What Every Start Up Needs to Know Before Hiring PR

Embryos are tiny and frail. Unfortunately, embryonic businesses get taken advantage of by consultants all too often.

If you’re a start-up, an emerging thought leader, or a self-published author looking to hire a public relations agency to promote your company or yourself, I will share with you something that most people won’t.

They won’t because they want to bilk you of a few months of retainer payments while you come up to speed. It’s a dirty little secret no one likes to discuss, but PR firms still profit from inefficiency.

None of this applies to name brands or enterprise players (although they get bilked, too), but if you’re new or pivoting or just getting started with a PR consultant and it’s your first time at the races, what you’re going to learn here will help you manage your risk.

Assuming you’re a reasonably literate, informed person who reads regularly and keeps up on current affairs, with some guidance, you may be able to do your public relations.

Some PR consultants will tell you journalists don’t want to be pitched stories directly or that they have relationships they can use to get you press, but that’s just a sales tactic to get you to sign with them.

Show me a journalist who doesn’t want to hear directly from someone with a good story, and I’ll show you a shy TikTok influencer.

So the question is, how do you learn how to package your own story in a way that’s mediagenic?

How do you get the skills and knowledge to implement your PR campaign without relying on a public relations firm?

And how do you figure out who you should pitch and when and how to pitch them?

If you have the time and inclination, you could take a class or read some books on public relations and figure it out on your own.

Or you could hire a seasoned public relations consultant to show your ropes, accelerate your learning curve, and teach you to manage your public relations campaign. But it might be tough to find someone honest, experienced, and willing to share the secrets of public relations consulting.

But what if you could hire a seasoned PR consultant to guide you through the implementation process so you could get your campaign up and running on your own?

Inside Out PR

Inside Out PR is an alternate framework I developed for implementing PR under the guidance of an outsourced senior public relations counselor.

But to understand how this approach differs, let’s look at the Traditional PR Staffing Model.

In this example, Erica Romaguera, the in-house director of PR (although it could be a VP of marketing or the company owner), manages an outside PR agency that handles the entire lifecycle of external communications.

From developing the key messages and preparing the media lists to connecting with influencers, amplifying their coverage, and measuring the outcomes of the coverage, a public relations firm — retained non-exclusively — handles it all.

This traditional PR Staffing model makes sense for larger companies. Still, there are several practical challenges to sustaining a long-term client-agency relationship. PR agencies must find a way to maintain staffing levels in an environment where clients expand and contract unpredictably.

More than anything else, this stark reality leads to PR agencies delivering shoddy work.

Email blasts that should be targeted get shotgunned far and wide, not because PR people don’t know better, but because PR firms are under pressure to deliver media coverage without the long-term commitment from clients they need to staff accounts appropriately.

It’s usually not that public relations specialists don’t know better, although when agencies over-rely on junior-level staffers, that may also be the case.

It takes a lot of time to send custom pitches to hundreds of reporters who may not be interested anyway. PR specialists often take a scattershot approach to save time and resources and email blast the world whether the story is right for them.

For decades, I produced meet the media panels for PRSA, where journalists tell PR people the best way to get their attention is to read their articles and pitch based on their prior coverage.

Still, taking that approach only marginally increases the likelihood of coverage since the number of pitches a journalist receives is always more significant than their capacity for coverage; most PR specialists go broad, and personalization comes down to merging a first name into a canned email pitch.

It’s an issue of economics rather than capabilities, although that may also figure into it. From this perspective, the PR representative is only in it for the short-term prospect of scoring a quick news hit, rather than building long-term relationships, which is what would benefit the client most, although they may not know it.

Since most clients are not big names, consumer brands, or enterprise players, tasking an external, shared resource to handle external communications is fraught with conflict. The agency seeks to minimize the resources required to score news coverage because they’re nonexclusive and must serve multiple clients with shared resources. Journalists are looking for personalized pitches.

Under the Inside Out PR model, an external PR expert leads the client through structured, one-on-one coaching sessions, checklists, access to online resources, and some editorial support to jump-start a media relations effort and build momentum.

Through this approach, clients come up to speed on securing media exposure for themselves or get the guidance they need to hire and train an entry-level PR specialist to work in-house.

Inside Out PR may also include the task of hiring, training, and management of a dedicated, in-house, junior PR specialist, but not their compensation.

By outsourcing the hiring and training of an in-house, full-time resource to a senior-level counselor, the client gets what a PR agency would provide but from a dedicated resource at a much better value.

Inside Out PR is an option for clients who:

• Are looking to build momentum before they hire a publicist
• Aren’t promoting global consumer brands
• Are working on securing venture capital
• Aren’t seeing value from an existing PR agency relationship

Inside Out PR is an alternative PR staffing model that gives clients access to a senior-level, strategic PR advisor on a nonexclusive basis, possibly with a dedicated junior PR specialist, so there’s no need to ride herd over a PR agency account executive to get the appropriate level of service.

Inside Out PR flips how conventional public relations teams are resourced and can work for clients just getting started with public relations or those looking to take their PR in-house.

I am working with a few startups on their go-to media strategies and message development, providing editorial support and door openers with journalists and influencers. Contact me to learn more.