Why Segmenting Your Market Matters for PR
Positioning in general is critical to effective PR, because you need to give your PR agency the tools to explain your product as quickly as possible. But how you segment the market is at least as important for an effective PR campaign, though for different reasons.
Choosing a market category that makes sense for your product helps journalists understand why they should care about — and write about — your company and your product. But segmenting the market tells you and your PR team which journalists you should be reaching out to in the first place.
Let’s start with the obvious. If you’re in the cloud native / Kubernetes space, there are some outlets you are always going to want to target. These are The New Stack, DevOps.com and its sister publications like Container Journal, and SDTimes. These publications are probably going to be a part of any public relations campaign.
They should not, however, be the only pubs in your PR campaign. S which other publications should you target? Well, it depends. What types of companies will get the most value out of your product? Is it:
Companies that have recently been through an acquisition and are merging two engineering teams?
Small custom software development agencies?
Managed service providers?
Companies whose applications have to meet HIPAA requirements?
There are unique, niche publications that cater to each of the specific types of companies above. These publications probably don’t get tons of pitches about, to use one example, how a company can increase development velocity while maintaining HIPAA compliance. Journalists loathe writing about the same topic twice, so if you can pitch something unique to the publication, you are much more likely to end up seeing it in print or in pixels.
There’s a second reason why this is so important: Your article is going to stand out in these publications.
What is the end goal?
If I were doing PR, I would measure the success of any given campaign on how many articles and mentions we got in our target publications. That is because measuring how those press mentions translates into sales is a challenge. But the ultimate goal of any PR campaign is to increase sales. Right?
When your PR campaign targets the specific type of customer that is most likely to see huge value from your product — one that is also not being simultaneously courted by a number of other solutions — they are more likely to proactively reach out to you after reading the article, more likely to engage with your other content and more likely to ultimately become a customer.
Segmenting your market will make for more successful PR campaigns, both in terms of the number of articles you get placed and in terms of how the campaigns translates into leads, opportunities and sales.
If your market segmentation is “Fortune 500 companies,” try again — unless you can make an argument that your product is most valuable in huge organizations, because that’s all the Fortune 500 really have in common. If you need help narrowing things down, that’s what I do.