Having some kind of notion what line of business your fledgling company might want to pursue used to be a prerequisite to raising capital. Now, it’s a mark of hubris. You don’t tell the market what it needs; you gently offer it a series of options, which are less viable concepts than ritual sacrifices aimed at cultivating the favor of the start-up gods. It’s called “iterating.”

The gist of the post is essentially this: if there’s no product, there’s nothing to invest in, yet people seem to be investing anyway and OMGITSABUBBLEWE’REALLGONNADIE!! (ok, I’ll admit my version has extra drama).

The post doesn’t offer up much to back up the thesis that startups with no specific product idea are getting funded left and right (positioning Instagram as a typical startup is, in my opinion, bonkers) but it raises an interesting question – is there really value in a company that doesn’t have an offering? Suppose you invested in a company with a product, that later changes the offering significantly – does that mean you screwed up?

Pivots aren’t new. Admitting we do them is.

I’ve been involved in loads of version 1 product concept/development/launch exercises I’ve yet to see one where the offering didn’t significantly change after initial customer feedback. At what point in the product life-cycle these “pivots” occur however is shifting earlier and earlier as most self-respecting entrepreneurs have read Steve Blank and are now embracing the concept of early customer feedback and “customer development”. If anything, I think we are seeing less iteration post-investment than we ever have before because many startups are getting it done earlier.

I’d make the argument that previously startups were embarrassed to talk openly about pivoting precisely because we did it after investments (and investment cases based on selling a set product in a well-defined market) were made. We often pivoted, but we were sneaky about it. A shift in target market for a later-stage startup was an “expansion to serve a new customer set” or a “refined market focus” and a major product shift was a “next-generation solution”. Unlike their later-stage peers, early stage startups can more freely come out of the pivot closet because their shifts put less money (if any) at risk and often serve to demonstrate a growing understanding of the market, making them more attractive to future investment, not less.

Just because you have a product, doesn’t mean anyone wants it.

But hey, just because folks have been investing in pre-pivot companies all along doesn’t make it smart (VC returns on average DO kinda stink). Coming back to the question – Is your startup really worth anything before you’ve settled on your exact offering?

Leaving aside the issue of the skill of the team (which is difficult to assess and there’s an argument to be made that previous success doesn’t necessarily predict future success), it still takes two to tango. There are markets/desires on one side and there are offerings on the other. The money only comes when both are viable and a match for each other.

I know there are cases of companies that have developed/launched solutions without knowing what problem they would solve or what market they would eventually serve that were later successful but I think doing it that way requires a lot more luck and effort than doing it the other way around. If you get what customers are trying to get done, why they want to do it, who they are, how they make decisions, how they want to buy and how much they are willing to pay, then you essentially have the basis for a solution because you understand the requirements and the constraints.

On the other hand, simply building and releasing an offering doesn’t prove that your company knows anything about the market or that anyone wants it. You might have that knowledge but you can certainly build stuff without it. And by “stuff” I mean crap nobody wants or will pay for.

So if both have no customers, why on earth would a company with an offering necessarily be more valuable than one without? There is absolutely no inherent value in effort put toward something nobody will buy. The value comes with market knowledge that informs the development of the offering, which in turn, increases the chances of market success.

Is a startup with deep market knowledge but without a well-defined solution yet worth investing in? I don’t think anyone can know for sure but if I were a gambler I would bet my money on the folks that were certain about demand but uncertain about the way to meet it over the folks that had a solution they weren’t sure anyone wanted.

(thanks to Mike McCarrell @mmccarrell for pointing me the Forbes post

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William Mougayar of engagio had a great post over on StartupNorth this week about his lessons learned over the past 3 years. I agree with a lot of what he has to say here about relationships, the danger of believing your own story if nobody else does and how helping people is important. I don’t agree with him that selling to enterprises is a dead end – but I do agree that it’s very, very different from selling to individuals. (full disclosure, I am an advisor to engagio)

Mark MacLeod at startupCFO had a nead post called Vision can Come Later talking about startups that start as services businesses that later transition to product businesses and the resulting domain expertise that comes with that. His thinking is very much in line with mine on that topic – there is no substitution for hands-on market experience.

