams says. “It’s never just bake the cake and you’re done.”

Why you should call in reinforcements

Perennial question: What’s the right time to engage comms pros in a launch cycle? Williams’s advice? As early as possible.

Too often, she says, launches fall flat because a company approached a consultant or agency with a fire drill, rather than allowing time for a “walkabout” where a team can really gather and evaluate the storytelling assets on hand. They are the experts who step outside of a company and identify the related stories the media will care about. “You are working with someone to establish a clear positioning,” Williams says. “And a narrative framework that couches everything: origins, mission and vision, and founding pedigree. A good comms team places all those in the context of the current media environment. They then give a founder the talking points to tell a story customers will be interested in hearing.”

Case in point: Williams and her team were called in to help launch Slack. At the time, the messaging service had both assets and challenges to telling their story. In the plus column, founder and then-CEO Stewart Butterfield had previously founded and sold Flickr, so there was fantastic name recognition and credibility. At the same time, Slack’s product was easy to pigeonhole as the “latest attempt to replace email” or as “just another messaging app.” Their solution was to uplevel and drive the conversation about “future of work” technologies, but there was much work to be done to achieve that.

Williams and team helped Butterfield frame Slack in a larger narrative about how workplace productivity was evolving. Professionals were increasingly working across multiple personal and work devices throughout the day. In turn, companies like Slack were riding the huge BYO Technology wave (the forerunner of what’s known as “product led growth” today) as people brought the tech they preferred to the office.

Williams also brought capital among journalists to the table. After decades in the trade, she had built a reputation for being discerning and truthful about her clients’ potential. When she called two reporters at Bloomberg and said, “You guys have to see this,” they were willing to sit down for a demo with Butterfield. By helping Butterfield frame Slack in a larger conversation around the future of work, Williams and her team were able to build a broader, more compelling narrative that resulted in headlines such as “Slack’s Co-founder on the Future of Communication” and “Slack’s Quest to Make Work Easier.” Those stories carried the company’s narrative forward.

“Obviously, the media wanted to talk to Stewart, but it was his ability to tell a story, to showcase the application, and to speak openly about what they were building that afforded multiple positive follow up conversations with the same journalists,” she said.

How to find the right agency/consultant fit

Public relations agencies are never one-size-fits-all. While vetting potential partners, founders should always ask for sample story placements involving companies with “ingredients” similar to their own—pedigree, products, customers, stages of growth and so forth—and should expect to be taken through the process from initial strategy to article in “ink” of how those placements happened. That vets the agency and provides founders with additional perspective on how to strategize for media engagement.

Williams also suggests running prospective public relations hires by investors or other founders and colleagues for a gut check. The firm that’s eventually hired may need hand-holding through the technical details of the product but once the overall model is made clear, they will be able to take the appropriate 30,000-foot view on market fit and understand how to shape the story for journalists.

Still, founders need to ask themselves what capacity they have for engaging with the media. Too often, founders will underestimate how much time it takes to engage in thought leadership development. It takes an ongoing engagement with the agency or consultant, sharing ideas and evaluating opportunities. It is often helpful to appoint – and media train – multiple executive spokespeople beyond the founder(s). Once a strategy is underway, it’s important to be ready to engage in a quick turn with resulting interest. Reporters are often on tight deadlines and may only have a few short hours to hear back from a team they’re hoping to include in a story.

There is also sometimes worry among founders that an agency won’t give their small company ample attention and the engagement will be a waste of money. Williams tends to find this concern overblown; if a founder has engaged with a reputable consultant or agency, that comms partner has built in the time required for the agreed upon scope of work. And they’ll be proactively honest when there are natural lulls in the news cycle. However, she says, founders should still be vigilant in the vetting process to feel for a good fit:

• Do they understand the technology you are building? And the customers and verticals you’re building for? And the competitive landscape?
• Are they asking thoughtful follow-up questions throughout your conversations?
• Can they speak fluently about specific reporters that would be most interested in your company, and why?
• Does the strategy they pitch feel truly based on your company and team or is it formulaic?

Founders should be vigilant in the vetting process to feel for a good agency/team fit.

And—probably most importantly—do you like them? Do you enjoy interacting? The answer can seem trivial, but a good comms pro should regularly challenge assumptions (pressure testing!). They may push you to make time for opportunities even when you’re at your busiest. And, in the unfortunate event of a crisis, they should be someone you feel you can trust.

Where to start: your narrative‍

Making an honest assessment of your company’s story can be a difficult task, one that requires thinking past salesmanship and delving into the true ingredients of what makes it interesting.

• Will the product fundamentally change the industry. And, how?

• What makes that change valuable and for whom?
• Why are you the right team to make this happen?
• What experts, statistics, and studies back this view up?
• What real world use case examples, demonstrations or visuals of the product drive all of this home?

• How do these answers map to the goal of media engagement overall?

Remember that reporters will be asking versions of these questions. A reporter, in a sense, provides a level of validation for each company they write about. It’s their name on the byline. By telling the reader that this is the company you should read about today, they are trading on their own rapport and trust relationship with readers.

“What establishes a long run of success with reporters is finding other compelling angles in and around what a founder does that anchor to what the reporter and their readers care about,” says Williams.

