The face of PR is ever evolving and positioning your brand to potential customers has never been easier. PR has inherently moved to a more content-driven approach, and the focus is the distribution of your news. While advertising on social media platforms has reached a new peak, the good old credible news sharing strategies still hold true, adding a twist to distributing this information can make it very effective and still help you stay within budget. As a Start-Up, there are a variety of things your organization could be doing to position your news and content and create a buzz around your brand with your potential customers.

Identify and focus on specific and niche publications/blogs that target your audience/industry and have an inherently built-in audience.

As you start off your journey, you need quick access to start getting the word out about your business. Spend time on finding the right avenues to start sharing information about what you do, who you are and what you stand for. Niche publications and industry blogs are the best way to start. Identify a list of these potential publications which already have a small to medium audience and are always looking to offer their audience valuable information. Have the right conversation and understand how you can collaborate with them to build up content that can position you as the expert in your industry and at the same time add value to the audience.

Collaborate on some base level research, identify the highly engaging and shareable topics from their existing content and then help make them better and more credible.

It’s good to start off with building this relationship with 1 or 2 such partners and validate the direction you are taking, once you start creating great content suddenly you will have a plethora of other options to share the same content and maximize visibility for your brand as well as your partner’s platform. By creating this Win-Win relationship you automatically start off at a much higher level of visibility then you otherwise would have, had you started building your network from scratch. These relationships can be invaluable, and growth on either side leads to success for both partners involved.

START BUILDING YOUR NETWORK FROM DAY 1

While starting off, you can “piggyback” on some niche publications; but you must also be very clear about growing your own network. Great news without any visibility is of no value. The success rate to your growth is dependent on you effectively positioning yourself in front of the end users. So correctly identifying your potential customer base, where they spend their time online and offline and building up connections on those platforms or in those areas is a crucial task. Ensure you pursue this relentlessly even if the results are not immediate. In the long run, your own network is what is going to give you the big returns and will be the most reliable source of business for you.

Now how do you do this? Most entrepreneurs are now aware of social media platforms and how important they are to grow their business. What they are not aware of is the fact that the growth does not necessarily need to be through the paid channels offered by social media platforms. If your content has the ability to add value to users, then organic growth can give you far higher returns than paid campaigns.

Observing, Testing and Monitoring what works becomes the key here, so continue to publish relevant snippets of information and see which ones get you the most traction. It is important that you effectively utilize niche publications to get into the bigger publications, share your published content with other publications and offer to do similar collaborative work with them. This can lead to you getting positioned which some of the heavy traffic and well-known news services and can send your marketing into overdrive.

CREATE A PRESS RELEASE AND CONTENT STRATEGY

Make this one of your top priorities. Ensure it is something that you work on, on a daily basis. If this is not built into your work day, you will never have enough or the right content to start positioning it to your audience. A strategy gives you the right direction and timelines to continue to work on your visibility and not get caught up in the day to day transactional and operational aspect of the business. Once you implement this over a few months, you will start to realize that, every day, you create newsworthy stories at your organization and letting your customers know will give them insights into who you are. As the news gets created using a news distribution partner can also help you get the visibility you deserve and position you with a variety of media publications across geographies and demographics.

There are many other things that you can do to get your message out there but just starting with the above options will be invaluable to your long-term PR and marketing strategy and will provide a strong foundation to launch your business.