Dear tech CEO: Awesome product? The press doesn’t care!
By: Jamie Catherine Barnett
Tags: CEO, Public Relations, Earned Media, Marketing, Press

(And other torpedoes of truth from the PR front lines.)

Tech CEOs, we love ya and all, but we gotta give you some feedback. No matter how cool your product is, the press doesn’t care.

Here’s your TL;DR: The media aren’t what they used to be. PR can help you get the earned media you deserve, but you gotta do your part. Partner with your PR agency; tell a great story; use your data; approach reporters the right way; and make it count by creating a flywheel.

Here’s how we’ve seen it play out: Tech CEO builds amazing product. Launches company. Customers buy. Customers love. Time to scale! Hire marketing. Make a deck. Bring on PR. And all’s right with the world.

Except it’s not.

Here are some torpedoes of truth about the media, and a 5-step roadmap for how to make PR work for you. My friend Bill Bourdon, co-CEO of communications agency Mission North, rides shotgun on this article. All the diplomatic, useful stuff is from him. The grenades are from me.

Before we dive in, here’s some context: Journalism has been slowly gutted over the past 20 years. Bill breaks it down: “Startup funding topped $150 billion last year. Meanwhile, newsrooms employ half the staff they did in 2008. Adding fuel to the fire, the explosion of screens, devices, and content makes audience attention increasingly scarce. The average human attention span is now 8 seconds.” He sums it up with, “Earning editorial awareness in this environment is really effing hard.”

Should we just pack it up and not even do PR? Not just yet. When done right, PR brings awareness, buyer credibility, and even efficient demand generation. Bill goes so far as to say, “It can have the single biggest return on brand spend than any other category of marketing.” Oof, tall order!

Here’s Bill’s and my roadmap for how to make PR work for you:

1. Make your PR agency an extension of you

I’ve seen too many tech companies toss a few slides and a product demo at their PR agency and then expect the puff pieces to start rolling in. It doesn’t work that way! Bill’s advice: “Work with your PR partner to adapt your company positioning and messaging into a narrative that will resonate with the media. Key elements include your problem, promise, product magic, proof points, and an authentic plot that ties it all together. Your story isn’t your product position.” My less-nice version: The press doesn’t give a shit about your revolutionary whoozywazits that “leverages AI to deliver actionable intelligence” (on a related note, please do a “command-f” on all your collateral and then mass delete this phrase everywhere it appears).

2. Tell a good story (for eff’s sake)

Once you’ve sussed out that narrative in collaboration with your PR agency, arm them with the content that makes it come to life. Bill recommends human-interest founder stories, quirks your team has, tension between your company and competitors or a mindset you’re challenging, customer proof points, and (my personal favorite) owned research. Don’t just do it once; make it an ongoing conversation. Ask for the agency’s input on what they’re hearing from reporters. Try stuff out. And over-share what’s going on. “A good agency will mine for the elements that make your story interesting and be honest with you about what’s not,” says Bill. “CEOs and CMOs sometimes want to sugarcoat things or only share the shiny, good news. But that’s not interesting. Reporters care about the learnings, the vulnerabilities, the truths. Agencies can help you tell those kinds of stories so they’re compelling to press and ultimately reflect well on you and your company.”

Here’s an example from Bill (See? Told you he’s useful.): “We built a wildly successful campaign around a client’s CEO who had been publicly fired from a prior high profile company. We leaned into that vulnerability and positioned it as a strength, showcasing the humanity of the experience and what he learned from it. It totally resonated with business media. Even more importantly, it built empathy with his employees.”

3. Use your data

That point Bill made about “owned research”? He’s talking about the aggregated, anonymized data your product generates. It’s a gold mine of insights and trends that the press actually wants to cover. “Owned research is the lifeblood of many tech companies’ PR efforts,” says Bill, pointing to examples from companies like Okta (“great research on the ‘state of work’”), Netskope (“known for their report on cloud and web security”), Narvar (“translate their commerce intelligence into totally compelling retail stats”), and HackerRank (“awesome reporting on engineers’ skills and pay”). You can do this with product data, customer surveys, your team’s R&D, output from a marketing focus group, and even your own analysis. Be creative! Find those nuggets and showcase them in a way that either contributes meaningfully to a discussion du jour or provides an insight that people care about.

4. Approach reporters the right way

Just as you wouldn’t approach a prospect by asking, “How much software would you like to buy today?,” your media pitch shouldn’t be a pitch at all. Your goal is to target the right reporter with the right story at the right time. But your more important goal? According to Bill, it should be to build a reciprocal relationship, and that starts with you. “Add value. Earn their trust. Share what you know. Help them understand something.” In other words, be a giver. I have seen this come back in spades, but you have to go into it with a generous mindset.

5. Get a flywheel going

Invest in creating a flywheel — a body of work that you and your PR agency can use again and again — to gain leverage from the media coverage you do earn. Whether it’s creating ongoing research like a quarterly data report or anticipating breaking news with pre-approved quotes as part of a “rapid response” campaign, find ways to create self-sustaining awareness. Also, use your network to get mileage out of the news you do generate. “News is fleeting,” warns Bill. “Get network effects from your employees, investors, customers, and others who care about you. Liking and sharing the content is just the first step. Brands should reshare and repackage these stories, building on older content with new perspectives over time. This gives you legs beyond the 12-hour news feed. It also helps the reporter, who cares about eyeballs. So you’re helping yourself and the reporter in both the short- and long-term.” Not just a win-win, but a win-win-win-win! We’ll take it.

Now that you slogged through our torpedos of truth, you know what to do: partner with your agency, tell a killer story, use your data, be a giver with reporters, and create a flywheel. Now, go forth and be the media warrior you were destined to be!

Bill Bourdon contributed to this article.