Growing your brand and business as a startup is challenging. Startups have a tough time surviving the first few years, and effective promotion is often the difference between surviving or going out of business.
Public Relations (PR) is pivotal to the growth of a startup. The right PR helps generate more buzz around your business, helps attract new customers, increases conversions, and builds trust around your brand.
How do you formulate the right PR strategy for your business? By working with a startup PR agency with expertise working with startups.
In this article, weโre covering some of the top tips to help you choose the right PR agency for your startup to helps supercharge your business:
Work out your budget
PR can scale at a rapid pace, so itโs important you know what your budget is from the start and you stick to it.
This will also help you narrow down the companies that are willing to work with you. Always be upfront with a PR agency about what your monthly or annual budget is and ask them what services they can provide for that amount.
Check theyโre experienced working with startups
A lot of PR agencies will say that they work with startups, but you want to do your due diligence to make sure that they have experience working with startups.
As you will be very aware from managing a startup, startups have very specific market challenges that experienced companies do not have.
Working with a PR company that understands the unique challenges of a start-up can be the difference between a hugely successful relationship and a failure.
Meet with the agency reps in person
PR is a personable industry. If someone is going to be representing your brand, you want to have a personal relationship with them yourself so you have the confidence theyโre going to represent your brand as you would.
This also gives you the opportunity to ask them questions and put them on the spot. This isnโt a bad thing, itโs the perfect opportunity to check that the agency is a good fit for you.
Look through their portfolio of work
PR is a very visual and results-based industry. Any PR agency you are talking with should be able to show you a portfolio of their best work and a summary of their successful campaigns.
Keep in mind that they are only going to show you their best work. What youโre looking for is that they have expertise in the industry youโre in, and their general style, and the way they approach representing their clients.
Read reviews and testimonials from past clients
Obviously, any agency you speak with is going to put their best face forward. If you ask them for testimonials, they give you a bunch of testimonials from happy clients.
To get a more accurate picture of their service from past clients youโre going to need to do some of your own due diligence.
You should be able to find some sort of footprint by performing some basic Google searches for the agency.
Donโt be put off if you see a couple of negative reviews if there are a lot of positive ones. Itโs something you can bring up with them when you speak to them in person though.
Ask them to lay out a plan of action
The best way to get an idea of how your arrangement is going to go with an agency is to ask them to give you a plan of action for how theyโre going to handle your PR.
Every agency approaches PR differently. If you have them lay out a plan, youโll have a clearer picture of what to expect and what you can hold them accountable for.