The Content Marketing Institute has a summary of the results of the Brandpoint 2012 Digital Content Marketing Survey with some interesting data around social content, outsourcing and storytelling.

Earlier this week I posted about what startup folks are looking for in a marketing hire. MarketingProfs has a related post this week called 7 Traits of an Ideal Marketer. I agree with all of this in particular the desire to have marketers that have had some sort of sales training and also the need for great writing skills.

That’s it for this week. I’ll be in China next week working and eating as much food as I can in 6 days. I’ll be posting here but if it takes me a while to respond to comments, I will blame that on my spotty internet access. Have a great weekend.

Related posts:

1. Weekend Startup Marketing Reading
2. Weekend Startup Marketing Reading
3. Startup Marketing 101

Here’s what startups are looking for in a marketing hire:

1. Content creation – Folks that can create engaging, relevant content are in short supply. Most are looking for writing skills but being able to create video, build infographics and create presentations are desirable skills too. Bonus points if you are a decent public speaker and can represent the company well on video (and face to face).
2. Community management – Great social media marketing programs require folks that can work with the community to help build an engaged audience. Social media skills are important here but equally important are good people skills, especially around relationship building.
3. Analytic skills  - Companies are getting better at tracking their marketing efforts through clicks, conversions, impressions, keywords, links, mentions, along with more traditional pipeline stage tracking measurements. Being able to not just gather data but make sense of it is a skill startups are looking for.
4. PR contacts – Later-stage startups might use outside PR help but most are getting the word out to blogs and news outlets on their own. Having a set of relationships with key influencers in a particular market makes you very valuable to a startup.
5. E-mail marketing – Still the cornerstone of most digital marketing programs, email programs are getting smarter and more sophisticated. Marketing automation tools from simple things like MailChimp through to more feature-rich tools like Eloqua and Marketo are now widely used. Knowing your way around those tools and having some experience in multi-stage email marketing is a rare and valuable skill.
6. Salesforce.com – Many startups are using Salesforce as their CRM system and although it’s easy enough to get started using the tool, using it to it’s full potential isn’t, particularly when it comes to tracking and analytics.  There are also loads of tricks to learn around account visibility, pipeline staging and customer segmentation that aren’t intuitively obvious unless you’ve got some time with Salesforce under your belt.

The good news is that it’s pretty easy to pick up many of these skills right now regardless of whether you currently hold a startup marketing job. Any one of these would get you skills that would make you hireable:

1. Start blogging and creating stuff – I don’t think anything teaches you more about what works in a blog better than blogging and the more you write the better you get at it. It also gives you a place to experiment with other media. I’ve done a bunch of video, podcasts and graphic content in this blog and unlike my regular work I get to experiment a lot to see what works.
2. Get active in your community – Being an organizer for a group or project can teach you a lot about what makes communities tick and what it takes to get them engaged and motivated. These groups are always looking to help out and getting involved is usually as easy as raising your hand.
3. Track yourself (and learn some SEO) – This goes along with #1 but if you have an online presence, set goals and learn how to track them. There are loads of great SEO blogs out there. My two favorites for practical advice are SEOmoz and Portent (formerly Conversation Marketing). Runing experiments to put what you have learned into practice is probably the best way to build skills in this area and having specific example to share with potential employers will help you prove that.
4. Make friends with bloggers/journalists – I think networking is the best thing that anyone at any stage in their career can do. If you have a set of relationships with folks in the media, journalists or bloggers that are influential in a particular space, those are very valuable to a startup that doesn’t have them.
5. Learn how to manage a mailing list – Much like the point on SEO, this is an area where there are a ton of amazing resources available online to help you get smart about this topic really fast. For email marketing stuff I like the Mailchimp blog. Although the topics they cover are much broader than just email the Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot blogs are also great sources of information. There are also some low-end tools that you can use for free that can help you fool around with some of the technology in the space to learn it. As I mentioned in the above point on community management skills, community groups are always looking for help. Being the person that manages email lists can help you get smart on this and provide you a theatre to run experiments and learn about tracking, analytics and what works.
6. Play around with Salesforce (or some other CRM) – Sure not everyone uses it but lots of startups do and the principles that you will learn from fooling around with Salesforce are pretty applicable to other CRM systems. If you have access to SalesForce where you work try creating a set of dashboards or reports that are useful to you. If you don’t have access, you can play around with one of the free CRM tools (ZohoCRM is the one I hear about the most). CRM tools are all different but the underlying principles of managing accounts, tracking pipeline, capturing and managing activities, creating reports and dashboards are all pretty similar across tools.

