PR 101

For most products, getting good PR early on is often crucial to making that solid first impression in the minds of users. You must have read stories of companies crediting their initial traction to TechCrunch or Forbes (or Product Hunt, the latest kid on the block). The case of Evernote growth-hacking TechCrunch and growing to 125,000 users in 4 months immediately comes to mind (for those who want to take a deep dive, check this post about their $0 growth engine).

PR is not just about blindly shooting out press releases to all and sundry. Finding the right contacts can often prove to be the difference between a good PR campaign and a great one.

At Newton, PR outreach is one of our go-to marketing channels for quickly getting the word out about product launches and feature updates. And we’ve been quite successful at it too, having been featured by TechCrunch, The Verge, WSJ, Engadget & more.

Newton is an email service so whenever we do PR, we naturally reach out to journalists/bloggers in the email space. This is a huge space and you’ll find a lot of people having similar but not the exact interests. We always try to have a category for people who have shared interests. Here’s how we do it:

Those who write app roundups

If you follow tech news closely, you must have come across these many times. Creating roundups is often a surefire way of getting eyeballs (because let’s admit it, who doesn’t like to get introduced to new apps and compare them).

And especially in the email space, roundups are a dime a dozen, not least because of the fact that there’s a new email service coming up almost every month. As a journalist you might have done an email roundup like ‘5 best iOS alternatives to Apple Mail’ but who knows, in the next 4 months, you might have 4 new email services that are worthy of being part of your list.

Thus, there is a constant need to either update or come up with fresh roundups and every editor knows this. We know this too, so we’re constantly on the lookout for new roundups. It’s like a gift that keeps on giving.

Those who’ve done an exclusive with competitors

This is a tough one to crack, because an exclusive means the journalist has done considerable research before narrowing down to the app of his choice. In turn, these are often pretty deep, insightful reads that cover nearly all aspects of the product.

Convincing these guys to ditch your competitor and to at least try you out is a Herculean task. We always do our background research before reaching out to these guys because we know they expect nothing else. Your pitches also need to be tailored to their liking, should show that you’ve taken the effort to read their article and ultimately try to win them over by explaining clearly how your product can top it. Here’s an example of a successful conversion :)

As a brand, this is by far your Holy Grail PR-wise because the journalist is telling your audience ‘This is what you should use’ instead of ‘Here are 10 things that I think you’d like’

Getting on blogger listicles

This actually doubles up as a great SEO tactic as well. Bloggers/content writers working for some brand often write SEO-friendly articles. They search for popular, high-volume keywords and craft content around it.

Since email and emailing tools is always a hot topic, there are a bunch of blogs dedicated to ‘boosting your productivity’ or ‘improving workflow’ and so on. For example, there are many blogs on email tracking solutions, email scheduling, app integrations with email etc. Since Newton provides all these advanced features in-app, this gives us a great opportunity to pitch this category of writers. And if you manage to get on one of these, you can expect a steady stream of traffic since they generally rank very well in SERPs

These are just some of the strategies we follow for P.R. Long story short, if you can find relevant contacts in your space, research about them to understand their interests and then craft a personal pitch that shows how your product falls within their interest radius, you’ve struck gold 💰

How do you approach P.R.? Do you follow a similar strategy or have you learned something new? I’d love to hear about it!