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The Startup PR Checklist – What to do before a big launch

Copy of branches&creaturesFor early stage startups, cash-strapped and overworked, there are few things more valuable than PR. There is nothing more important at that stage than getting the word out there and getting users on board, for which PR is the only real shortcut available. And when there is an important feature release or a launch or a funding announcement and so on, all of which can be leveraged to get your startup up into the fickle spotlight, you need to be on your best game.

Here’s a small PR checklist that can be used as a starting point for campaigns. Based on a plan I’d made for a company I consult for, it can be used for different domains with appropriate tweaks.

Press Release

Write the draft yourself. Don’t let your PR agency write it. Remember that most wires will just pick up your release and distribute it. Writing the release itself let you control the small nuances that would make an impression on a reader. No PR person, as good a writer as they may be, will know exactly what you want to say or be able to communicate what you know. Ask them to review and edit it later, of course. But when your positioning needs to be clearly articulated, no one can do it better than you.

Tip – Read the PRs which made an impression on you. See what caught your attention. Replicate.

Reach-out mailers

About three weeks before your release date, prepare a small outbound list of tech journalists, podcasters and bloggers, and start reaching out to them with the story you want them to tell. The best case scenario would be that you have built up a relationship with the journalists and bloggers over some time, and are now in a position to leverage it. If not, this is as good a time to start as any. Try to tell them a story, give them a ‘hook’ to write about and ask them if they’d be interested to write about you. Most will not, a few will, but maybe next time, when there’s an even bigger launch, they will. And what coverage you get now for the story will be a bonus.

Tip – Have a list of journalists you consider important on your table. Mail them at intervals, give them tips, ask their opinions on vital debates. Be useful and interesting to them, basically. They’ll be more receptive when you reach out to them later.

Homepage

Connect the Press Release’s story with the homepage. In effect, make the homepage the landing page for that day, so there’s a smooth experience for the reader who’s coming in from reading the release. If they say different things, you may lose his/her attention. But when what is said on the release connects snugly with the homepage, there is a higher probability for the reader to spend time on the site. You can check how many readers actually followed this process, read pages or clicked on CTAs to know how this worked, so you can tweak it on future releases.

Blog

Write at least two tangential/related stories about the release on your blog, preferably personal stories of how the team built this, or how it impacted a specific customer and so on. This way, readers who arrive on the site through this story have additional reading material to spend their time on. Though this isn’t spoken about more often, the blog is often a measure of organisational credibility. For example, I sent a senior manager at Freshdesk a link to a young product that could have been useful in sales processes. The first thing he told me was that since the company did not seem to write anything on their blog, he didn’t have anything to judge them on. The product seemed okay enough, but he didn’t know if he could trust them. This is something product marketers should take not of.

Tip – An article or two on Medium would also help. Medium, being the heavily tech-oriented community that it is, can sometimes get your story noticed more. Again, all of this is possible only if there’s a good story people actually want to read. None of this is useful otherwise.

Case Studies

At least one case study should be there on the home page, where the customer has used the new feature you are releasing. A good case study can be fantastic collateral for a feature release or a product launch; readers who arrive from the news will know immediately that what has been told to them and interest in which has led them here, is already out there being used. This again raises the probability of them clicking on CTAs or getting on mailers or even buying the product itself.

And so on and so forth. There are a lot of these things startups can do on the contextual level that will make the arriving reader spend more time on the page and convert. For the startup with limited money and marketing budget, which needs to ensure that not a single reader who arrives trickles away into the ether, these tricks of the inbound trade are definite aces-up-sleeves.

If there are other things that you have done, or which I have forgotten about early in the morning as I write this, please add them in the comments.

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5 questions for every product marketing team

When Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshdesk) hired yours truly, a complete novice straight out of B-School, I was Freshdesk’s employee no. 8, and we operated out of a nondescript location deep in south Chennai, from two small rooms behind a quaint Catholic church. Painted in our company’s signature teal color and equipped with an internet connection that had a mind of its own, our old office was for me the ultimate symbol of the true entrepreneur – spare, utilitarian and with a contagious energy that infected everyone.It was then that G, as we call the boss, told me to put my Kotler away and learn by doing, rather than falling into the trap MBAs usually fall into, of analyzing everything but failing to execute even a single one.I tried to do that, and learned a lot from a world class team of marketers along the way. Our marketing has received some praise, and though we’re light years away from where we want to be, I’d love to share a few things with the product community.Here are five questions for product marketers like me –

Are you telling a great story?

The answer should be a resounding yes. If not, well, you should be. A technology product’s website is its showroom, and like showroom space is gold for the retailer, so is our website. And this is where we need to get our story across. 
We humans understand and assimilate stories much more easily than we do disparate facts. It’s just how we are. And that is why, to make it easy for the customer to understand our product offering, to digest it, there needs to be a story, told in a simple way, as clearly as possible, with a definite call to action. For tips and techniques you can use, here’s a post from Jonah Sachs, author of ‘The Storytelling Wars’. The book itself is quite good, and I highly recommend it.

 

Is the language perfect, the communication flawless?

You should be saying yes even before you read the question completely. As product marketers, more often than not, our target market is international, and there can be no compromise on grammar and language. The writing needs to be top drawer. Full stop. In fact, this was the reason I got the chance to become a product marketer in the first place. G did not hire me because of my MBA degree, G hired me because he judged me to be a good writer and because I was able to get a point across. 
When we at Freshdesk write copy for our site and content for our blog, there is great emphasis on grammatical accuracy and narrative tone. None of us is Shakespeare of course, but selling to respected companies abroad, we can’t afford to drop the ball on this – the very brand is at stake.

 

Is more time being spent on perfecting things than on getting stuff out?

This question is specifically for content marketers like me. The desirable answer is of course no, but if your answer is yes, then rejoice. You now have a chance to simplify your content delivery stream and it’s going to give you great results. 
What you need to do is this – don’t keep reviewing and perfecting the content you write or the infographics you make or the SEO pages you craft. Just get them out. Nothing is going to be absolutely perfect. Even Beethoven thought his symphonies were flawed. After a point, the difference between good enough and perfect is so negligible you’ll need a microscope to find out. Something ‘good enough’ that’s out there and garnering eyeballs always, always, trumps that ‘perfect’ thing which will take another week. 
Don’t ‘review’ over and over again. Just get it out.

 

Are there clear strategies for social, content & customer service?

Yes, you need them. Just so every employee knows what’s going on and what the organization’s outlook is. At Freshdesk, being a customer support company ourselves, our service is our brand. Every single customer of ours is treated with respect and the questions our support and sales teams ask them, boil down to roughly this – what problem of yours can we solve today? 
This is ingrained in the way we do things and it’s now in our very DNA. Our customer service strategy is clear – whatever we can do for him/her, we will. This clarity is very important. Because when different teams talk to customers and prospects, this consistency will become your brand, and then reinforce itself. This is exactly how a brand is built. Same with your content and social strategy. The key word is consistency. Just remember that with every piece of content and tweet and Facebook post you put out there, your brand is being constructed, bit by bit.

 

Are new things being tried out, and are the results being recorded?

Yes, yes and yes. If A/B testing is not (at least) a weekly activity, you are doing something wrong. You should be constantly trying out new avenues for growth and new platforms for attracting customers. A few will work, many will not. Don’t worry. This isn’t sunk cost, not at all. Write down the results and move on. This way after a point of time, you know which channels to invest in and which channels to avoid. The data you collect during all this will give you the answers you need to the channel-ROI question.
And in the age of newer platforms and channels almost every month, if you continuously try new things – you might actually be the first movers into Klondike! Give yourself that chance.