PR Tips For Startups: 7 Step Proven System to Get Press

You just launched company. Hooray! Now onto the next big challenge. How do you let the world know you exist?

In two words: Media coverage.

Of course, landing a story in a publication is not as easy is simply firing off an email to one of its journalists. Or there’ll be an article about every fifth grader’s lemonade stand as well.

There are a few secrets that I’ve discovered while helping numerous companies land stories in CNN, TechCrunch and other top publications. I’m going to share with you the step by step framework that will earn you those shiny Featured In badges for your landing page. (Well of course that’s not the only benefit!)

PR Tip #1: Target journalists who are most likely going to be interested in your story

This is the most important part. No matter how well worded your pitch is, if you’re pitching a tech product to a fashion journalist, it’s going to fall flat.

The easiest way to build a list of journalists most likely to be interested in what your company does is typing a few general keywords related to it into Google.

For example, at JustReachOut, we help startups run their PR brands so general keywords related to what we do would be “startup pr”.

Toggle the Google topbar to News so it only shows news articles for the results:

Click through to each article from the past ~ 3 weeks and scroll to the bottom of each one to find the bio of the journalist who wrote it. It typically includes a link to the journalist’s Twitter where many of them share which topics they cover:

To keep all the relevant journalists you find in one place, create a spreadsheet with the following columns:

• Full name of the journalist
• Email address of the journalist
• Link to the article you discovered them on
• Link to the Twitter profile of the journalist
• Timezone of the journalism (based on the city they live in) - this is so you can send your pitch when they are most likely working/checking their emails

Add every journalist you discover who covers topics related to your company.

To get each journalist’s email address, enter the URL of the publication they write for into emailhunter.co. It’ll return the emails of some of the people who work there. Looking at the results, you can see how a publication formats their email addresses to smart guess the email of the journalist you want to get.

For example, entering Forbes into Email Hunter, it returns these results:

From there you can tell that Forbes formats email addresses as firstinitiallastname@forbes.com so if your journalist’s name was Sam Harris, their email would most likely be sharris@forbes.com

You can automate the journalist searching and email guessing process by using JustReachOut.

All you have to do is enter the general keywords related to your company and it provides the most recent articles published about it:

You can easily add each journalist to your pitch list by clicking the + button.

When you’re ready to pitch the journalist, we provide you with their most recent validated email address. Our users validate each email address so it’s highly likely to be accurate. If it doesn’t work for you, report it to us and we follow up with you to provide the journalist’s new working email address within 24 hours.

PR Tip #2: Build relationships with journalists first

Journalists are much more likely to at least give your pitch a chance if you built a relationship with them beforehand.

But how? Emailing them out of the blue with your unsolicited advice doesn’t quite work either.

The secret is participating in online discussions of a topic related to your company and referencing it to ask for the expertise of journalists who has experience with it. This helps you naturally start conversations.

You can find online discussions of any topic easily using JustReachOut.

Here’s a few of the results I got on SEO:

Next, you simply leave a meaningful comment in those discussions and circle back to the journalists you want to build a relationship with some variation of the message below. Remember journalists are human too and many are flattered when you ask them for their insights on a topic, implying you recognize their authority on it.

Hey Journalist,

I noticed you’ve been writing about the SEO skyscraper technique a lot lately, I just answered a question on Quora about the skyscraper and I’m not sure I was able to give it a complete answer, wondering if you have a better answer specifically around the process of determining who you want to link to your post?

https://www.quora.com/Whats-your-secret-strategy-of-getting-quality-backlinks-the-white-hat-way

I’m writing a blog post on this topic and would love to feature your answer in my blog post. Feel free to comment directly on the thread.

Thank you a bunch ahead of time!
-Dmitry

PR Tip #3: Offering interesting visual content assets

Instead of just offering a text only pitch, use visual assets to instantly explain what your company does and why what your company does is really important. We process visuals an astounding 60 000 times faster than text and the less time you take to prove to journalists you are worth their time, the less likely your pitch will get skipped over or forgotten.

