What happened to the media and whether startups should host them

    What excites most young startups today? - Investments, startup incubators, smoothies and, of course, PR. And also various startup parties where IT industry gurus share secrets copied from Google’s results. Although this is also about smoothies. And these your online stores, suppliers and the whole small business - for wimps.



    And so, we tasted the smoothies, read about Silicon Valley, watched the interviews with Sam Altman, meditated, raised money ..., well, first, let's get down to public relations. True, the product must be brought to mind, and there are no sales. Well, nothing, there will be PR - there will be sales. Maybe.

    Offline editions



    And who would give an interview? Where to post a publication? If we take the level of our innovativeness, creativity and ambitiousness of the team, then if you PR in offline publications, then only in the top and most cited federal newspapers.



    But how to check the effectiveness of such a publication? - What for? The main thing is that you can then put a beautiful logo in the section “They write about us”. The newspaper wrote about us - solidly the same as! And we'll think about sales later.



    Although we initially understood this ourselves, for the complete “kit” we still posted our articles in several editions. True, it cost us nothing but the time spent on preparing the material. So, personal experience in posting information about one of our startups - a freelance platform for language professionals 2Polyglot.com- in glossy editions showed almost zero result. After the publication of several print magazines, the growth rate of the main indicators of the online resource has not changed at all. And why would he change if the reader of the paper version, seeing information about the new platform, doesn’t google the name 2Polyglot on his smartphone. People in their essence are lazy, especially if they are not fully targeted. And who now generally reads offline publications? Nowadays even electronic books are read less and less, but you shouldn’t even speak for gloss. Even electronic longreads are no longer popular. It is difficult to say what this is connected with, possibly, with an overabundance of available information, because of which our brain follows the path of least resistance, filtering out excess, and maybe we are just dumb.



    That is, even the radio overtook the print media! Yes, it turns out that everything is so bad! The print media is dying out like dinosaurs or press releases. Although they themselves do not believe in it. By the way, the same applies to offline advertising on billboards, etc.



    But startups are people who always go against the system. They are not looking for easy ways. They need to come up with an innovative bike that goes backwards with a fingerprint scanner and an integrated front camera that will take selfies and send to Instagram.



    Online media



    Advanced startups quite logically believe that first you need to strive to get into online publications, which are a much effective tool ... SEO, not PR, as they might think. Absolutely all media can be useful to a startup only in the context of increasing brand awareness, which a startup does not yet have, because it is a startup because there are few people who know about it. What does a startup need for rapid development? - Oh, just do not fool your head again with your investments. Sales, gentlemen, yeah. A brand is developed through sales, not PR. PR is only a catalyst, but sales are always primary. It’s scary to imagine how much paid publications on resources cost, where almost no one will buy anything from you. What is better read in the media? - Who got how much money, as well as success stories from zero to a million. These are the most popular topics. Here you can even guess who reads them. Potential buyers of your innovative salt table lamps? - I doubt it. Rather, even competitors. And the lamps obviously need to be sold elsewhere.



    Of course, we are talking about paid publications. If it is possible to stay for free, then no one will refuse, because an extra link will not hurt.

    Startup Media





    This category refers to online media in general, but deserves special attention. "How? They haven’t written about you in Zuckerberg yet? - Losers!". Transitions, of course, from such resources are crazy. But a high attendance of a resource is an indicator that the seoshnik can use in his report for the boss before the salary, if it is really about a startup, and not a blog, where advertising is the main source of income. But sales from these transitions - the cat burst into tears. A published article in a startup media has become akin to a status accessory: it practically doesn’t perform any functions, but the number of show-offs increases by several times. If the primary goal is to increase sales, then the effort expended in the form of time and labor or money is absolutely not worth such a PR. Well, if your sales are already on top,



    Placed in the top media, whether online or print, of course, you decide. Just remember that it takes a lot of resources: in time or money. If you have a startup that does not yet have enough organic traffic and sales that would allow you to score on the transience of sales activities to generate sales, then focus on the sales themselves, and not on PR for the sake of increasing brand awareness, which you essentially have not.

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