Outcomes of better positioning: More Media Coverage
For most people, the way media works seems to be an enigma. Why does one founder get quoted and another not? Why does one product get written about and another not? Why does it not seem to matter whose product is most featureful or technically better? Since I started my career in tech journalism, I know a bit more about how the sausage is made and can tell you the answers to those questions.
First of all, however, I want to mention that my experience as a tech journalist is a big part of why I started helping companies with positioning. Because I would often get pitches about companies, and not understand:
What on earth they did
Why anyone would care
Journalists are busy — let’s face it, everyone is busy. But journalists and editors are getting many more pitches than they can possibly quote or write about, and they need someone to make it easy for them to understand why this new company or new product matters.
This is why good positioning does exactly that — it makes it easy for journalists and editors to immediately understand what the heck your product or OS project does, and why this matters to the ecosystem.
Be memorable
Good positioning makes your company and the OS projects and commercial products you create more memorable. This is really important when it comes to media coverage — your goal shouldn’t just be to get a write-up because you launched, but rather to be interviewed for relevant articles that come up down the line. In order for this to happen, the journalists and editors have to understand which types of articles are relevant, first of all — they need to understand who you should be grouped with, what market category you’re playing in and what problem you solve.
The more memorable the better. I suppose that a best practice would be to keep a Rolodex of some kind — and I’m sure some do — but I always just relied on my memory. Even if an editor has a Rolodex (or modern version of a Rolodex), he or she still has to make the connection mentally — it doesn’t matter how meticulous the editor is about keeping track of names and companies if you just don’t pop up in relationship to a subject you would like to comment on.
Don’t neglect ‘why’
It’s not just that folks in the media need to understand what broad — or even very narrow — category you should be placed. They need to understand why they should care. Perhaps even more than specific prospects, journalists tend to be focused on the ecosystem — they’re operating at the same level as, for example, a conference organizer. They don’t tend to care about specific features you have or a deep dive into why your architecture is better.
They want to know how this makes the ecosystem better, how it improves metrics that application developers and infrastructure developers care about and how it solves problems that no other solution can touch.
Brevity wins
Remember how I mentioned that journalists, like everyone else, are busy? You need to be able to convey all of this information in a sentence or two. You don’t need to tell them everything about your company or your product, but you should be able to get them to understand, generally, what the product or OS project does and why it matters in a sentence — a fairly short sentence.
You only get one sentence to convince the editor or journalist that it’s worth his or her time to keep reading. So make it count.
What’s the role of positioning?
Positioning is all about slapping the right label on your project/product/entire company so that people get it immediately. While we often think primarily about potential users and customers as the audience, the media is an important way to amplify your message and reach more potential users and customers. Good positioning does two things:
Makes it more likely that you’ll get covered in the media in the first place
Makes it more likely that the media coverage you do get will make sense to readers, who are likely to be potential users and potential customers
Therefore, it makes it more likely that readers/listeners will read/hear about you in the media and then become users or customers. And that, ultimately, is the goal of media coverage.