Startup PR Strategy Hit the American Way

Hey Guys!

Task for this week: to share with you our invaluable experience – a little bit of our heart – Startup PR Strategy.

Tap2Pay.me has become the winner of the joint project by Dev.by and NY communication agency Storifier among national startups focusing to hit the USA market. In this article you will know about the first steps to start a PR strategy campaign by the example of Tap2Pay.

PART 1: FIRST QUESTIONS THAT YOU SHOULD ANSWER ABOUT YOUR STARTUP

Step 1: What is the size of your target market?

First of all market size is measured in money equivalent. Most of the other startups’ founders answered to this question mentioning numbers of people who could benefit from their product, their age, country, and etc. But this is not your target market, this is your target audience.

According to the answers from other startups – participants of the competition, many figures were highly overestimated. For instance, If you are developing an application for children at the age of 5 to 7, do not call “your” the entire education market. It is also incorrect to talk about the market of educational applications. “Educational applications for children” is better. “Educational applications for children in your age category” is the ideal answer, based on the “top-down” approach.

There is also bottom-up approach: estimate how much your clients spend on solving the problem. Estimate how many people have the same problem, and how many of them can be reached.

Overestimated figures and general information will not help you to reach good investors as they will need to do additional work to figure out the real numbers in money equivalent.

In addition to that, it is important to specify the dynamics of the market, for example, its present size and projected growth in five years. Dynamics are sometimes more important than today’s size.

Many investors say that the size of the target market for a startup is the main factor for them when they make a decision. The second place is the team, and the third is the product. Judge for yourself: if there are questions with the product, but the market you have chosen is the right one (large and growing), then there is always room for maneuver.

Step 2: Newsbreak:

In this issue, you need to be both self-critical and ambitious. Many participants indicated the work on the functionality or the hiring of a new UX-designer as an interesting piece of newsbreak. It can be certainly important news, but only for employees and close people. In the world there are millions of companies that every day release new “features” and hire new employees.

“When you think about interesting news that can potentially form the basis of a PR campaign, be ambitious. There is an exercise: think up 5 headlines about your company that you would dream of seeing in the media. And try to work towards those stories that will help you to get these headlines.”

Just answer: If you were a journalist who receives hundreds of pitches per day could your news keep his attention longer than 10 seconds?

Usually newsworthy cases are the following:

• launch of the project;
• loud partnerships;
• Founders with an impressive biography;
• Metrics (the number of downloads, for example, when it comes to large numbers);
• Big events (not participation, but organization);
• Attraction of investments

Step 3: Problem: why did you decide to work on this project? Have you already faced this problem? (Personal experience).

In this issue people want to hear a particular story, the problem of a single person. A general mistake is to answer this question in this way: “People are tired of …”, “Children want to …”. How do you know? Why do you speak for all? What evidence does this have?

Take into consideration that it is psychologically always easier to believe and sympathize with one particular person than the abstract mass of people. Tell your personal story in colors and details. Let us live this problem together with the main characters, feel all of his experiences. A hero can be you, your friends or acquaintances. Then bring the story to the fact that the main character is not alone – in the world there are many people with a similar problem.

In the next post we will answer the tricky questions about target market, clients and UX.

Stay tuned with Tap2Pay!

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