Most founders think PR works because people read the article and rush to invest. That happens, but it’s the smaller half. The bigger win is what we do with the piece afterwards: we turn it into an ad.
The twofold benefit
Press coverage pays off two ways.
First, attention and credibility. It’s another source of traffic to the campaign, and it’s someone other than you talking about the business. A third-party voice carries weight that yours can’t.
Second, and this is the one I care about most: a press piece often performs brilliantly as an ad. We take the article or the news segment, put paid traffic behind it, and let the coverage do the selling. When it beats the rest of your creative, it can improve your cost per EOI or cost per investment by 20 to 50%. On a real campaign, that’s the gap between an ok raise and a great one.
The best piece is a video piece
The outlet matters less than people think. More reputable is better, partly because it’s harder to land, which is a signal in itself. For a raise, the AFR is about as good as it gets, because it’s built for finance.
But format beats masthead. The best piece is a video piece. A pitch video can cost you ten grand to produce. If a news channel films a segment on you, you’ve basically got a second pitch video, made by someone else, with their credibility stamped on it. Run that as an ad and it can be killer.
How to actually land it
Landing press comes down to two things: contacts, and a story worth a journalist’s time.
For the contacts, we partner with Jesse Burns. Jesse was a news anchor with Channel Nine around the country and has run corporate PR for a stack of companies, so he knows what gets on the news and he’s got the direct lines to the people who decide.
The story is on you, with our help. The way Jesse describes it: hand a journalist a story that’s basically oven-ready. You’ve done the work and shaped the angle, and all they have to do is take it out and run it. Make it that easy and your odds of coverage go right up.
Can you do it yourself?
You can. You can write your own media release and dig up journalist contacts online, and some founders do fine with that.
But a good PR person earns their fee two ways. They know people in the industry, with direct lines and favours they can call in. And they know what’s actually newsworthy and what isn’t, which is the part most founders get wrong. Knowing what not to pitch is half the skill.
When it doesn’t work
Worth going in clear-eyed. When PR flops, it’s because the piece doesn’t perform as an ad. You get a burst of traffic to a news site and that’s it, with no guarantee those readers are investors or that any of it becomes investment. Which is the whole point of a raise.
So treat PR as an amplifier on a campaign that’s already working, not a rescue plan for one that isn’t. Not sure whether yours has a story worth pitching? I’ve written the honest version of that call in do you actually need PR for a raise.
General information only, not financial advice.