Startup PR Trends in the Time of Corona(virus)

2020 has been a weird decade. How are startup and tech PR evolving in this moment of hyper-change? The PR leads from our San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and New York City offices share their thoughts.

Having spent nearly a decade doing tech PR in our three markets, we’ve always been attuned to regional differences and trends in startup culture, the media, and the VC community. Those are fast-changing industries, but never more so than in 2020, and changes in the tech and media worlds are forcing change in the PR industry that supports them.

So here are a few startup PR trends we’ve been tracking and responding to over the past few months. We hope they’re helpful!

Korina Kennedy, San Francisco

I remember when I first started pitching media. I emailed Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch (I 100% just aged myself) and he took my story for a hot new music startup. I won’t age myself further by naming it, but it was a company that launched from nothing, and Mike wanted the story. It seemed so easy: Send the release under embargo, set up the interview with the founder, and boom, send the coverage screenshots when the embargo lifted. Tech PR is easy!

Boy, that isn’t the case anymore. You can’t just launch and expect headlines, especially in 2020. Here are the three biggest shifts I’ve seen.

First, your story has to be tight, and credible. At Codeword, we like to build our narratives around data, which is what skeptical journalists really want. It could be survey data, or tying a company to a bigger trend, or customer growth (if the client will share it). Numbers don’t lie, and weaving in a surprising stat or two is a great way to punch up an otherwise dull story. I especially like using geographical and demographic data. Bonus: it helps expand our coverage focus into local media, which is always a plus for clients.

Second, even in Silicon Valley, it’s now less about who you know and all about how good the story is. I remember sitting in new-business meetings early in my career, listening to the senior leaders talk about all the media they know and how easy it is to pick up the phone and give them a call and voila! you’ll get the story posted within hours. I know plenty of reporters, some I drink with and some I just email with, but they aren’t going to write a story just because we went out for happy hour and shared some memes on Instagram. No way! I won’t take a story to a reporter friend if I don’t think it has a good narrative. Clients come and go, but our media relationships need to last forever.

That’s especially true now, with the media getting rocked by layoffs and downsizing. Strong media relationships are everything, and they stay strong because I send them the good stuff. Good stories, good quotes, good companies to meet, good sources to talk to. We can’t afford to jeopardize a good reporter relationship for the sake of making a client happy, sorry!

The third trend is noticeable everywhere: A comms strategy isn’t just about PR anymore. Early on in my career, social media was just starting to be a thing. Companies were coming to us to weave in a more integrated comms approach by incorporating social into campaigns and daily programs. Social is now baked into pretty much every plan, but the notion of an integrated comms program has evolved, and it’s been fun to see influencers play a bigger role in the programs we create. Clients expect a 360 approach, and while our journo and our influencer friends can still be territorial, a good comms strategy can span both worlds, as well as events, affiliate programs, and so many other channels.

Gabie Kur, New York City

While previously there was a true separation of Church and State between editorial and advertising, PR professionals and media alike are now being forced to think with a sales mindset. Editorial teams across many publications have introduced commerce writer and editor roles, who look at companies from a revenue as well as a brand perspective. When we pitch them, we’re still selling the editorial story, but also need to think about the publication’s audience more intently to identify the use cases that will make them convert. In a way, this may strengthen the relationship between PR and publications — they have the same objective of wanting to share what is actually useful and wanted by their audience, thus leading to conversions.

More than ever, data is king. As Korina mentioned, whether data is informing your PR strategy or showing a direct (not dotted-line) effect on revenue, PR teams have to quantify their impact. This has been an area that most PR firms have gracefully flitted around, hiding behind vanity metrics. Nowadays, especially in a contracting market of startup dollars and journalists, numbers are going to be the key to survival, both in telling stories and proving their worth.

You need receipts. Over the years, companies overpromising and under-delivering — or just outright lying — has deeply eroded the trust between communications folks and their media counterparts. It is all about the “show, don’t tell” — actual metrics showing corporate growth, respected partners to speak on behalf of your brand, use cases that are live in the real world, etc. Without it, you can save your breath with that pitch. My journalist friends have been burned too many times to just take an executive’s word for it (ahem, Theranos, anyone?).

