PR is enormously beneficial for tech companies. This article aims to provide an overview of the benefits of PR for tech companies and the nuances specific to tech firms that PR can help with. We’ll outline some strategies we’d use at PRLab to help grow your company, including examples of how we have used PR in unique settings for various businesses and niches.
Perhaps you are a tech startup starting your venture or have successfully raised capital. You might be wondering how to raise your head above the pulpit to get your innovative product out there in the public space. After all, there are many startups vying for the attention of wider audiences. As such, there is an increasing need for brands to differentiate themselves via effective PR strategies that highlight their USP.
PR for tech is growing, not just because of the proven benefits that PR has in growing a business, but because of the increasing involvement of technology in both our private and professional lives.
To understand the value of tech for PR, it's good to first understand what PR is and its advantages and disadvantages. Many think of PR as being used where an individual or organization suffers negative publicity. While this may be true, crisis management is only a small part of what tech PR specialists do. The main role of PR is not to fix a negative image, but to establish a positive one in the first place.
PR, or Public Relations, is the management of information and how it is communicated to various parties: your stakeholders, your employees, investors, partners, and, of course, your clients and customers.
All need to be considered in your tech PR strategy. However, PR is not simply telling people how great you are, there is a bit more to it than that. PR aims to get stories featured in the media that frame you or your brand in a positive narrative or story, increasing brand awareness and establishing authority and credibility. With this understanding of PR, what exactly is PR for tech companies?
PR is the process of telling stakeholders about your product or service and leading them to think of it in a particular light. Tech PR involves doing just this about your digital service.
Tech PR is quite specific in that you must explicitly communicate the values, features, and innovation of your offering. Very often, you'll be communicating about a brand-new product not specifically on the market yet. Tech PR differs here from other types of PR, so you'll need to generate a compelling narrative to turn heads and show people how you are solving their painpoint.
It will involve developing relationships with relevant media outlets and effectively communicate your message and product value. Outreach will need to be more specifically targeted.
Of course, there are some similarities between a regular startup and a tech company, but the focus on technology creates some unique differences.
Firstly, the tech world is rife with jargon that goes over many people's heads. It is, therefore, essential to cater your communications when communicating with experts compared to your average consumer.
Messages filled with jargon are not terribly relatable and can make communicating your value difficult.
Due to the rapid pace technology evolves, technology PR is a fast-paced and competitive industry. There are always new startups, funding rounds, and innovations that make the tech media landscape crowded. PR for technology companies has to move fast to remain on the cutting edge of breaking news and stay relevant.
PR can solve many problems for your tech company, and having a communication strategy in place is very effective at increasing your visibility and growing your reputation.
Some of the problems tech startups may face could be:
As a long-term activity, PR seeks to grow your sales by creating trust between your brand and your stakeholders.
Creating visibility through your communication channels and getting featured in other publications is key to developing your startup and bringing your technology to the world.
When you think of PR, you may think it is only a viable strategy for established companies with the money to maintain their image. This is a myth. PR is, in fact, of great value to those who need media attention to establish credibility and grow their audience.
As a startup, you have some advantages over more established companies. These could be:
These reasons highlight why you shouldn’t focus on the strategies employed by large corporations. Company credibility is built and established over time through strategic partnerships, improved SEO ranking, and overall visibility of your brand. All of which come under the umbrella of effective PR strategies.
Limitations encourage creativity, and as a smaller company, you have far more freedom to move and adapt your strategy.
Interested in seeing what we can achieve for your business? Schedule a free intro call to learn more.
As you can see, being a startup brings advantages you can capitalize on to run an effective PR campaign. To help clarify why you should invest resources into this, let us look at the benefits PR can bring to your tech startup.
This is a key component of public relations and long-term success. The more places your brand is positively seen, the more trust people will have. This is why getting media attention from established publications generates interest at any stage of your business.
By frequently updating your communication channels with regular content and getting your website featured via backlinks in other publications, you will increase the organic traffic to your website, thus increasing the possibility for new conversions.
Having a PR strategy is about taking control of your brand and the story surrounding it. More than simply selling a product or service, PR aims to communicate your values and core principles. It is about letting people know you are not just selling something to make money but to fix a problem.
Above all, PR aims to grow your target market. Each strategy employed is intended to help you reach new stakeholders or strengthen relationships with existing ones, building brand awareness and authority in various parties.
Although PR is focused on securing media coverage for your brand, PR is most successful when integrated into your overall marketing efforts. Let us go over some of these to see what strategies PR uses to increase your brand visibility.
While often overlooked, thought leadership is considered a core component in marketing. When building on your reputation as an expert in your field, leveraging your opinion as an individual or representative of a company carries a greater weight and boosts your influence across the industry.
By becoming an opinion leader, you position yourself as someone who profoundly understands the industry, your business, and the needs of your audience. With more than 83% of buyers believing thought leadership builds trust in the organization, this strategy can prove very valuable for your startup or scaleup.
Due to the highly specialized nature of tech companies, thought leadership strategies can demonstrate your expertise within your field. This not only means people trust your brand but that they will search you out for your insights.
In the last twenty years, social media has become a very effective tool for sharing content.
Having a strategy for managing the various platforms you use is a great way to take advantage of the accessible ways of reaching your audience.
By having a consistent presence on social media, you have opportunities for honest communication with your customers and to add value to their experience.
