Positioning and PR
Journalists are busy. Possibly just as busy as any of the buyers that you might want to reach. And they get pitches from companies new and old all day, every day. Your PR team has the advantage of contacts, but even so they have to get the journalist interested quickly. They don’t have time to explain what the company does for 15 minutes or to present 50 slides. They need to be able to articulate what you do in the first paragraph of a press release.
Good PR pros know how to get a journalists attention, but they can only work with that the company hiring them provides.
Journalists, in turn, need essentially the same information that any buyer would need. In other words:
What is this
Why should I care
The answer to ‘what is this’ is going to be the same for both a buyer and a journalist. Why they should care, though, is similar but different. Journalists are looking for ‘news.’ The problem they are trying to solve is creating content that will inform readers, not trying to increase their deployment speed or whatever your tool accomplishes.
Journalists in the cloud native space are also very savvy. They probably understand the market and the competitive landscape better than any of your potential buyers. Actually, they probably understand both of those things better than you do. Unlike a buyer, they will compare you not to the real life status quo alternative to using your product but to the 3 other seed-stage startups that are doing the same thing. Also unlike your buyer, they are not actively searching for a solution.
If you can’t articulate what your product is in a way the journalist will understand, the press release you (or your PR pro) sends will be deleted. Journalists don’t have a bunch of time to spend trying to figure it out.
If you can’t articulate what is unique about your product (ie why they should care), it’s possible you’ll still get some coverage, especially if you’d just raised money. The problem is that if the journalist isn’t so sure what makes you unique he or she will definitely not be able to convey that uniqueness to readers.
Positioning and PR
Of course, the relationship between public relations and positioning is actually more fundamental. The type of publication you want to appear in is going to be different depending on how you position your company.
Let’s say you have a product that could be used for security or for business intelligence. Should you pitch security publications or business-focused publications? The audience is going to be very different for those two use cases. If you pitch a product that sounds vaguely like a BI tool to a security publication, you’ll be wasting everyone’s time.
And that’s just deciding what your product is. You’re also going to segment your market, right? In the next post, I’ll talk about how segmenting your market, aka the second part of positioning, is also critical for successful PR.