about their issues and by talking to them
not about your product but about their
challenges and pain points. Jump start your path to
brand awareness itself from existing companies and how it
will otherwise add value to the economy,
environment, and socially.
Once you’ve taken these steps, you can
begin to experiment with a go-to-market
approach with the expectation that you’ll
continue to refine and change it based on
experience and further insights. Figuring
out an approach for going to market is one
of the toughest things for a startup to do.
But without understanding the customer’s
issues, it’s almost impossible to get it right. When an organization has no history,
getting initial media placements is
challenging. However, starting with a blank
slate can provide an incredibly exciting
and unique opportunity to create a brand’s
reputation from the ground up. Startups
can do this by being clear about what
they want their audience to know about
the new brand, how it will differentiate While a young company may not have
business partners to leverage or a portfolio
of positive customer experiences, it can still
borrow a page from established companies’
playbook by finding its own way to jump
start a path to brand awareness. Startups
can identify short-term opportunities to
introduce their brand by figuring out where
their audiences are and communicating
with them directly. If their customers
hang out on Twitter all day, that’s where
the startup needs to be, too.
Entrepreneurs can achieve the best
PR results by asking themselves tough
questions about the potential news value
of a story and prioritizing their objectives.
Use your best judgment to assess potential
business or consumer news stories and
figure out what is best presented as
internal communications to be shared
with stakeholders, rather than with the
media. Some stories may seem exciting to
the insiders buy may not be newsworthy to
the press when weighed against hundreds
of competing stories each day.
Startups are known to have “press release
fever,” but press releases alone don’t
typically lead to media coverage in top-
tier news and business outlets. This is
where PR pros can be particularly useful,
as they can pitch ideas, place bylined
thought leadership articles and submit
interview requests with targeted media to
fit each company’s specific objectives.
Startups can learn invaluable lessons by
observing the PR strategies of established
companies, but prior to creating their own
PR plans, entrepreneurs should consider
both the challenges and benefits that are
inherent in any startup, instead of seeking
to simply emulate what other companies
are doing. Consider what has worked best
and continuously tweak it to suit your
company’s unique communication needs.
Irene Mbonge is a Communications
Expert and a current affairs
enthusiast. She is the interim
Chair, CIPR-Kenya chapter. You
can commune with her on this or
related issues via mail at: Mbonge.
[email protected].