Eight advantages of starting a company to do public relations

Eight advantages of starting a company to do public relations

Xu Xiaoping, a famous angel investor, once shared an article about the importance of public relations to a startup in a circle of friends, and elaborated the role of public relations to a startup in detail.

For early companies, public relations is actually a valuable job, but few investors will realize it, let alone entrepreneurs. In the initial stage of the company, it is inevitable to tighten their belts, and everyone in the team is staring at the products and technologies, so that they often misjudge the importance of PR. I think it is difficult to measure the value of PR clearly, which may be unacceptable to those who are used to measuring the value with specific figures.

In fact, PR is priceless. It is silent and powerful. It won't be like: Look, I only printed 10000 newspapers for 7000 yuan. That's not the concept.

Then why public relations?

1 recruitment

For all startups, the most difficult thing is to recruit a group of world-class talents. But if these big cows hear about your company somewhere in the world and are excited about your idea. Then, as an unknown startup, it will be much easier to recruit top talents. A startup I worked with had a very talented and cohesive team, but I still racked my brains for recruitment. It was not until the recent public relations activities ended that they gave me feedback and the number of applicants suddenly increased sharply. Like I said, public relations will work quietly, and you will hardly notice it until all your newly recruited employees are working at full speed. However, people always seem to forget that they found such great employees through media reports or even word of mouth.

2 Business development

Business development is always full of hardships. You are just a start-up company, and every company you meet is critical of whether it is really worth taking the time to talk to you about this transaction. When they learn about you in the American aviation magazine Wired or Recode, they will think, "Maybe we can try to contact this company. So you got a call, you were happy, and the business was progressing smoothly, but few people thought about the cause of the call. When they called, maybe they forgot where you were when they first heard about you. But this is the silent effect that PR brings to business development.

3 Raise funds

No venture capitalist who has worked for many years will admit (even to himself) that he has been influenced by media reports. But psychologically-we are always influenced by reading. Sometimes, after reading it, you will immediately think, "I should contact this company." 」; Sometimes, it comes from some kind of word of mouth, for example, someone I know read a report about your company. So, as I have told many founders, a good PR can increase your company by 654.38+million dollars, or increase your chances of completing the second round of financing. And these in turn will make your media coverage more powerful. For a company that no one has heard of, financing is very difficult.

4 team morale

People often ignore team morale. I once asked people who worked in Accenture (the company I used to work for) why they advertised everywhere at the airport. The reply is: "Many of our employees fly to work every week. Every time they see these advertisements, they will be proud to work in such a company. Well, it actually worked very well until the scandal of Tiger Woods flooded all the pages of the airport. But the fact is that employees are happy to see positive reports about the company. They will be praised by their peers, boyfriends, family members and classmates. Think about how people feel when they call them good children. You will understand that reporting is very important. You can't estimate the hidden value, but I guarantee that it does exist. Just like the damage value brought by negative reports.

5 enterprise sales

After meeting with customers by email or phone, the first thing customers do is Google them. When they decide to make a deal, their boss will Google it. When competitors compete with you for the list, the same thing will happen again and again. So, arm yourself and defend your position.

6 future public relations

This is a problem that is often overlooked. When you finally want the Wall Street magazine to publish your story, or are trying to persuade Good Morning America to let you participate in their program, these reporters and executive producers will not hesitate to slide the mouse to search for relevant information. If they see something good from the early reports, they will be more willing to talk to you. Of course, you need a new angle for reporters to report, because no one wants to repeat the same content as before. Similarly, no one wants to be the first person to predict how you will change the world in the future. The media loves the enterprise as much as the exclusive reporting right. Ironically, of course. But I promise, it's true.

7 enterprise merger and acquisition

A few years ago, the M&A director of an American technology company sat in my office and told me that he wanted to know which company I invested in most excited me. At that time, I showed him all my completed investments, which may be related to his business one day. He told me, "Mark, I can't follow every transaction of every investor or banker. There are too many of them. So I set up a filtering mechanism: I only chase the investment of 12 venture capitalists and let my team pay close attention to it. I have made up my mind. I want to track your investment. This made me realize the importance of public relations-even if you may be acquired one day. It turns out that the investment I accidentally mentioned has already been captured by someone's sensitive radar. Everyone will watch the news-even those who make you rich one day by deciding whether to buy your business or not. (I forgot to mention M&A in the original text, thanks to David Katarovsk for pointing this out on Twitter. )

8 new customer acquisition

I deliberately put the point of getting customers last. Why? Because every company I have talked about regards this as the least important reason to be a PR. Those short-sighted people always think, "We are already on the technology blog" or "We are in the app store", but we haven't got the expected downloads. Many people download our application, browse our website and so on. But none of this can be translated into sales. This is just a waste. We have to stop public relations for a while. 」

Now watch 1-7, brainwash and repeat the above steps.

When I first started my business as CEO, my company won the British B2B Public Relations Enterprise Award that year. This award is not only for startups, but also for all companies. When I wrote down my success speech, I quoted a sentence:

If I only have one dollar left for marketing, I will spend it on public relations.

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