Related posts:

1. Product Marketing & Social Media Skills: Talk is Cheap
2. Why Your Startup Shouldn’t Hire a Marketer from Microsoft
3. Startup Marketing: Does the Competition Matter?

The folks from the startup Pipedrive, a pipeline management tool wrote a great post looking back at how they grew to 1,000 paying customers. The post includes a great discussion about how they learned to say “no” to customers that wanted one-off features, how they ramped up their growth by spending more time with key influencers and removed as much friction as they could in the their sign-up process. This is a great lessons learned post.

An older article on Demand Gen Report, “Why Demand Generation Shouldn’t be Focused on Marketing Qualified Leads” inspired this post this week from B2B Digital Marketing called “Looking beyond Sales and Marketing Alignment“. The original article looks at the problem of Marketing’s continued struggle to provide good leads to sales and proposes that the solution to the problem is better orchestration and coordination between Marketing and Sales. We are focusing too much on MQL’s (Marketing Qualified Leads) when in a perfect process all leads should be marketing influenced as well as sales influenced. In the second article, the author takes this line of thinking one step further to make the argument that sales and marketing should just be “aligned” but actually “integrated”. These are two great articles to read if you are struggling with lead generation process issues related to a salesforce.

Over at SingleGrain there was a really interesting post on using competitive research to analyze a new market. This post describes the process the writer used to launch a new online business website from a very SEO-centric perspective. He describes the tools and methods he used to determine traffic potential, assessed demographics, analyzed key words and how he researched competitor’s tactics. A great read and useful even if you aren’t launching something from scratch.

Lastly, Michele Linn over at Savvy B2B Marketing had a good post on how to be a better listener in content marketing. The post describes how she monitors and discovers content from a variety of different sources using a variety of devices in a very streamlined manner. If you feel like you are spending too much time on Twitter, your inbox is overflowing and your RSS reader is a mess, this is the post for you.

No related posts.

Startups are not Big Companies

I very rarely see useful competitive analysis done by startup marketers, mainly because they are trying to do it like big companies do it. The big companies I’ve worked for have had departments dedicated to creating large detailed check mark matrices that showed how our feature set compared to competitive offerings. These matrices almost never included any feedback from customers. Needless to say, the products and their markets were very mature.

This approach completely falls apart within the context of a startup. Your competitors, from a customer point of view are almost never so easily defined. For startups, your offering is often competing with “do nothing”, “hire someone to do it”, use spreadsheets/documents/paper, or some other solution that might be completely unsuited to the task but is free/easy/what has always been used. Comparing features of one of these alternatives to your startup’s offering to makes absolutely no sense in this context.

A More Customer-Centric Approach

In the context of a startup the only competitive analysis that makes sense is the one that is happening in side the heads of your prospects. The more you understand about that, the more you can use that knowledge to improve your marketing.

Instead of the traditional competitive comparison matrix, a more useful competitive alternatives snapshot for a startup would look at what customers perceive to be the major benefits of the alternative, what risks they see that might stop them from choosing your solution and how you might address these issues in your messaging.

An Example

Here’s an example for CRMster, a fictional solution aimed at mid-sized consulting businesses to help them manage their customer information. The points here are just to give you some ideas about how this might look:

For this example, only the last couple of rows get into any discussion of product features and even there those aren’t the only considerations. The other thing to notice is that the feature discussion can happen as part of a higher-level theme (we’re better because we are cheaper, more targeted to this market, or a more elegant solution) rather than a checklist of niggley esoteric features like you would for mature products in a mature market. If you are going head to head with an established player in the market you’re doing it because you have something radically different.

The Output: Better Messaging

The next step is to look at the themes and develop key messages that highlight your differentiated value while addressing the potential big concerns. I’ve written about messaging here and here and I’ll talk more about how you would take the next step and construct messaging upcoming post.

