Medium, LinkedIn killed PR. Here’s what companies need to do now

Photo credit: Pexels.

With the increasing popularity of publishing platforms like Medium and Linkedin, it’s become less valuable paying a firm to try to get your company mentioned in one of the traditional news outlets. So what’s a company or a leader in a company to do to get heard above the noise of hundreds of thousands of other companies selling products and services–especially online?

Marketing in 2010

Between 2008 and 2013, when I ran my startup, there were two vendors we couldn’t live without: the accountant and the PR firm. As a CEO, my job was to keep money in the bank, hire the best people, and evangelize our product, it was clear that those two outside relationships were the ones I needed to nurture; the accountant to help with money and the PR firm to help with evangelizing.

We had a product offering that confused a few (customers could comparison shop for alternative electricity suppliers) and we needed to build customer trust, external to our own push marketing.

I hired the PR firm even before we raised any venture capital because I recognized that earned media was the most cost-effective form of building a brand and customer trust. Every press mention brought a flow of customers and interested job candidates. From 2008 to 2013, every marketplace startup could raise a seed-funding round, new technology was upending staid industries, and the marketing tools we had were:

1. Paid marketing: mainly Facebook and Adwords which are expensive for a startup with limited budget
2. Blogging: consistent and akin to screaming into the forest, which we did
3. Virality: as much as a crapshoot than it is now
4. Public relations: where you pitch a story to a web or paper news outlet with the hope that your brand gets mentioned. This is the tactic we doubled down on and it worked well for us.
5. Email marketing: our most valuable customer engagement and retention tool

PR also had the added benefit of search engine optimization. We made sure to get back links to our website, which increased our site relevance. But it was all about increasing the number of people who became aware of what Power2Switch was (It was, as it is now for a lot of companies, all about marketing to drive revenue.).

Thought leadership a.k.a. marketing in 2017

All marketing, regardless of the method or type, is about getting consumers to take a journey with your product or service, a journey that you hope concludes with them taking an action i.e purchasing your product or service. The company goal is to guide prospects through the loop of awareness → discovery → purchase → use → referral.

As mentioned, my startup nailed the awareness part of the loop with PR. We then proceeded to satisfy the customer needs once they purchased (by saving them on their electricity expenses) and equipped delighted customers to share through social media.

It seemed straightforward. But, truth be told, if we were to do this today, I believe we would have had limited success generating awareness. Why?

How to do thought leadership and strategic narratives right