For over a year now, most news cycles have been oversaturated with stories about the pandemic, which, from a PR perspective, made brands stop pitching their own stories to journalists out of respect for what people around the world have been going through. Instead of that approach, plenty of businesses have decided to shift to thought leadership in order to share how the CEOs and founders helped their companies deal with the various pandemic-related challenges. This way, companies could still share information with their target audiences without receiving potentially negative feedback from consumers.
When it comes to startups, many of them were greatly affected in a negative manner throughout the pandemic because they struggled to raise necessary funds. However, a year after the pandemic started, plenty of them have started adapting to the new situation. However, aside from raising necessary funds, all startups should also have a strong PR strategy, which can help increase brand awareness, attract more investors, and more.
With public relations campaigns, startups can create a positive image for their target audience. In most cases, this image tends to be everything, as it can either help a company succeed, or lead to its downfall, and is also frequently one of the biggest factors influencing consumer decisions. Additionally, without having a strong PR plan in place, companies can’t look for media coverage, which can also bring great benefits to different companies.
Consistency Over Time
Getting to a point where a company frequently receives media coverage requires a lot of consistency, which can be difficult for startups to achieve. This is because plenty of business owners of startups don’t have the extra time to invest in establishing relationships with journalists, because they’re trying to focus all of their time on growing their business in the first place.
Nevertheless, there are some strategies, with consistency being the key one, which help most startups receive positive media coverage at the end of the day. Consistency should be a long-term strategy because most PR efforts require a lot of patience to become effective. It takes time to build relationships with journalists, and it takes time to create engaging and attention-grabbing content for the target audience. All of the different PR efforts should be consistent over a longer period of time instead of just a week or two.
Prioritizing Communication
With many startups, public relations is one of the last pieces of a company’s operational plan when it should actually be one of the first. As soon as a company finds time, it should start creating relevant material that can be pitched to journalists and media outlets, to get ahead of the game.
Additionally, it’s not just important to create relevant and engaging content for audiences, as companies should also communicate well with journalists and anyone that can help the company get to the next level. That means making time to be available to people’s requests or questions, despite working on growing the business itself, which can be difficult, but it’s not impossible.
