How to get FREE PR for your startup- Growth Marketing Tips

Hello everybody. Thanks for coming out. I appreciate it. It was a great intro. Nick covered most of it, but my name is Adrian Salmanovic and yeah, I've built several multimillion dollar companies and the thing that I want to point out is I did them without paying money for advertising for the most part. And so we were able to use earned media and PR to build these companies and that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I hope that some, some of the micro lessons in this are applicable to your business and hope we can bring some value today. So I'm also advisor to about, believe it or not, over 200 companies through both 500 startups and also Clarity FM which is a platform you can go to to just hire experts by the minute. And I really do enjoy mentoring startups and meeting with different startups through a variety of platforms. I'm also the author of a new book that goes by the same name as today's presentation, Free pr. And I'm really honored to have co written it with a guy named Cameron Herald. And Cameron Harold's probably one of the top 100 iconic sort of business consultants or business advisors in North America. And although you might recognize him, he was the COO for 1-800-got junk. He actually helped to build the company from $3 million in revenue to almost 180 million. And he used it, he did it using the power of free PR and media. So he's my co author on this. He's also a best selling author of four other books, three other books I should say, and I'm honored to be working with him on his fourth book. These are just some of the places that we've received media through the variety of companies I've been involved with. And in fact there's been almost at last count over 3,000 free articles or blog posts, news items and podcasts that I've been responsible for acquiring using the techniques we're going to talk about today. So quickly I'll tell you what I'm doing now. So I don't work full time for any of the companies that I founded. I'm actually a full time advisor and author right now and I do a lot of consulting. But essentially what I do is I teach companies like a lot of people in this room have how to get massive amounts of PR and exposure without hiring an agency or a PR firm and without really having to spend as much money on advertising. So I'm going to talk about the power of earned media and PR and what it is. So the first thing I want to do is really understand this term, earned media. It's not that widely used, but what does it mean? Well, there's essentially three types of buckets that any company can use to optimize their marketing. The first one is paid media, which we all know about. Facebook ads, Google Ads. It even includes things like billboards. And that's where you pay to play. And the more you pay, the more exposure you can get. And it's been that way for over 100 years. Owned media is all the assets we own. It could be our website, our blog, our YouTube channel, the Things that we have control over. The third one is what we're going to talk about today is earned media. And as the name implies, you have to earn it. So it's not given away, you have to earn it. And it's usually things like most people will call it, word of mouth marketing. And one of the biggest components of igniting that word of mouth is using influencers and the media. And that's specifically what I focus on. So why is it so powerful and why does it matter? Well, let's put it in context of using the analogy of an engine. Owned is the actual engine. That's your business, your company, your website. The thing you own, earned media would be the lubricant, which helps to lubricate things like partnerships and lubricate the process of creating recognition. It amplifies everything. And then paid, once that's kind of working, is the fuel. So paid is really. You start throwing more paid after you've proven that you can earn some media and get some buzz going. So why does earned media matter? Well, the biggest thing is it helps to reduce your cost per conversion. So you can imagine a company that relies on 99% on paid advertising. Your cost per acquisition is going to be quite high. With most of the companies I co founded, I actually did the opposite. I relied on word of mouth buzz, great customer reviews, it's slower, harder to scale. But our cost per acquisition was extremely low as a result of this. So having good PR and earned media actually can help reduce your cost per acquisition by as much as 50% or even more. It also helps you build credibility and social proof, which is really important. We'll dive into that a little bit more and more also lets you position yourself as a category leader. If you think about it, whatever industry you're in, whether it's B2B or business consumer, there's always an industry darling or industry leader and they're usually the ones that are getting written about the most. So it really helps with that. So the mechanics of it really, if you look at the free links part, is really what you're trying to do is create a lot of free links and social media mentions, if you will, and that's gonna build links. Those links create SEO juice, which then gives you higher positioning in the search engines, creates more traffic, and that traffic naturally converts into more business. Easier said than done. But if you know how to do it, it's actually not that complicated. And the most important thing I've seen over the last decade is once the PR machine starts working, it's a flywheel effect. So once you get in the media bit, then the media comes back to you. And as that starts to happen, all sorts of magical things start to happen, like inbound inquiries from much larger companies or opportunities to appear and put your product into major television shows or investors. A lot of our investors first heard about us through TechCrunch, for example. So attention in the attention economy equals revenue or money. So PR can make or break you. So I don't want to make it sound like PR is just positive. It can also be negative because at the end of the day, if you don't know how to control the PR machine, it can come back to bite you. So we could use a very well known example. Probably everybody in this room may or may not recognize Elizabeth Holmes. She created a company called Teranos, which we've probably all heard about. It was a multi billion dollar fraud. And in fact it was the Wall Street Journal that first really, really pulled the rug from under her. And that is not the way to do pr. So that's an example of PR gone wrong. On the other hand, some of you might recognize this guy, especially if you're a man between the ages of 18 and 40 in the room. It's Dollar Shave Club, the billion dollar shaving company came out of nowhere, out of Venice Beach, California. And it started when Mike here created a $5,000 video that we've probably. How many people have seen the Dollar Shave Club? Wow, that's pretty much 100%. So that just shows you some of it was paid, but really he got most of that earned for free. And the result was a billion dollar shaving company. So I'll give him a check mark. So what's PR now? Well, PR is much more than just word. Public relations today. Right? It means people relations, it means partner relations. And it's really 360. It's everything revolves around media relations today. And it's interesting is that now, anybody, the blog is a journalist. Anyone with a YouTube channel has a