3 Reasons Startups Need PR

Every startup should engage in Public Relations (PR) from day one. Does this mean you hire a PR firm? Absolutely NOT! When you talk about your start up at your local college, a Meetup or a friend’s wedding, you are doing PR.

Of course, as with all such activities, if you do it in a systematic and smart manner it can pay off in a big way. It’s easy (and wrong) to imagine public relations to be a matter of hiring a PR firm and talking to the media. It’s really about letting your stakeholder community know that you exist and shaping their perception of you.

As all-knowing Wikipedia quotes

“The aim of public relations by a company often is to persuade the public, investors, partners, employees, and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about it, its leadership, products, or of political decisions. Common activities include speaking at conferences, winning industry awards, working with the press, and employee communication.”

With that said, here are three reasons for a start up to do PR.

Customers If customer’s haven’t heard of you or know that you exist, it’s hard to get them to buy from you. A well thought-out PR plan, even if executed by one person, usually the founder, can do wonders. This is particularly true for anyone in the B2B business. It’s nice if customers have heard of you before you show up at their doorstep. This can be done in any number of creative and no-money-spent ways from blog posts, contributed articles or op-ed pieces in your local paper, talks at industry bodies or local associations, or newsletters. A side benefit of such PR activity is that you get to practice and refine your company’s story, which is always a good thing. It’s also a great way to figure what resonates with your target audience and in some instances, even refine who your target audience really is!

Employees If you grow, or land that first or tenth customer, you’ll find you’ll want to be attracting employees. Even more importantly, if you’ve hired folks, you’d want to retain them and keep them motivated. Nothing works like seeing your company’s name in the paper, a poster, on the TV or in social media, to both attract and inspire folks. If like most start ups you’re asking them to work hard and make sacrifices then such inspiration is not an option. In time, you can get your team to do the PR, which will help build their own personal brands and bring goodwill and repute to your business.

Investors At some point if you wish to raise money, whether from friends, family or other fools, or professional investors, it helps – much like with customers – if they’ve heard of you. While a lot of ink offers no certainty of raising money, it provides folks the comfort that you’ve been around, survived and hopefully thrived by the time you approach them. The beauty about PR done well is that it allows you to drive the conversation about what your company stands for and sets context, so that you are really not an unknown or worse yet, a . Imisunderstood quantity to prospective investors.

So darn right, as long as you spend a finite amount of time and constantly measure the effectiveness of your activities, I’d assert every start up should invest in public relations from day one!

This post was inspired by a question on Quora