Basic Guide to PR for Startups

A startup firm sets in the market with new brand name, varying products and services only to bear belligerent competition at first. Observations revealed that every 91 out of 100 startups fail to foster a strong public and media relation which leads to the early downfall. Many startups rely on digital advertising and marketing campaign only to earn the leads while neglecting the power of public relations.

Al Reis, author of ‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding’, talks about the anomalous position in marketing that Public Relations hold for building a quintessential brand.  He believes that earned publicity creates an honest brand image than advertising. What general public says about your brand and business is a big matter of concern than what you say about yourself through advertising.

Therefore, what businesses really need today is a strong brand presence along with the increasing number of sales. For this, a lot of startups club public relations and other marketing techniques altogether to earn reputation and generate great revenue.

You may opt for professional PR services or can take up the charge to manage public relations yourself. In the latter case, following tips will surely help you a great deal:

•    Prepare content for coverage

Whether it is a press release, article or a startup story, it should convey the information of your products & services, justify the purpose of business’s existence and the passion of its workforce.  Identify the pain of your customers, and decipher how your products or services provide relief to the customers. Do not forget to write it all with passion. You may also write content on the social media topics that your customers care about. And then, you may proceed to pitch the journalists for covering your story. Use tools and software to find and connect to the right journalists.

•    Create a media list

A media list is one of the cornerstones of any PR campaign. Once you have prepared content for release, it’s time to look for the right media influencers and journalists for earning the coverage. Find the contact details of the various journalists, read their writing, identify their interest areas and proficiency and organize them comprehensively in a list. Based on the context of your story, you can approach a journalist for coverage with a creative and appealing pitch.

•    Pitch the right way

Avoid writing cold pitches that do not interest anyone. Do some newsjacking with your story and write it impressively while maintaining a professional tone. Through your pitch, inform the journalist why your company is worth writing on. What is distinctive about your products, services, and company? If you have news, make it ground-breaking. If you are launching a new array of products and service, discuss how the public will be a direct beneficiary. Also, do not send same pitch to hundreds of journalists. Instead, try to pitch fewer, and pitch smarter. Your story should be relevant, novel, and fresh. It should not be anachronistic.

•    Foster relations with public early

Many a time, people start engaging with media and audience all in a sudden when they require coverage. Therefore, you should start engaging and interacting with them a little early. Do not approach a journalist all in a sudden saying, “I have a brand new story which will interest your audience or can you please cover my launch event because it was amazing?” Such are the examples of poor approach which will leave journalist with a not-so-good impression. Therefore, it’s important that you stay relationship-focused and not coverage-centric.

PR converts more because people trust earned media more than the traditional earned media. To get enough exposure and coverage, you must work hard on all above strategies.

Plan Your Corporate Event with Professional Event Managers

As soon as one hears the term “corporate event,” one unconsciously begins thinking of the best event management companies in Delhi or nearby. That’s because managing corporate event, especially a big one, is tougher than one usually thinks. Companies prefer to outsource the event management duty to professionals specialized in Public Relations of Business events. This saves them time, money, and their productivity remains unaffected. Hence, opting for event management company appears a good option for the companies. But is it really easy to hand over the job to professionals and meet directly on the day of the event? Of course, no! Still, companies have a lot to do with corporate event management as many firms do not keep them updated about the planning updates.

In this post, we will share a few tips to choose a reliable event management company; also, the suggestions for collaborating with the event manager to plan your next corporate event at ease:

1.    Ask for portfolio

Let’s assume you have shortlisted four event management companies in Delhi for your corporate event, you should contact each of them at earliest and request for the portfolio. The established and reputed event management companies maintain a proper portfolio in which they keep all details and pictures of the events for reference. Ask them to share their portfolio before making any decision. If you see any of these four companies organized and managed the events fine, you may choose and proceed for other details. 

2.    Enquire the team’s expertise

If you are holding a big press conference or summit, you must ask the professionals if they possess adequate experience, and skills to manage it. Because you cannot take risks, ask them to introduce the team or give any detail of who press conference organizers will manage your conference. They should be both experts and experienced in managing press conferences, summit or any other corporate event perfectly.

3.    Check clients’ testimonials

First of all, do research about the company. See what its clients are saying on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other review website. If you find more good reviews than the poor ones, you may give the company a try. Do not trust on 100% good testimonials as well as 100% negative.

4.    Decide on a budget beforehand

Discuss the event budget in advance before signing up the contract. Be clear on how much you can invest in event management, promotion, and coverage to avoid any grievance later.

5.    Develop a shared work plan

Once you have signed the deal, it’s time that you ask them to work consistently as per a work plan. Ask them to develop and share a schedule and work plan containing the details of every move. Make a work plan on Google drive or any cloud-based software where they can easily update the work progress online, and you are instantly informed about it. This is the best way to avoid miscommunication.

6.    Do not forget to follow-up

While the event managers have to look into so many errands while managing your event, you should regularly follow-up to know what work is going on. This would help both parties engage, brainstorm and exchange some ideas, strategies or everything else to make the event a success.

7.    Be prepared for the worst

You need not worry about the malfunctions or what if anything goes wrong as the event managers are fully responsible for this and they stay prepared for the worst. But still, you should ask them if they have any backup plan or strategies to handle any mismanagement.

8.    Say Thanks on success

If your corporate event turns out a success and everything goes fine, do not forget to send a thank you email or note along with the payment. It’s a good gesture which will help form a good relationship with the event managers. And when you need the services again, they will stand by your side all-ready to work.

