PR for the entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship
As a newly started company, PR is often not an area that is prioritized very highly. It can seem demanding, and there are many other important points on your agenda. However, that is a shame. The PR effort is crucial for creating awareness of your product and your company. Get our tips to get started well with PR work.
As a newly started company, PR is often not an area that is prioritized very highly. It can seem demanding, and there are many other important points on your agenda. However, that is a shame. The PR effort is crucial for creating awareness of your product and your company. Get our tips to get started well with PR work.
What is PR?
First of all, let's make it clear that PR is much more than just a single press release now and then. Your PR effort should be thought of as a long-term strategic work with influencing and nurturing your company's reputation. As the term suggests, PR (public relations) is about working with external relations – whether it's the press, customers, partners, or other stakeholders.
By continuously influencing these relations through various communication disciplines such as press releases, lobbying, social media posts, and newsletters, you can create a good story about your company and thereby build and maintain a good reputation.
Why should you do PR?
First and foremost, it is about creating awareness of your product and your company. The outside world needs to know you exist if they are to buy your product or service.
As the Danish PR industry's trade association once formulated it, you can "by telling the company's positive stories, build and nurture your company's good reputation. A positive spiral is created if the company, through planned and persistent communication, manages to raise expectations for a product or service. If the quality lives up to the expected, the reputation increases further, and the company experiences a measurable effect. Public Relations can therefore contribute directly to a company's success."
Thus, PR is a tool to create visibility and ultimately also customers and thereby sales. In addition, a good PR effort also helps make you visible online so your customers can find you there – whether through newspaper articles, social media, or Google.
What is your core story?
To be able to tell positive stories about your company, you must start by finding out what the core story really is. You need to be very clear about what perception the outside world should have of you and your company.
Start by asking yourself some of these questions:
- Why did you start the company?
- How do you differentiate yourself from the competitors?
- Why are you/the product unique? What is the purpose?
- What can you/the product offer?
It is precisely in this initial phase when starting your company that you have the opportunity to build your company's story properly. It is all things considered harder to go back and rewrite it after you have been running for a couple of years.
Your core story or storytelling is an essential element in your branding and must of course align with your overall business plan – it must be genuine and able to be lived up to.
"What is the primary message that the rest of the world should understand?"
First, you need to have the aforementioned core story in place. Once you have it, you can begin to create a long-term strategy where you become very clear about what your overall goal should be regarding PR.
What is the primary message that the rest of the world should understand? This can initially be to create awareness of your existence, for example in connection with a store opening or product launch.
When you start planning your PR effort, there are especially three factors you should consider:
3
Factors
Target group
Who do you want to reach?Resources and skills
Do you have the skills to write the stories yourself?Get started well
When you have control over your strategy and planning, it is time to really get going. This requires, besides a good strategy, that you are also able to execute it. Understood in the sense that you yourself must have the skills to see the good story, write it, and get it through the eye of the needle so that the media bites.
To succeed with this, you must be able to think a bit like a journalist and put yourself in their mindset and daily life. Many journalists are so busy that they will often gladly accept good stories if they are served on a silver platter, are well written, and have sufficient news value.
If you do not have the time or skills to handle the entire PR effort from strategy to execution yourself, you can alternatively consider buying help externally.
This guide is written by Morten Stendevad
Morten Stendevad is one of our skilled advisors from our advisory network. Their help is indispensable in our work with entrepreneurship, where they share their knowledge and make their competencies available to our entrepreneurs.
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