PR Pain Points for Entrepreneurs
Identifying the challenges entrepreneurs face in doing their own PR outreach
Here’s a story you have probably heard before. An entrepreneur approaches a public relations agency. They want to grow their burgeoning business and need help driving brand awareness. The entrepreneur knows that strategic media placement can be a great tool for scaling a new business, but they’re reaching out to the PR agency for a reason. Or maybe it’s many reasons. Here are some of the most common challenges entrepreneurs face when attempting to do their own PR and, consequently, why they decide to entrust an experienced agency with their brand story.
Time
The eternal challenge for the entrepreneur. While they are understandably excited to trumpet their business to key media, handling that outreach on their own means dedicating time that is already at a premium. Even in its most simplified form, quality media outreach requires ideation research, contact curation and thoughtful pitching. Each one of those tasks can take hours, especially for an entrepreneur who has many talents, but may not be an experienced PR professional. Therein lies the hidden reason why time is a common pain point for entrepreneurs attempting PR. It’s not time, so much as it’s efficient use of time.
Entrepreneurs frequently express to me that they ran out of steam when doing their own media outreach. The reason is because entrepreneurs often navigate the process with a lack of knowledge on how to streamline processes, best ways to develop connection with media and the time to dig into who is covering what, where and when.
That process is understandably frustrating. A couple days’ worth of work may yield five good pitches, with no guarantee of success. PR professionals help make this process more efficient by scaling outreach to pitch more relevant media in a fraction of the time. Our carefully organized media lists help us identify relevant media quickly and our automated tools for tracking important keywords allow us to find new relevant contacts as they emerge. It critically frees up the entrepreneur’s time to run their business.
Journalist Access
“Who do you know that can help us?” It’s one of the most frequently asked questions I get from entrepreneurs. Our answer as PR pros will always vary based on a client’s industry, news, and existing relationships.However, we know how our PR experience can help an entrepreneur gain access to key journalists. Let’s take two examples.
Example 1: We have close relationships with journalists in a relevant vertical. Our existing relationships with key journalists will always instill confidence in entrepreneurs who have toiled through the painstaking process of handling their own media outreach. Our value in these scenarios lies not only in our relationships, but in our ability to leverage them tactfully. After all, we have built these close relationships by being respectful of journalists’ time. It may satisfy our client in the short term to immediately contact our journalist friends with a pitch, but we understand that timing is important for the long term health of the relationship. To maximize the odds of a result for our client and avoid the risk of alienating a valued contact, we track the journalists’ work, monitor editorial timing for their outlets and maintain regular contact so we can pitch when the time is right.
Example 2: We may not have close relationships with relevant media as media moves happen frequently. Not to worry. Our experience in PR teaches us this is the case more often than not. In fact, a global PR survey by Prezly revealed that PR pros have a “good relationship” with only 11% of their contacts. That means we’re used to pitching media we don’t know or at least don’t know well. PR professionals are experts at utilizing their tools and experience to identify and connect with relevant media. Even when we don’t have close relevant contacts, we can give our clients access to relevant journalists by utilizing our knowledge and expertise to efficiently find new contacts that will be key to our clients success. Just like pitching close contacts, the key to pitching journalists we don’t know is respect. By pitching media that could genuinely benefit from covering our client, we can establish credibility and develop brand new relationships.
Messaging
Distance is key. An entrepreneur sees the strengths of their business. A PR professional sees which strengths are most relevant to journalists and subsequently their audience. As outsiders to the business, we bring perspective that can help entrepreneurs craft messaging that sets their business apart from the pack.
A healthy degree of skepticism is crucial to effective messaging. Remember that a journalist’s job is to critically examine every subject they cover, so we have to do the same. We perform thorough market research to better understand the complete competitive landscape around a business. We aren’t trying to poke holes in an entrepreneur’s perception of their business, but instead have a thorough understanding of strengths, weaknesses and differentiators. This helps us quickly get to the heart of what is genuinely unique and newsworthy about the businesses we represent.
All of that research and skepticism is aimed at one goal: brevity. A journalist receives hundreds of pitches and we need to be able to grab attention quickly. Because entrepreneurs want to tell journalists all the strengths of their business, they frequently try to shoehorn the whole story of the business in one pitch. Long emails like these get skipped over and fail to highlight what makes the business newsworthy. A PR pro helps trim the fat. We tell journalists what they need to know right up front. What makes this business different? How do they fit into the larger media conversation? We can tell the rest of the story when we have their attention.
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