9.    Ask for media coverage

Many event management companies offer PR services also. You may ask them if they can help you gain media coverage as well. Your big conference or event should bring your business into the limelight, which PR services help you do that easily. Pay some extra bucks for PR services to them only as they know your event really well, and they will manage your PR project better.

Top 4 Skills that great SEO professional has

With digital taking up the center stage and becoming the necessity of almost every industry, search engines have got all crowded up with hundreds of millions of business portals. And, getting a top spot for your businesses in such a crazy rush is a tough and tedious job that only skilled SEO professionals can do. If you are amongst the ones doing good offline but still not gaining recognition and respect online, then instead of getting all tensed hire an SEO professional from top PR agencies in Delhi and boost your SEO rankings adequately and organically. Here are the skills with which the SEO professionals help you and your business to succeed:

1. Critical Thinking

This is one of the crucial most skills necessary for every SEO professional to possess. As the online scenario is constantly changing, the SEO professionals need to be in constant touch with the changes and be better prepared for the situations ahead. Only a person with a critical mind can sustain this hyperactive job and bring great success and recognition to the client’s online portals and websites that they are handling.

2. Speaking & Writing Ability

An SEO professional with the ability to do their own keyword research and create their own plagiarism free and authored content are incredibly more valuable for SEO companies in Delhi and around the world. The job doesn’t just include writing down articles and having good speech skills instead it also includes the tricks and tactics to convince the internal team and clients to unanimously head towards achieving SEO goals and objectives.

3. Technical & Programming Skills

There are many SEO persons that are doing a great job with only basics of the programming knowledge, but after a certain period of time, the basics won’t be of much use so it’s better to switch to the advanced levels now than facing problems later on. These professionals are closely linked with the web designing and developer teams, once they are better trained with the skills of this genre then they will surely offer better insights rather than just giving the clients with demands list.

4. Analytics Skills

Smart work is much more beneficial than more work and with the skill of extracting out their own data from Adobe or Google Analytics and save a lot of time along with providing excellent work outputs. To draft out a proper SEO strategy as per the conditions that are going to be there in the future scenes, knowledge of Business KPIs is also a necessity.

How is social media revolutionizing real-time information for journalists and news sources?

To start with let us look back on the time before the advent of social media. People used to know real-time information by word of mouth that is through traditional media like television and radio, while they can’t get information immediately due to technology restriction and media gatekeepers checking. So, the information cannot go viral without the help of legacy or old media, the public was mostly the receiver earlier.

Social media has been a great help to the journalists and the new sources in order to garner information from different sources, and all thanks goes to our social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. If we talk about Twitter, then every second on an average around 6,000 tweets are tweeted, amongst which, we might get more than one breaking news. Press conferences also happen but only to confirm and provide an explanation as the news had already broken in real-time on Twitter first.

Companies look for social media agencies to promote their brand and stay active on social media platforms. These agencies are the first one to respond or give opinion on situation if anything goes wrong.  Social Media is a platform which allows journalists and news sources to acquire details about the incident or situation as it happens, how it happened and from a lot of other different points of view. It also allows news sources and journalists to get hold of first hand viewers of the incident quickly for comment and details around the story.

Media itself has shifted from the traditional media outlets. Social media have begun to seriously affect news organizations and how they operate. Now the newspapers have started facing crisis on how to make the news profitable in the digital age. Social networking sites especially like Twitter, is now majorly affecting the working of news organizations and for a better media world has changed how the journalists perform their daily jobs.

There is a myriad of social media agencies in Delhi Social and around the world, in case you are looking for one because now the real-time social media has become rocket-fuel with breaking news. Anything and everything can be posted on social media which help a lot of different sources to grab the authentic information. The power of real-time social media is now at the center of our awareness and will only continue to grow in influence.

What is the future of SEO?

The digital world is changing and growing quite rapidly; SEO or the Search Engine Optimization which was earlier a magical trick for the businesses has now become a characteristic feature of every successful digital marketing strategy.  The digital world has travelled a long path towards its development from its nascent stage but there is still a lot more that is awaiting us in the future. With the search engines updating their algorithms and methodologies of doing search every now and then, here are the top three predictions that will be majorly shaping the future of the SEO industry.

1.      User Experience (UX)

The time for the SEO has changed, now it’s not only about optimizing the website in accordance with the trending keywords, but is also about understanding how people interact with the web.  Search engines have now become obsessed with the users and so the websites need to follow the same path, too. With search results becoming more and more customized, you need to understand that if your content isn’t found interesting to the users, they won’t be coming to your links ever again, thus making you lack behind in this ever competitive digital world.

To improve the condition of your site, invest in creation of content that is not only helpful to the users, but is engaging too. The user experience (UX) of an online content can be checked and improved with the free analytics tools that keep a track record of what the users are doing.

2.      Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Originally search engines were designed to operate from a single index of documents, i.e., from desktop. But today with time the process is getting divided into two indexes, one for the mobile and other for the desktop, with mobile being the primary choices. With mobiles actively becoming the most preferred devices for assessing online information, search engines are pacing towards the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project.

Presently, AMP is not a ranking factor, but still it holds its own significant impact on the search or website performance. AMP content is gaining prominence in mobile search results, as the content is designed specifically for these devices thus, giving users a relief from the slow-loading online pages on their mobile devices.

3.      Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Over the time, Artificial Intelligence is benefitting with more and more accurate results as the machines have now got familiar with the learn patterns and understanding the originality of the content. This will also benefit the industry in getting rid from the black-hat SEO that was required since a very long time. The machine learning has made the search much more personal than ever, and this will force all in the marketing fields to get thinking about the segments much more precisely than ever before.