I had several people approach me in the last few weeks to say that no matter where they looked they saw Social Tables. That’s probably because we all go to the same few places to get our information but I hope it’s also because we played our cards right when it came to our PR strategy around our new version, which were extremely psyched about.
In this post, I will share our PR strategy in the hopes that it helps other startups get the most out of news they’re excited about sharing.
To position this piece to reporters, we had two key pieces of news to share: closing a seed round and launching a new version.*
Our PR schedule for launch week
Think Local We knew we wanted to start local so when BisNow approached us about a piece, we let them say that we were going to announce funding soon. When we were ready to make that announcement, we gave the Washington Post’s [awesome] tech reporter Steven Overly an exclusive. We also made sure to send other local publications our press release before we sent it elsewhere.
Position We positioned the news differently to different outlets by changing a few key words in our press release headline. For example, we made sure we included the word weddings when we sent it to wedding blogs and we made sure we focused on the raise when we sent it to startup blogs.
Peg We looked up each reporter’s latest articles and found a tie-in between our big news and their recent interests. That way they (1) think about ways of pitching it to their boss and (2) know that we care.
Personalize We leveraged some of the relationships we had with some journos (SXSW is good for building these!) by writing a personalized email to each of the reporters in our media list. And we kept it short and sweet.
Overshare We made sure to include as much information as possible in the emails we sent journalists so that all of their questions would be answered. That included an intro video, our press release (in the body of the email below a personalized note), a link to a demo, a link to the site, and screenshots.
Here are a few other things we did:
- We emailed our user base before we sent the press release out to make sure they knew about the release first - we appreciate them and we wanted them to know that.
- We reached out to our investors and advisors to share the news with them and asked them to share it with their networks
- We sent our press release to anyone we knew in the media - you never know who’ll bite until you try!
- We made sure most of these emails came from me. Reporters appreciate hearing from the CEOs of companies and appreciate the hustle of startups.
- We got the entire team motivated which read through in the press release and in social media outlets - if you’re excited to share, others will be too!
I hope this helps other startups think about PR. If you have any tips or best practices, please share them in the comments!
-Dan
*The fact of the matter is that we closed our seed round over a month before we announced the close but we waited on pulling the trigger for a very vain reason: our old version was still up and we didn’t want the new traffic we expected to see it. So we waited until our new version was ready to be unveiled.
