509. PR & Comms Playbook 🐊
A five-step process for running a powerfully effective PR program
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
PR & Comms Playbook
One of the marketing channels I get asked about most often is PR & Communications. It seems like everyone is curious how to get their name in the press, curious how the PR machine actually works, and definitely curious about how much it costs. 💰
Public Relations is the No. 11 fastest-growing job of 2024 according to LinkedIn. More and more teams are hiring these resources in-house (this is how we did it at Buffer) or looking to great PR agencies for support (this is how we did it at Oyster).
Since PR & Comms is such a popular topic — and for good reason — I thought I’d share some of the strategies and principles of PR playbooks that have been effective for me in the past.
If you have any PR questions or tips & tactics, please let me know! I’d love to hear from you.
Principles of PR & Comms
1. PR will not be successful if you are purely self-promotional. You should not undertake a PR strategy if you simply want to see your company name in the news. You should do PR because you have a meaningful, relevant story to tell and believe that people will benefit the more this story gets told.
To that point …
2. Align your PR strategy to brand narratives. Your narratives should be timely, compelling stories that speak to some tangible benefit for your customers or some notable tension in the market. If you don’t have brand narratives yet, check out this brand narrative framework we teach at Bonfire. Feel free to use this as a starting point.
For example, at Oyster we had four brand narratives, one each for our product, our persona, our category, and the culture. The timely, compelling story for the culture was how global employment will fundamentally change the way that companies source talent.
3. The more connected you are to the zeitgeist, the better. Your best odds of getting a story picked up is if you are addressing something that people are thinking about and talking about right now: the economy, artificial intelligence, Gen Alpha, Taylor Swift — there is no shortage of possibilities.
Be able to answer “Why now?”
4. No one is getting press for their product launches anymore. Can you believe this was actually a thing that used to happen? Perhaps unsurprisingly, people don’t really care to read about your Tier 1 product launch in TechCrunch. Keep in mind that you are pitching culturally-relevant stories, not product-specific features.
5. PR is waaaay more about just getting your name in The New York Times. Here is a short list of all the things you can gain from having a PR & Comms resource, either in-house or through an agency.
Media training for your main spokespeople
Thought leadership platforming for key ambassadors
Crisis communication
Ghostwriting
Market research
Book recommendation: Trust Me I’m Lying is one of those industry exposes, which in this case exposes how the PR machine really works. It’s by Ryan Holiday, who used to do PR for brands like American Apparel, and it is full of rather shocking, somewhat cynical “gotcha PR” tactics that used to be in vogue. It’s a great read for context into the PR machine, but probably don’t do most of the things in there. You can be good at PR without the lying part! Here are my highlights.
The 5-Step Process for a Powerfully Effective PR Program
1. Pitch-and-place
When people think about PR, this is typically the first thing that comes to mind. A PR person emails a journalist and gets them to write a story. If only it were that easy!
There’s obviously a whole lot more that goes into this, oftentimes months (even years) of relationship-building. But at its core, this part of the PR program is an essential lever because you will have narratives that evolve and mature and need a whole host of different audiences and publications to get the word out. Having a robust pitch-and-place approach is a cornerstone of your program.
Typically, pitch-and-place can be broken down in two ways:
Mass media. This is your Fast Company, your TechCrunch, your Wall Street Journal, your NPR. All the big media companies you dream about. All the ones that are really hard to get into.
Niche publications that are loved by your personas. These will be unique to your audience and will be much more receptive to anything relevant you pitch them. For instance, at Buffer we would often pitch to Social Media Today because we were social media software.
With pitch-and-place, you’re often telling a story that is all about you; therefore, expect only a handful of these to land each year.
This would include:
Fundraising announcements
Major technology innovations
Workplace culture stories
2. Develop a PR mix
Pitch-and-place might be the most obvious tactic, but there are a host of other ways to keep your name top-of-mind. Having a solid mix of PR content is a good defensible tactic so that you’re not overly reliant on single stories getting picked up by writers with their own agendas.
Here are my three favorite things to add to a PR mix:
Bylines. You can get an executive byline in a place like a Forbes Tech Council or Ad Age contributor fairly easily. The then ensures that you can talk about a topic that’s relevant to you in a publication with a lot of clout (and backlink power!).
Syndication. Take existing content that has worked really well for you — perhaps industry-relevant blog posts or how-we-work content — and pitch it to be reposted on content websites like Huffington Post or others.
HARO (Help A Reporter Out). On this website, journalists will post topics and questions, looking for subject matter experts who can respond. It’s the most wonderful two-sided marketplace for anyone who wants to easily get going with PR.
3. Proprietary data
The media looooves data. It’s what they use to validate stories and prove their points. And the good news is that businesses are full of data!
You can share proprietary data from how your users are using your product (anonymized, of course). Like, if you were a photo editing app, you could pull data on how many AI-edited images are being made now versus six months ago.
Or, you can come up with original research by running a poll or survey among your core persona. We did this at Buffer with a State of Social Media report. To make it even better, we did it every year, and we partnered with other companies to co-market and boost the amplification of each report.
4. If you have to talk about yourself …
Identify milestones that might be especially noteworthy and that people would care about. Oftentimes this happens around a fundraising announcement or a certain milestone of revenue or users.
But don’t just stop at the number. This number should tell a broader story about, maybe, the momentum of your product category overall or the evolving market dynamics that are driving more people to use your particular product or service.
Your milestone is obviously about you, but remember that people care more about what’s in it for them, not you.
5. Conventional PR vs. unconventional PR
All that we’ve talked about so far is typically thought of as conventional PR.
But sometimes people’s PR minds go to a different place: stunts.
“Stunts” probably isn’t being fair to this tactic because there are plenty of genuinely original and thoughtful campaigns that are certainly unconventional but not irresponsible. Many PR firms will be able to help you dream up possibilities for unconventional activities to try, and they’ll have a robust rolodex of contacts who can help pull them off.
These can range wildly in their scope and nature. For instance:
At Buffer, we counted unconventional PR as the things we did around transparency, like publishing all of our salaries in a public spreadsheet
At Red Bull, they did a skydive from space
All the PR agencies I’ve worked with
There are a TON of PR agencies out there. If you’ve worked with one you’ve loved, please let me know, and I will add it to the list here.
Dotted Line Communications (far and away my favorite one!!)
For paid subscribers, I’ve added some additional details, resources, and links if you want to dive deeper into the world of PR & Comms. Not yet a paid subscriber? You can sign up here and get access to this content plus my personal Notion library of resources.