Yes, we know they’re almost always mentioned in the same breath. To most companies, mar/comms is this undefined group of people making the salespeople complain about their lead funnel. This image creates problems because marketing and PR strategies serve different purposes.
Marketing makes people who care, buy your product. PR makes people care! If your PR strategy is built by marketers, for marketers, you won’t get the results you were looking for. To get the media to care about your company, you need to put yourself in the shoes of a journalist.
Journalists want stories.
Your product isn’t that interesting. It’s surely a great piece of innovation, but it is nonetheless just an object. Of course, in product marketing, your features are important – they tell prospects what they can expect to get. But this is only effective if people care, realize the importance or understand they have a need. No one cares about your solution until they know there’s a problem to solve. PR is about making journalists care about your story, and help you make the audience understand why this matters to them.
Most journalists, simply, are looking for one thing: news. So what is it about your company that makes you newsworthy?
The answer lies in the impact your company has on people’s lives. Have an incredible industrial solution? Build your story about how this will help feed 40% more people or clean up our natural environment. A new SaaS tool? Talk about how it will save people from losing their jobs. A deep tech piece within a large machinery?
Without this piece, we will not be able to build renewable energy or solve our environmental challenges. Talking about your impact on people’s lives triggers an emotional reaction in an audience. And journalists love that. That’s what your PR strategy is there to help you do.
Impact, impact, impact. And timing.
Marketers create a core message and hammer it through to prospects multiple times, in multiple channels. That works great for people who already know who you are. The issue is, without PR, they won’t know you when that marketing email ticks in, and are likely to disregard it unopened. Your PR strategy is there to get people talking about you beyond your marketing. To get results with PR, you need to understand the world outside your own walls.
This is where your PR strategy has to be flexible. If you want to talk about how you help solve food shortages, but all journalists write about is the energy crisis, you need to pivot. To put it bluntly, no one cares about your heating technology in a heatwave. You have to follow the media, know what they write about, and build your stories around relevant topics. That way, you get journalists interested, and in turn, their readers.
Your marketing and communications are cousins, not twins. You need to think about them differently. To be successful in telling your story through the media, you need to leave your marketing hat on the shelf and start thinking like a journalist. Today!
Now that you get it, let’s make it happen!
Get in touch, and we’ll help you tell your stories.