And this is the case with brand clients as well. Engagement after engagement with PR firms that don’t live up to the hype they set in their sales conversations leave some pretty bad trust issues for us “good guys” to have to clean up. If you’re not building your PR programs against the business objectives your client is trying to achieve with their sales, marketing and product arms, then you’re not going to last long. You need cold, hard data to prove your work and how it ties into the grander plan of moving a business forward. If anything, it makes our lives as PR practitioners easier. A clear business objective will drive what we’re focusing on from a program perspective, instead of arbitrarily getting hits and hoping something sticks.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen the NYC proptech industry grow leaps and bounds, with a wave of VC dollars flowing in that direction. Whether it is how we build residential and commercial spaces, what we put in them, or how we get around them, every space is being powered by deeper and smarter technology. The Disney Channel movie Smart House (directed by LeVar Burton, starring Katey Sagal!) is closer than ever before, except it’s not just our homes, it’s our doctor’s offices, professional environments, schools, retail environments — everywhere with four walls and a ceiling. Given the average human spends 90% of their time indoors, this is a huge area to disrupt. With COVID-19 and on-again, off-again shelter-in-place orders, we’re now thinking about facilities and our indoor spaces more than ever, so I’d expect this trend to continue. We’re lucky enough to work with companies that power indoor facility tech, like speedy modular construction, unbiased AI surveillance, an indoor mapping platform, and platforms that will change the way we buy houses. We didn’t set out to be proptech specialists, but it’s an exciting space to play in right now.

Josh Heath, Salt Lake City

Getting the media to care about you and your brand is hard, especially in a frenzied media environment like we have right now. They call it “earned media” for a reason, and it’s earned by developing a great story for a journalist’s audience, which is ultimately your audience.

This process has become more difficult over the years for many reasons — more business vying for attention, changing media landscape, media consolation, layoffs. 2020 has accelerated these changes and made it even more difficult to get the media to care about your company’s news. According to Cision’s recent “State of the Media” report, we know that journalists are busier than they have ever been, and have to do more with less to stay competitive. What does this all mean for brands looking to secure some news coverage? Getting news coverage is more complicated than ever, and you should expect to get less coverage than you have in the past.

Having spent time working on the East Coast and Utah (Utah for the past 10+ years), I’ve seen a massive shift in outside money and talent coming to Silicon Slopes because of the talented workforce and booming business economy. And I like to think my own PR work and Codeword’s has brought national media credibility to our local tech scene. And here’s the thing: We thought 2019 was a tech boom in SLC, but over the past six months it’s really exploded, as Utah’s economy has bucked the downward trend seen by so much of the country.

So, money and talent and new companies are booming, news coverage is shrinking. What does that mean for PR people and our clients going forward? Here are a few ways we’ve evolved our approach.

• Focus on quality over quantity. Frankly, this is something you should have been doing in the first place. The recipe is simple: begin every press release, pitch, or story idea with your target audience in mind, and go for the specific media outlets that your target audience reads. A massive media list typically shows you don’t know your story or your audience well enough. Once you’ve narrowed down to the outlets your audience really cares about, take the time to put together a sharp narrative that not only tells your story but adds context to the reader’s world.
• Be a news producer and think like a journalist. Understanding that the journalists we’re pitching are overworked and stressed pushes us to produce tighter, more compelling pitches and stories. We’re always asking ourselves “What other news elements can I add to make the story better while making the journalist’s life easier?” We know we’ve nailed it when the journalist thanks us for the help once the story is live.
• Bolster your owned channels with compelling content. Here’s a fun stat: Trust in business is higher than trust in the media and the government. That’s not a bad thing for the PR world, because it means we don’t always have to use the media as, well, an intermediary. We can communicate directly with our audiences, and focus more on “public relations” versus simply “media relations.” One of the biggest lessons of 2020 is that anything can happen, and our clients’ owned channels help us get their news out no matter what may be dominating the headlines. Newsletters, corporate blogs, executive speeches and bylines, and social media assets can carry just as much audience credibility as news coverage, if they’re done right.

Want to chat about how startups can make the most of this moment? Hit us up at hello@codewordagency.com.