For example, let’s say you’re Telsa. Instead of writing a wall of text explaining how your car works, you can organize that information into a compelling infographic:

If you are an app, instead of using text only to describe how it works, consider annotating screenshots briefly explaining its main features instead (or use your onboarding screens):

PR Tip #4: Find journalists who are actively looking for companies and people to feature for a story already they’re working on

Sign up for HARO and they will email you twice daily a list of journalists who are actively looking for companies and people to feature in stories they are currently working on:

JustReachOut’s algorithm finds the most recent articles journalists from top tier publications have written about. It also gets smarter with every search. Each one triggers our algorithm to to crawl the web for more articles related to those keywords so all subsequent searches have even more results:

Quickly skim each day’s email to see if any of the journalists are looking for something related to your experiences or what your company does. Answering a journalist’s query gives you a much better chance of making it into one of their stories since they already working on it.

You can also type in the hashtag #journorequest with a few general keywords related to your company to find other journalist requests on Twitter. Here are some results I got when I searched for “#journorequest crowdfunding”:

If you want to automate this process, you can search for journalist queries related to your company on JustReachOut which pulls requests real-time from multiple sources. From there, you can simply respond to the relevant queries directly inside JustReachOut.

PR Tip #5: Start off pitching local publications

Local publications can be much easier to break into at first since the mere fact you started a company in your city can be newsworthy. Once you get featured in a local publication, you can leverage the credibility from that article to work your way up the media totem pole.

For this approach, you can simply create a list of every publication from your city and find a journalist at each one whose beat is most relevant to what your company does. Don’t forget to also include your college alumni publication as well! They love featuring the success stories of their graduates.

Here’s a template you can reference when making your pitch:

PR Tip #6: Don’t solely pitch what your company does, pitch a compelling angle related to it

Unless your company is literally world changing (on the scale of sending humans to Mars), the mere news of its launch is not enough. That’s why it’s key to pitch a compelling angle related to your company as journalists mostly write stories about larger issues and movements and mention companies relevant to it. Fewer articles revolve around one single company unless what they do is really interesting or innovative.

Here are a few angles you can try.

The personal angle

Your personal background and the process you went through to create your company can make juicy details for a story. It also puts a human face on your company, which journalists know is more emotionally engaging for their audience. Additionally, your personal experiences may prove relevant for journalists working on an article about a larger issue related to it. In these articles, they do mention the companies you work at so it’s both a PR success and ego boost!

Here’s an example of an article a journalist wrote featuring Tristan Walker and the companies he created in the context of what it’s like being black in Silicon Valley:

Even if the article doesn’t end up being primarily a profile of you, many journalists start off articles by describing the story of an involved party so they can use your background details there.

Here’s a template you can reference for pitching this angle:

The interesting context angle

While what your company does may not be interesting in of itself to warrant an individual writeup, journalists do regularly feature relevant companies as examples when writing about larger movements or issues.

For example, in this article in Forbes, the journalist discusses the rise of the peer-to-peer sharing economy allowing travelers to earn money visiting different cities and lists a few trending apps within the space:

Here’s a template you can reference for pitching this angle:

PR Tip #7: Collect and analyze interesting data relevant to a journalist’s interests or beat

Do you know how OkCupid penetrated the public consciousness? Not by plastering ads of their happily ever after unions. But by extracting some very interesting dating preference patterns from their data and publishing interesting charts on their blog. Which got shared extensively by their readers and media alike.

If you can extract interesting behavior patterns from the use of your product, consider turning it into snazzy visualizations people can easily share. First publish them on your blog. Then promote it in relevant online communities. Sometimes you get lucky and a journalist discovers it on their own to write about it.

If not, you can also proactively pitch journalists your data discoveries with a message similar to this:

Key tips for doing PR for your startup

If you have any questions about pitching the press, shoot us an email at hi@justreachout.io and we’ll give you some solid pointers based on our experience PR growing companies to prime time. Once culminating in an acquisition by Google!