You had a great idea, from which you made a great company. At least, you and your fellow team are deeply convinced. Now, you have to raise awareness to acquire customers and get credibility among investors and other stakeholders.

PR is an amazing but tough tool you have to handle carefully on a long-term basis. Your future may depend on your ability to tackle PR. Here are some hints on how to do that.

1) PR is a long-term process

It is not one point on your to-do list you will erase once it’s done. PR is an ongoing process you have to take seriously. You have to build yourself a strong media network through time, whose knowledge on your company will help you share your story. Long-term does not mean harassing writers, bloggers and journalists every two weeks, but it does mean you need to maintain relationships and interest for your evolutions.

2) PR is a personalized process

You don’t exchange with a 22-year-old blogger the same way than with a 40-year-old journalist, neither with a tech or a financial writer. Personalize your content and your tone according to the target. Get to know people through social media or event, to understand what they value and how they act. Knowledge on people will help you reach their interest.

3) PR is an internal process

It is especially true for startups. Using the services of PR agency can be useful, but if those agencies have high knowledge and skills on how to manage PR, they lack passion about your product/service that you can find only internally. Get someone trained internally, the return on investissement will be much higher.

4) PR is storytelling

Journalists and writers receive so many pitches they need to easily be able to understand your points of differentiation, and what makes your company worth talking about. Don’t release boring announcements about the last changes you made, but build a strong and appealing story-telling through time, that will make them willing to share it.

5) The importance of having a corporate blog

Who can write better about you than yourself? A corporate blog has many advantages. It helps you create quality content around your start-up, that media can use to write their own papers, it is really inspiring for them as well as for the customers. It also helps you manage what you want people to think (or at least, know) about your company. It takes time, but it is worth it.

Here are some basic hints to manage properly PR within a startup. It is quite general assumptions but that every entrepreneurs have to keep in mind to share its great story.