PR for Early Stage B2B Startups

Part 3 of our interview with Rachel Kim, VP of Marketing at Wonolo, and Emily Kramer, former Head of Marketing at Carta and Asana

We recently sat down with marketing experts Rachel Kim, VP of Marketing at Wonolo, and Emily Kramer, former Head of Marketing at Carta and Asana. Here is a summary of our conversation.

We got so many insights that we decided to split this interview in five parts. You can find them here:

• Part 1: Trends in B2B Marketing for Early Stage B2B Startups
• Part 2: Brand 101 for Early Stage B2B Startups
• Part 4: Content Marketing for Early Stage B2B Startups
• Part 5: How to Make Your First Marketing Hire

Q. How do you think about PR for an early-stage startup?

Rachel: PR starts making sense when you have a reason for a reporter to care. It helps if you’re announcing something beyond just the product. For example, you’ve just raised a seed round. This is often when reporters get interested. Before you raise money, PR is probably not worth it.

If you’re looking for tips on how to do PR for your early stage startup, I have written an article on LinkedIn on the topic.

Emily: One key thing to think about with PR is who is your audience? Every startup wants to get their story in the tech press. But there are a lot of trade publications or blogs that are focused on your unique audience. So think about what your audience is reading and worry a little bit less about getting on the tech press unless you’re building a startup targeting other startups.

Q. When and how should you start building relationships with reporters?

Rachel: Twitter is really good for relationship building with reporters. When I was working on my startup, I followed the top five reporters in my industry and introduced myself.

2020 is hard. There’s so much news that early stage companies might have a harder time breaking through. If you’re really early and have not raised money, PR might be more of a long term goal.

Emily: You might not get a full story on your startup early on. But you can start building relationships with reporters to be thought of as an expert. People underestimate how valuable it can be to be in a roundup article or be an expert quoted in an article. A good way to do that is by following relevant reporters, replying to their tweets and start building credibility. But it needs to be an extension of who you are.

Q. At what point do you recommend startups bring on a PR person, contractor or agency?

Emily: It depends on how big of a strategy PR is for your business. How you figure that out is by figuring out where your audience is. Do they regularly read these publications? When you’re having your initial interview with customers, ask them what they are reading. This will help you hone in on what publications to target for PR.

If PR is a big part of your strategy, then it comes down to budget. Getting a good agency can be expensive, often $15 to $30k a month.

At the earliest stages, you can do the work yourself. If you hire a contractor, you need to know what you’re using them for. If you’re using someone for their media relationships, know that and hire a contractor with really amazing media relationships.

Rachel: I often see startups hire PR agencies for product launches, but they are rarely successful. The reason is that engaging a PR agency takes a long time. You want to have a relationship with that agency for 12 months and then it begins to pay off.

When it comes to startup launches the best thing you can do is leverage your VCs and angel investors because they often have relationships with reporters.

Hiring an agency typically works best after the Seed round as you’re getting ready for Series A. Before that, it can be cost prohibitive.

You’re going to get a better bank for your buck if you go for a freelancer when you are in the early stages of building your startup.

Q: Are there any subtle differences in PR for B2B vs D2C?

Rachel: Emily is an expert at leveraging data to get reporters to care. When we go back to the twitter example, the way you can insert yourself in conversations early on is if you sit on data that only you have access to. If you have information that only you can offer to a reporter, there’s a much higher likelihood they’ll call you in as an expert. Emily has done this at Carta.

Emily: When I joined Carta they didn’t have a marketing team and they weren’t really on the map. They didn’t have a lot of brand awareness but they had a bunch of cap table data from 13,000 companies. We partnered with a group of early stage of investors called #angels and later with January Ventures to put out data on the gender equity gap. This was our first foray into press at Carta.

Going out with interesting data that was “on topic” given conversations around gender in the workplace allowed us to start building relationships with the press. The story had a much broader appeal than just cap tablesl. We built tons of media relationships through that data.

Q. Any lessons learned when it comes to using data for PR?

Emily: What I’ve learned with data is that you can get a lot of press when the data first comes out. If the data doesn’t materially change in the next year, the press won’t care as much. In the first year (2018), we focused on press to get our gender equity gap report out. The next year we leveraged influencers in the space and created a branded event for it.

There are lots of benefits to regularly releasing new data. Unique data is the best content marketing you can do. In short: If you have proprietary data that you can aggregate and anonymise in a way that is valuable do it.

Rachel: I agree, the biggest pop of coverage will be in the first year. You can use that to establish credibility and subject matter expertise in a specific area. If you continue to update that data over time, it makes you an expert. Eventually when reporters are working on topics relevant to your area of expertise, they start to refer to your data in those stories.

Something else to keep in mind: when it comes to data, in the early days you might not have a large sample size. But you can still leverage it. For example, January Ventures surveyed early stage founder sentiment over time to have a pulse on what’s going on.

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Thank you to our partners Oracle for Startups and WSGR for making this event possible.

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