Technology readers, especially those working and investing in enterprise technology, need compelling reasoning for buying into a product that weaves the focus and function of the company back to the very real contemporary pain points of the customer. And the first step to having the platform from which to share these insights is for entrepreneurs to establish themselves as credible and worthy sources of meaningful insight.

Williams points to Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, as an example of optimizing reporter relationships for building that trust. At first blush, launching Box wasn’t necessarily an easy sell: the company’s first real media narrative was the claim that they were “taking on” Microsoft. Yet Box was a tiny startup and Microsoft one of the largest companies on earth. And Box provided basic cloud storage services—essentially, a commodity. Neither made for deep, interesting stories. But Levie’s sense of humor and willingness to candidly provide insights on questions which often had little to do with Box helped him build rapport among reporters. Journalists would return to Levie for comment on a number of tech-related and business related topics. This work elevated his personal brand, allowing him to tell the Box story more broadly as the company went from just another startup to a serious tech option for enterprise buyers.

Of course not all founders are as outgoing. So they, or their marketing teams, must think of other ways to leverage their persona, experiences, and expertise. Williams offers a few basic questions:

• Does the founder already have a reputation that can be leveraged to boost the company’s mission?
• If the founder is unknown (an outsider!), what about being unknown works to their or the company’s advantage?
• What fuels the founder’s vision of the product and market, and what are they bringing to the discussion that is (actually) new and compelling?

“The genesis of a person becoming an entrepreneur, leaving a big outfit like, say, Google to start their own thing,” Williams says. “What was that spark? What was happening in the world that made them want to do that? Founders making changes to their own lives, and the inspiration and thinking behind their decisions is what gets other people interested in what they’re selling.”

Storytelling can and should also lean on concrete details where possible. Perhaps a company has already signed a notable investor or has demonstrable results with a specific innovation. Perhaps they’re targeting a common pain point in the market and have adopted an approach that is truly new—how do you distill that difference into a few, clear points? Hot tip: Mine your funding pitch deck. Many of the same narratives and points can be recast for reporters.

How to quantify your work

To many technical founders, media relations harbors the ultimate dirty word: “unquantifiable.” What do placements in TechCrunch or the Wall Street Journal really mean for a business? Beyond the dopamine boost of basking in launch/announcement day coverage and feeling good about sharing on social, are the stories going to meaningfully move the needle for the business? The answers for comms efforts rarely fit in a dashboard but you should still set clear objectives for the work.

Press is a means to an end. Williams encourages founders to identify their goals first and suggests the following reasons as potential starting points for early stage companies:

• Increase customer awareness
• Hire top talent
• Attract interest from new investors
• Build your brand

“Any PR agency worth its weight in salt will want to understand your goals,” says Williams. “Then they can go in and design the proper strategy roadmap, in the sense of interviews, articles and media exposure, for reaching them.”

Spelling out objectives informs the strategy around the stories to tell and which media outlets or reporters a company should approach. Business and mainstream press, for instance, tend to build stronger avenues for interest in an upcoming investment round. Reporters covering workplace culture can greatly influence your employer brand perception with potential candidates. While niche, trade publications can be better for attracting customers or partners, especially in the more technical verticals.

“Any PR agency worth its weight in salt will want to understand your goals first.”

Williams says too often founders haven’t thought through the “why” of media. Too often the goal is simply to “build excitement” for a specific announcement. That thinking can squander the potential for using a launch day as an opportunity to form long-term relationships with reporters.

Like a good chess strategy, a smart public relations strategy thinks ahead a few moves, not just about the one at hand. An experienced comms pro can help you connect the dots for how smart outreach can parlay into thought leadership opportunities, trend inclusion, and feature stories down the line.

To capture how your agency’s comms strategy is delivering, there are both tactical numbers and the objective measurements to consider.

Tactically, your agency should:

• Compare the list of outlets and reporters that covered your company over a given time period against the comprehensive list that you and your agency/pro agreed upon at the outset of the engagement.
• Quantify the non-news-driven, thought leadership/trend media hits earned.
• Quantify any strategic media conversations that may not have resulted in immediate stories. (These have value!)

Objectively, establish company-side mechanics to better understand over time metrics such as:

• How customers and interviewees hear about and feel about your company.
• Messaging pull-through. When you are quoted or the company is mentioned, are you being characterized the way you aim to be?
• Competitive set inclusion. When competitors are mentioned, are you alongside?

Lastly, remember that since the invention of the lightbulb, technology has grown and expanded in cycles of hype and consolidation. Today the technology industry is facing economic uncertainty, not to mention rising skepticism about the merits of the industry in general. The flameouts and cutbacks in cryptocurrency, “Web3,” social media, life-sciences-meets-compute, even if unrelated to you in terms of their model, have put reporters on the defensive.

Williams says reporters are becoming far more discerning about where they put their byline and so “everyone’s having to find new ways to prove themselves,” she says of new companies and start-ups. Roller coasters have always been part of the landscape in technology but Williams points out that the basics of public relations continue to hold. “The storytelling and how relationships are nurtured around a mutual value exchange never really changes,” she says.