However, social media is not only used for sharing content but also to help you understand your target audience and then use this knowledge to create truly engaging media that caters to the needs and desires of your customers. This gives you a personality that reflects your brand's core values. As a tech startup, developing a brand personality is important to distinguish yourself from your competitors and to easily provide answers to the particularly niche questions that often come from being a tech startup.
This is a strategy that focuses on developing consistent, high-quality content. You may think technology should be the focus of a tech company, and you are right. However, to effectively sell it and create awareness of its existence, you should also invest time producing content.
Consistent content is key in reaching and developing potential customers as it communicates the value of your business.
Educating your audience and ensuring their awareness of your business’s and industry’s processes will make it easier to translate this value into sales and accelerate your growth.
Content also provides the opportunity to use keywords and website design that boosts your SEO performance. By answering topical questions, providing insights into your industry, and creating an engaging website, you’ll appear higher on search engines and receive more traffic.
At PRLab, we can work with you to execute a content marketing strategy with SEO techniques to boost your visibility and communicate your values to your audience.
When done correctly, internal communications help your employees internalize your values, inspiring a sense of purpose and turning them into effective brand ambassadors. Employees are the ones helping to deliver your product, so communicating updates to them means that everyone is on the same page, thus streamlining processes and encouraging team spirit.
The following are examples of activities that can be used to support PR tactics.
Growth hacking is a relatively new process that has earned praise from around the globe and has become a go-to method for growing a startup. Its goal is to acquire as many users as possible in a short period of time or with a limited budget while still considering customer retention. This strategy works through rapid testing of ideas, which is great for startups considering their advantages of little red tape and low risk.
These strategies can be applied to a vast range of industries. To demonstrate how PR campaigns can be useful to a tech company, let us look at some FinTech and SaaS companies to see how PR was implemented to boost their sales and grow their company.
There are many different strategies out there that are used to help grow the visibility of your tech startup. PRLab can help you with thought leadership, content marketing, and SEO.
Search Engine Optimization is another strategy that should be on your radar. Simply put, it is improving your website to increase the quantity and quality of traffic from a search engine’s organic results. The better your page's visibility in a search result, the more attention, and prospective customers you will attract.
SEO works by optimizing the various factors that search engines use to index pages. Given the thousands of results related to a search, a page will be displayed in the results by optimizing for a search engine algorithm.
There are a variety of factors considered by search engines that impact a website’s performance. These factors include the relevance and usefulness of the content itself and the site's architecture, that is, its load speed, security, and usability. Search engines will also look at backlinks, which lead to your website from other sites. The quality of backlinks is important. Links to your website from reputable sites with a high Domain Authority (DA) help your SEO.
You might already see the benefit of PR securing your brand media mentions. Gaining a backlink from a top-tier publication means that you will do better in consumers' search results, and thus be more visible, more credible, and more likely to make a conversion.
FinTech refers to financial technology, which aims to improve and automate the delivery of financial services. With the internet and smartphone revolution, FinTech has experienced a massive boom, and what was once the realm of offices and trading firms is now present in our everyday banking and finance.
Many companies choose to hire a fintech PR agency. One such was Chargebee. Chargebee helps individuals, small businesses, and enterprises automate the setup and management of their billing, subscription, revenue operations, and compliance. The past few years have seen rising demand for a subscription model, which is why Chargebee secured their series F funding round and wanted to use PR to spread the news far and wide.
We researched and analyzed the industry to find the most relevant press to target with our media pitches. After a week, we secured over ten pieces of news and some interview coverage on the launch day. With coverage from top-tier publications around the globe, the story went out to an audience of 128 million, with estimated coverage views of 133,000. Funding PR is a great way to build your credibility. This is because it demonstrates interest and trust from investors, which helps build further trust amongst your audience.
Financial technology is becoming more personal and integrated into our lives. As such, you need to communicate your values effectively with your audience and differentiate yourself from your competitors.
PR can also be of great use for B2B tech and SaaS companies. A B2B company transacts with other businesses rather than with direct consumers (B2C).
SaaS stands for Software as a Service and is a delivery model in which software is cloud-based and licensed on a subscription basis so it can be accessed anywhere. It is the common delivery model for many business applications by both big and small companies.
Recruitee are an example of a company that utilized SaaS PR. Recruitee is a company that offers software to help businesses streamline and scale up their hiring process. They successfully identified the recruiting problems employers face and developed an intuitive platform that was picked up by companies such as Starbucks, Toyota, and Vice.
This established them as thought leaders within the HR industry, but they needed more media presence to support their product. As a SaaS PR agency, we helped them develop a story to frame their success in the context of low unemployment rates. It was an interesting angle for journalists and framed Recruitee’s software as a problem solver. We also helped them publish an industry report during the coronavirus crisis's onset, which helped inform recruiters how to adapt to the shifting industry trends. Recruitee strengthened its position as a trustworthy business and thought leader by providing answers in a crisis.
As you can see, the wide range of existing tech companies means that there is no cookie-cutter strategy for PR. With such a vast range of ideas being developed, marketing tech PR has never been more relevant to help you stand out and provide the answers people seek to their problems or improve their lives.
You may have also realized that PR requires time and effort to develop key relationships and execute strategies to increase brand awareness. Working with a technology PR agency such as PRLab can be invaluable to a tech company that wants to focus on developing its technology PR. This is true for any business, particularly for technology PR, due to the fast pace of innovation and the media landscape. If you’re ready to hire a tech PR agency, and start growing your tech startup with PR, whether with digital PR services, SEO campaigns, media coverage, or thought leadership, you can contact us and begin developing a strategy today.
