Funding news is not a strategy; founders should contribute more value-add content

Founders in Asia Pacific tend to adopt a milestone-based approach to public relations, usually revolving around their financing. When they raise angel funding, they’ll make an announcement. When they raise a seed round, they’ll make an announcement. When they raise their Series A, they’ll make an announcement.

It’s hard to blame founders for taking this approach. The headlines in regional tech and business publications, after all, are dominated by funding news. It seems journalists, editors, and readers collectively have an obsession for which startups fundraise, who from, and how much.

The problem with this strategy – if you even want to call it that – is that it shortchanges the very real problems that startups solve, the traction they achieve, and the people they help.

Picture the life cycle of a startup as a timeline. Funding rounds would occupy some spokes along the timeline, but they would be few and far between. This picture is woefully incomplete, if almost a caricature of what you do.

As a founder, you do so much more than just fundraise. You build your product, you go-to-market, you acquire users, you growth-hack, you scale. How, then, do you successfully portray all these other successes that most tech headlines would typically ignore?

The importance of thought leadership

The answer is thought leadership. You cannot wait for journalists to approach you to cover your funding news par course. If you commit to the same approach as everyone else, you’ll get the same results.

So instead of defaulting into thinking that funding announcements and public relations are synonymous, you must aggressively push out stories to journalists that may make interesting stories for their readership.

Also Read: 5 essential traits of a successful entrepreneur

These can be press releases that offer select quotes from you about your industry, or they can be guest contributions authored and bylined under your name. The key is that you take a proactive approach in reflecting upon your company, its progress, and the industry to see where you can surface relevant ideas, angles, and stories.

The democratization of public relations

Such self-reflection is easier said than done. While all founders may have a strong product vision, they may not necessarily have as keen an eye for story. This gap makes it all the more important to encourage everyone across the company to be a content strategist and keep channels open for them to submit their ideas.

A recruiter from human resources, for example, may want to promote a story about a unique company perk for employer branding, while a developer may want to highlight a new feature on your platform for product marketing.

A salesperson may want to share a client case study to facilitate sales enablement. As the founder, you would likely not have uncovered these ideas, if only because you have a top-down view of the company.

Because your individual team members are closest to their domain, they can come up with stories that are both interesting to a general business and tech readership as well as impactful to their particular domain. But again, such high impact stories are only made possible with your blessing: You must make it known that external relations is a company-wide responsibility.

In the same vein that public relations must involve everyone at the company, so, too, should it encompass all your external stakeholders. Your customers and your clients are the most obvious ones, and the lowest-hanging fruit – you can easily find ways to share how your solutions have helped end users.

But your company, like any truly innovative one, will benefit more than just customers – you’ll help partners, investors, shareholders, vendors, suppliers, and even various beneficiaries, if your company runs corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.

Also Read: Filling the leadership gap: Why you cannot delegate responsibility

You must build, in short, a story world. How has your platform benefitted merchants who sell through it? Why has your fintech product attracted impact investors? Which communities does your company provide jobs and commerce for?

Developing this story world is much more resource-intensive than releasing funding announcements like everyone else, but the pay-off is also exponentially greater. By leveraging all your internal stakeholders and speaking to all your external stakeholders, you communicate your value proposition to everyone your company touches.

This strategy makes external relations not only more sustainable, but more impactful, helping you secure thought leadership ahead of all your competitors in your industry.
—

e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Image Credit : rawpixel

The post Funding news is not public relations: Building your startup’s story world appeared first on e27.