Medium/LinkedIn killed PR, Here’s What A Startup Should Do.
With the advent of publishing platforms like Medium and Linkedin, it’s become less valuable paying a firm to try to get your company mentioned in one of the traditional news outlets. So what’s a startup to do to get heard above the noise of hundreds of thousands of other startups selling products and services on the web?
Marketing in 2010
Between 2008 and 2013, when I ran my startup, there were two vendors we couldn’t live without; the accountant and the PR firm. Being as my work as the CEO was to keep money in the bank, hire the best people and evangelize our product it was clear that those two outside relationships were the ones I needed to nurture; the accountant to help with money and the PR firm to help with evangelizing. We had a product offering that confused a few (customers could comparison shop for alternative electricity suppliers) and we needed to build customer trust, external to our own push marketing.
I hired the PR firm even before we raised any venture capital because I recognized that earned media was the most cost effective form of building a brand and customer trust. Every press mention brought a flow of customers and candidates interested in joining our team.
Yahoo was still a beast back in 2010!!!
2008–2013 was a period when every marketplace startup (and its mother) could raise a seed round, new technology was upending every industry and the marketing tools we had were
Paid marketing: mainly facebook and Adwords, which was pretty expensive for a budgetless startup
Blogging: consistently, which was akin to screaming into the forest.
Virality: as much a crapshoot then as it is now.
Public Relations (PR): where your story is pitched to a web or paper news outlet with the hope that you get mentioned. This is the tactic we doubled down on. It worked pretty well for us with.
Email marketing: which was our most valuable customer engagement and retention tool.
The Sun-Times, Tribune and Crains did a great job of featuring our customers (not us). Built customer trust.
PR also had the added benefit of Search Engine Optimization, we made sure to get backlinks to our website, which increased our site relevance. But it was all about increasing the number of people who became aware of who and what Power2Switch was…it was, as it is now for a lot of companies, all about marketing.
Product Marketing and Customer Journeys
All marketing, regardless of the method or type, is about getting consumers to take a journey with your product or service. A journey that you hope concludes with them taking an action i.e purchasing your product or service. Your company goal, regardless of what you sell is to guide prospects through the loop of awareness->discovery->purchase->use->referral.
Modified version of the HBR article here (Courtesy Harper Jacobs)
As mentioned, at Power2Switch, we nailed the awareness part of the loop with PR. We then proceeded to satisfy the customer needs once they purchased (by saving them on their electricity expenses) and equipped delighted customers to share through social media. It seemed straightforward. But, truth be told, if we were to do this today I believe we would have had limited success generating awareness. Why?
Because PR no longer works! There has been a shift to content marketing on platforms like Linkedin and Medium.
It’s noisy in the market…
Personal blogs, for the vast majority of founders, are dead. Most companies are now doing their marketing through these channels, with the consequent dissipation of power from the major news networks. Some networks are actually setting up shop on Medium! And ads? Personally, I don’t even know any startup or business that still does Adwords! And, relative to 2010–13, Facebook ads have become somewhat ineffective. We also have adblockers.
Thought Leadership aka Marketing in 2016 (and 2017)
So with the death of PR, the ineffectiveness of paid channels and in a world where there are more devices than people, 1 Billion Websites (below) and ~6M Apps your startup is competing with more companies that are, in a lot of cases, selling the same thing as you. Sometimes better than you. And that’s pretty disheartening. A founder expressed this frustration to me just earlier today ‘how do I get heard?’
But smart founders/teams are finding a way to rise above the noise.
Smart founders/teams are getting their voices heard, above the deafening noise of marketing, by defining where their industry is going and placing their products or services at the center of that industry transformation.
It’s what Stewart Butterfield is doing with Slack. At the last conference I saw him speak, he wasn’t talking about Slack. He was talking about the ‘changing nature of work communication’. Slack just so happens to, intentionally, be a big part of that change.
Stewart Butterfield, NOT talking about Slack.
At an individual level, a fantastic example is Ire Aderinokun. Her bitsofcode newsletter is chock full of frontend development knowledge, that she drops on all who are interested, sharing value about how she is moving the industry forward. It’s thought leadership done effectively. The product or service becomes invaluable to those who agree with the future of the industry that you, as the thought leader, is helping design.
Doing thought leadership right.
Bear with me (this gets meta) because this blog post itself is me providing some thought leadership aka practicing what I’m preaching. I’ll walk you through a practical and personal example.
Step 1: Share expertise to gain awareness for your product or service. My expertise is product marketing and futurecasting* for energy technology (utility and distributed energy resources) and IoT (connected home). I blog on Medium and Linkedin and do it well enough that I’ve gotten close to 500k views/likes/shares of my posts in the last few months. A lot of people blog but i) I know my industry, have a sense for where the industry is going and continue to learn and ii) I happen to write well.
People seem to like what I write.
Step 2: Prove your product works and share knowledge: the images above and below show traffic generated from blog posts about IoT and Energy technology over the last year. I’ve picked niche areas of the industry that I care about and am defining (empathetic IoT and utility innovation) and, like Stewart of Slack, I freely share my perspective on where the industry is going. I spoke at SXSWEco and will be speaking at SustainableUX below. At these talks I say nothing about the work I do and focus fully on where the industry is going, what needs to be done to get there and I highlight some cool folk/products doing that. You gain more credibility and come off as less salesy that way.
Speaking at this conference in a few weeks. I’m pretty sure no one else is talking about this.
Step 3: Delight the customers when they pick you. Almost as critical as getting awareness is making sure that your product or service delights the customer. On the technology strategy/development side I’ve helped clients get multimillion dollar contracts. On the thought leadership side I’ve ghostwritten posts that’s generated inbound business for firms. You must still do the work, it increases your learning and the value of what you can share. Absolutely ensure that your work delights your customers.
Not bad for a guy figuring out how to talk about an industry folk don’t usually understand or pay attention to.
Step 4: Get referrals, generate clients and start from Step 1. You take all you’ve learned from Step 3 and share more knowledge (back to Step 1). It’s what I do and the referrals prove it. It wouldn’t be ghostwriting if I revealed who the customers are or showed images from the clients would it? :) Rest assured, it works.
The more times people see your work (content marketing) and hear you talk about the industry, not about your company (thought leadership), the more desirous they are of doing business with you and your company. Your role at that point is not to break the loop of the customer journey. It’s a journey that has not changed since the advent of trade. What’s changed are the tools used to guide customers through the journey. Use the tools wisely…
So what are you doing to become a thought leader? It’s the new form of marketing in a world where PR is dead and Medium/Linkedin now rule?
*futurecasting: it’s like weather forecasting for technology trends. It’s a far superior methodology to predictions because it’s based on Systems Thinking.
https://medium.com/@seyi_fab/medium-linkedin-killed-pr-firms-whats-a-startup-to-do-b02d7843970e