Your initial marketing investment should be in a fantastic strategic communications specialist. Your company will lose the bulk of its influence if its messaging is not clear, simple, and appealing. Forget the press and analysts; if your value proposition is not properly positioned, you will have a hard time attracting consumers or investors. Even if it is too early to hire someone full-time, enlist the assistance of someone with a seniority level that matches yours.
Early messaging/positioning and early product design should not consider as completely independent activities. Allowing these messaging sessions to reveal flaws or reveal fresh possibilities will guarantee that all of your future marketing efforts are based on truth and accuracy. If you have assembled a competent communications team, they will have a strategy and a plan in place. You can gradually assist them in carrying out their plan, but you can also reverse their progress in the blink of an eye.
Look for a strategic partner rather than a manager when it is time to hire a full-time comms person. Hire someone who is familiar with your industry, not just his or hers. Even though they are not a spokesperson, they will frequently be the first person from your organization to interact with reporters, analysts, and influencers. They should be able to converse as effectively anybody on your sales staff about your product and industry. If it seems like a large order, it is still another reason to provide enough resources to the position.
Many individuals regard communications and public relations as though they are interchangeable, while the latter is only a small part of the former. Traditional media relations are no longer as crucial as they were a decade ago. Every day, the number of business journalists working throughout the world decreases, but the number of journals that take paid and donated material increases. The reporter you “had” to see today may be doing public relations for one of your competitors tomorrow.
Those that remain are overworked. They do not have enough bandwidth to cover all that has to be covered. The days of a guaranteed business press article or trade publicity surrounding a product launch are long gone. Every tech company believes it is doing something unique and wonderful, and many of them are.
However, no matter what you are doing, someone will always find a way to remove you from the news cycle. Find a mechanism to quantify your communications program’s output other than the quantity of articles published; those mentions are useless if they are not relevant to your message. In today’s landscape, relationships and inventiveness are essential for a successful media presence. Reporters must rely on a network of individuals they trust to tell them what is essential since they do not have time to cover everything.