TV network. Anybody with a podcast has their own radio station. So the media is no longer the bottleneck that it was 20 years ago, when getting on TV was one of the only ways, or getting in the newspaper was one of the only ways you were going to get exposure. Now there's millions of micro channels out there. But even though it's been diluted, there's two opportunities. One of them is you now have more chances to interact with much smaller groups or tribes. So that's an opportunity because there's no longer that bottleneck. And the second thing is traditional media matters more than ever. Today in a world of fake news and fake clicks and all this, people still rely on these logos that I showed you earlier, right? It means something to be in TechCrunch. It means something to have PC Magazine, editorial review. People rely on these brands to deliver to them a certain type of news that they rely on. So the big media still matters. And I'd argue it matters more than ever. So where do you start? If I could boil it down to one thing, it's something called the press release, which we've all heard about, and many would argue the press release is dead, right? Like, who's this guy talking about press releases? Is it 1985? Well, the press release is dead. And the days of writing a press release, throwing it on the wire, and then hoping that some journalist randomly sees your press release just doesn't happen. Press releases on the wire will never get anybody any news, ever. The point is, the press release is super important and more important than ever because it's a way of validating your product before you even launch. And I didn't come up with this. A lot of people don't know this, but Jeff Bezos actually forces every product manager and VP to write a press release before they even write a single line of code for any product launch. And the reason they do it is so they can answer questions like, who really cares? Who gives a shit about this? Is it interesting? And to me, the press release is sort of the new business plan. It's a new investor deck. It's the new vision document, and it allows you to do rapid iteration. If you think about it as you're writing a press release, it's really easy to change things around and make it interesting rather than building something and then figuring out that nobody cares. So the press release is honestly one of the most powerful tools I've ever come across for product iteration launching. Whether you're a startup or a multi billion dollar company like Amazon. So that's what we're going to talk about. And the ultimate rule is if you can't make a press release interesting in one page, how are you going to make it interesting to investors or customers for that matter? So let's break down the press release and just so you guys don't have to take a lot of notes or anything, I'm going to be actually offering everybody here the ability to download a free template and tool so that tomorrow you can go back to the office or next time you're about to do a product launch is use this process. So it breaks it down super easy and fun to do. And I just want everyone to have that. So the press release, if you look at it, has 12 different sections and if you look at it almost flows like an investor deck. Any of you who have had to build an investor deck will recognize the flow of it. It's very similar. And that's why I say it's kind of like the new investor deck. And so you start off with a summary and the summary you just want to cover the. The name is pretty self explanatory. That's where you're going to talk about the five W's. Who, what, when, where, why, et cetera. And then you're going to go right into the problem in the second paragraph. And each one of these represents one paragraph. So you're going to do the problem, then you're going to talk about how you solve the solution. You're going to talk about data. And this is where you go and get some analyst data on the market size. Or hopefully it's a large market, hopefully it's a growing market, but it kind of forces you to do some research. Then you're gonna quote your quote hopefully as a founder or VP of marketing's quote or whoever, CEOs quote. And this kind of forces you to think about your why and your position and articulate it in an intelligent way. And then you're gonna get a third party quote. So this is often a customer or client, it could be a partner or if you don't have any of that yet, cause you're a startup. One of the hacks that I often do is I'll just go out in the media but find the most famous person I can who's talking about my industry. And there's nothing wrong with taking that person's quote and putting it in your press release. It's public knowledge, right? If somebody said something publicly, you can Quote them. Then we're going to do the closing call to action. Have a bit of FOMO in there. Some reason for the journalist or whoever's reading the press release to take an action. Fear of missing out. Good question. Sorry, I should have. Most people wouldn't know that anyway. So. Good question. Sorry, fomo, fear of missing out. And then you're gonna develop the headline. You're actually doing the headline almost last because you wanna kinda take the summary of all this and create the headline for the journalist. So one of the biggest hacks and when you're trying to pitch the media is you actually wanna try to come up with the headline for the journalist and you kinda wanna do it last. Sub headline just supports the headline. It's pretty self explanatory. The release date can be anytime in the future. Some people write press releases years before they're gonna be released as a vision document. But you can set the date a week from now, a month from now. Usually you want to give yourself a month so that you can pitch the media and hold the press release back until a public date. So you want to usually start the process about a month before. And then location can be anywhere. It doesn't have to be Ottawa, it could be anywhere where your market is. It could be New York, it could be London, it could be Los Angeles, it could be Hollywood. There are no rules. You can launch it from wherever you want. And then your boilerplate, which is your about us. Another thing is I found that writing a boilerplate helps me keep my about us section really sharp. So it's another great exercise in keeping your communication really tight. So let me move forward. So I'm not going to bore you with this, but this kind of just shows the correlation between all of it and showing you that the order that you're writing is not necessarily the order in which it's displayed. So don't worry about this. This is all in the template that you can download. So here's your challenge though. I want everybody to go and download this. I'll give you the address in a second. And the next time you're about to do a product launch, whether you're founder, the CEO, whether you're the VP of marketing or head of product, is force yourself to go through this exercise. It's an amazingly powerful exercise. And don't take it from me, take it from Jeff Bezos. So start with the press release. Here's where you can grab it. I want everybody who wants this to grab it now because it's available, it's earned co pressrelease. You can download. It's absolutely free. I've actually sold these for $100 a pop before, but I'm just going to give them away today to anybody that showed up. So I thank you. Hopefully that was useful at a high level. Thank you.