Crowdfunding and PR During the Pandemic

By Birchal guest blogger Jules Brooke.

If you have a fabulous new product or service that you are crowdfunding for, then you probably had a bit of a wobble a few weeks ago. I think we all felt a little like the sky was falling down for a week or so. But I hope by now you have picked yourself off the floor, dusted down your clothes and you are ready to give it a red hot go again.

Birchal are big believers in PR. Huge. The reason for that is that once you appear in the media (and I’m talking TV, radio, newspapers, podcasts and blogs here) then you get instant credibility for your business. People, rightly or wrongly, believe that the media only features the ‘best of the best’ so the assumption straight away is that your business is credible, and a leader in its field. Or you are, depends what you want to promote!

So with this seemingly endless social lockdown, should you be doing PR?

Perhaps you thought you would wait until life went back to ‘normal’ (however that may look), or you’re waiting until your Birchal profile is live, or you might just be thinking, “if I do PR now we will somehow be ‘tainted’ by association with COVID-19”. None of the above is correct. Now is EXACTLY the time you should be doing PR. The media is hungry for content and there are more people watching, listening and reading the media stories now than ever before.

This is a huge opportunity for you to get ahead of the pack.

As a result of the isolation period and the shutting down of many businesses, the media is not getting as many pitches as normal, but the need for content hasn’t diminished. What this means is that small stories are being blown up to take up more space.

For instance The Age recently did a story on Zoom backgrounds and interviewed me. I had assumed it would be a small story but it was almost two thirds of the page, and ran in the Sydney Morning Herald as well, and then 3AW picked it up and interviewed me. I believe the size of the story was purely because they had nothing else to fill the space! One of the people doing my PR Accelerator program told me that she has had one story picked up EIGHT times so far. That’s eight different media outlets running the same story. Again, I think the timing was right because there aren’t enough stories to fill the space.

There is no better time to be getting publicity for you, your team and your business than right now. And if you need to build awareness to attract investors, then do it now…and keep going for as long as you can! It’s really not hard to do and the rewards can be massive.

If you do PR for your business, these are the sorts of returns you can expect:

• You will attract new customers and/or investors
• Your SEO will be fantastic because google values backlinks from media outlets highly
• If anyone googles your business, they will see lists of published articles too
• You will be positioned as the leader in your industry, one to watch
• Your social media posts will go further if there are media links in them

I bet you are already writing social media posts that explain your business, perhaps a newsletter and no doubt website copy. So you know what messages you want to get out there. Now you just need to turn what you usually think about marketing on its head. It can be quite counter intuitive but even though you want awareness for your brand, you need to be thinking of the benefits to the consumer.

To be blunt, the media doesn’t care about your business — they care about their audience and how they can add value.

So make sure, when you are writing your release, or pitching your ideas to TV or radio, that you lead with the ways you can help other people. Your content needs to be useful, or helpful, or full of stats and research results.

PR agencies can be expensive, I get that. You would normally be looking at roughly $3–5,000 per month for a minimum of 3–6 months. But if you learn how to handle your own PR, it’s one of those skills, like riding a bike, that you will be able to do for the rest of your life. And you will also build relationships with journalists and editors who like what you’re doing.

Then, when you have raised your funds and are liquid, you will be able to engage an agency and know what to expect from them, as well as being able to guide them with the content that ‘works’ in the media and the media outlets that have been accepting your pitches. It means you will get more value from their work.

Jules Brooke is the founder of Handle Your Own PR and the host of She’s The Boss on Ticker TV. Jules sold her house to fund her PR SaaS platform so she is familiar with the trials and tribulations of building a new business. She has been teaching entrepreneurs, start-up founders and small business owners how to get free media coverage for themselves or their business for over twelve years and she is very passionate about it. Jules makes PR easy to understand and her customers get consistent media coverage.