Entrepreneur’s tips on how we started our public relations

We surely agree that it is very important to make people speak positively about your startup or business. You can invest time and money on SEO strategies, ad campaigns in search engines and social networks, but people have learned to ignore ads and prefer the opinion of someone they trust. A good opinion in the media and on social networks is an important ingredient of a good marketing strategy; especially if the opinion or review is read by thousands of people. Many entrepreneurs rush to get promotion in the media, without defining a basic strategy. This is a mistake which could cause potential customers to have negative opinions about your brand.

There is no second chance for a first impression. -Oscar Wilde

Gaining a good first impression is vital for the image of your business, this will help establish a reliable presence not only today but in the future as well. A bad first review will be on the internet forever and remember that many people will try to find you through a search engine and the reputation of your business will be based on the positive and negative things being written about it.

At Toky, we still get customers who came to us after reading articles published months ago. Our reviews some of which are in major publications, which used to appear higher than our website in search engine results when someone searched for Toky.

When we were looking for media publications or contacts that could generate interest in Toky, our challenge was to have the right content ready to share with the media industry. This initiated our public relations program.

1. You must have a product to show

It is difficult to ask someone to write or talk about a simple idea; you must have something real that you can show and with an appropriate level of quality so those who see it have a good impression of your product or service. This is a basic version of your value proposition which must be functional. At Toky, we start with our free plan and prior to media contact, we had our platform performing basic functions.:

• Users sign-up
• Public profiles
• Internet phone calls using a link
• Android app able to receive calls
• Stress tests to validate that the platform supports a good number of users.

If your product or service wants to reach non-Spanish-speaking markets, you must have a user interface at least in English and Spanish

Toky has evolved considerably since those early days with free plans. If you want to know our product, visit www.toky.co

2. Write a press kit

When contacting any media outlets or press contacts that could be interested in talking about your startup or business, you benefit hugely by having resources ready that will make their work easier. This press kit can have the following elements:

• Logos
• Full product or service description
• Startup history
• Basic information and pictures of startup team, including extended data about founders
• Links to website and social media profiles
• Goals, awards, achievements etc.
• Contact information in case they want more details or even an interview.

It is very important to have the content in Spanish and English if you wish your business to target markets that do not speak Spanish, and you should try to write something simple and easy to read and not packed with many details because those who need more information, will use the contact information you left in the press kit.

3. Create a list of relevant media for your business

It’s not always good to appear everywhere, besides media and press won’t publish anything about your startup if it’s not related to their editorial guidelines. First, you must sit down and make a list of the media, newspapers, blogs etc. that have within their audience segment, some of your target customers. In the case of Toky we can select the media from different perspectives:

• As a startup, we are interested in media coverage from sites related to technology, entrepreneurship or startups.
• As a product, sites or press that talks about telephony, telecommunications, VoIP, internet calls, WebRTC etc.
• As a functionality, with Toky, any startup or business can create its own call center and give customer support or make sales calls, so any website or media that talks about call centers, phone marketing, customer services or customer support could be an interesting choice for public relations.

It is good to bear in mind that depending on the media you could be asked to write a different approach for your article.

Now that we have helped you on your way to a successful public relations campaign, why not give your business some extra sparkle; try our virtual telecoms platform, free for 14 days www.toky.co

Originally published at blog.toky.co on August 16, 2016.