Author: Dmitry Dragilev / Source: The Next Web
If you’re working on any sort of promotion, whether as a PR person or simply trying to get the word out about your own company, you’ll need to understand journalists. Rebecca Grant who was a journalist at VentureBeat for a number years wrote a blog post describing how she felt at her job:
I thought this was a perfect way to describe how dysfunctional PR has become.
Everyone is obsessed with “Lights over Broadway PR” — i.e. getting featured on TNW, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, NYTimes, WSJ, etc.The trouble is that while you want to have your name in “lights over Broadway” your customers are at home watching Netflix. You want to be on the homepage of TNW but your customers are reading Startups.co.
“Who cares?” you might say, “Maybe some of those readers from TNW might convert to customers? It’s good for overall exposure.”
So you follow this same process countless other companies have followed for decades (I’ll be 100 percent honest, I’m guilty of previously doing this):
- You hire a PR firm for $10K- $20K/mo
- PR firm writes and publishes a press release on PR Newswire
- PR firm uses Cision to find a list of journalists around a specific beat/location
- PR firm sends 500 emails and gets 50 replies
- 3 stories are published on big name publications in a month, you’re ecstatic, you repeat
What’s wrong with this picture? Why is this archaic?
Here are the reasons I stopped using this process and why I believe others should as well:
- Journalists are spammed to the point of insanity with pitches that are not related to what they do, they feel like gazelles being hunted by predators
- You’re not targeting your customers properly with your PR approach — so the end result is just a bunch of traffic and very low conversion
- You’re not building genuine relationships with journalists yourself, which means you don’t accumulate you own rolodex of press contacts
In plain English you are not targeting your customers; you’re doing a huge disservice to journalists. Here is Grant again:
Not long ago I grew a startup from 0 to 40 million page views and got acquired by Google and I used an entirely different type of PR, I call it the ‘Netflix PR’, it focuses on the following:
Value up front – are you delivering value to a journalist without asking for any promotion up front?
Relevancy – how relevant is the information you’re sending to the journalist’s interests?
Targeting – based on the last three articles the journalist published, how relevant…
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