Related posts:

1. When Having No Competition is a Problem
2. Startup Messaging and Market Frame of Reference
3. A Startup Marketing Framework (Version 2)

Don’t get caught smoking your own marketing

Which brings me to this example. Here in Canada, the University of Guelph announced a research project called “The Enviropig.” From the site:

The Enviropig™ is a genetically enhanced line of Yorkshire pigs with the capability of digesting plant phosphorus more efficiently than conventional Yorkshire pigs. These pigs produce the enzyme phytase in the salivary glands that is secreted in the saliva. When cereal grains are consumed, the phytase mixes with the feed as the pig chews. Once the food is swallowed, the phytase enzyme is active in the acidic environment of the stomach, degrading indigestible phytate in the feed that accounts for 50 to 75% of the grain phosphorus.

Simply put – this pig can digest phosphorus from pig feed more efficiently than regular pigs. This means the pig doesn’t need to get fed expensive phosphorus supplements and also produces manure with less phosphorus. Phosphorus in pig manure is a major source of freshwater pollution. Hey, less pollution, that sounds pretty good! The site even goes so far as to helpfully point out that raising an Enviropig is just like raising a regular pig:

…the technology is simple, if you know how to raise pigs, you know how to raise Enviropigs!

The obvious pig, er, elephant in the room however is the fact that we are raising these pigs, not to consume grain and produce manure, but to feed them to ourselves and our children. What are the risks involved in ingesting a few months worth of eggs over easy with a side of Envirobacon and pulled Enviropork sandwiches? The folks in Guelph decided that the best approach would be to simply avoid that question. Their discussion of “Societal and Ethical Issues” (notice the word “health” is avoided) contains nothing on the subject (although they do assure us that the pigs are very “fit”).

This head in the sand approach didn’t work out so well for the Enviropig project. The backlash was quick and loud. The “Frankenpig” was criticized by consumers, food groups and politians but most of all by environmentalists who quickly pointed out that:

1. Regular old pigs are pretty environmental when not raised in gigantic mega pig farms and
2. Pigs are being fed grain which they are not able to fully digest and changing the pig’s diet or adding supplements to it would also help fix the problem with no genetic engineering required.

Of course both of these things would be costly for conventional pig farmers.

So upon closer inspection, the Enviropig wasn’t a solution to an environmental problem at all. All the marketing in the world couldn’t change the fact that the Enviropig didn’t benefit anyone but pig farmers looking to grow cheaper pigs.

Consumers and the general public reacted with a hearty “hold the bacon!” Last week the project lost its funding from Ontario Pork and the University announced that the pigs will be euthanized. Optimistic marketing wasn’t enough to make those pigs fly.

So here’s the marketing lesson. You can’t ignore how customers perceive your product. Saying it’s great does not make it so and failing to address customer concerns won’t make them go away. Optimistic messaging won’t turn a crappy product that nobody wants into a winner.

Related posts:

1. Messaging Botox – A Quick Fix for Saggy Messaging
2. Startup Messaging
3. Should Your Messaging Use Your Competitor’s Terminology?

Startup Marketing: How to Earn Customers Without Paying for Them – this is a video of a talk by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz that is full of chunky marketing goodness. About halfway through he touches on the problem of attribution which I think is a HUGE one for marketers, particularly those that are heavily invested in content marketing. How do you track a funnel and measure what’s working when you have integrated content resources working together in a programmatic way? If a person sees a Tweet, watches your video, reads your blog and then clicks on a a search result to make a purchase, how do you attribute that lead? There is also a great discussion around organic search rank and how social plays into that as well as a great Q&A session at the end. The video is long but in my opinion, well worth the investment of an hour of your time.

How Perfect Pricing Got me 1500 Sales in 2 Days and Perfect Pricing Part Deux are two great posts from A Smart Bear dealing with a couple of experiments in pricing (ebooks in both examples but the lessons I believe are relevant beyond that market). The first post walks through the author did pricing research, decided on tiered pricing and the results that showed his higher priced product performed better. I am not sure this is really a price anchoring experiment in the way the author suggests but for me it spurred a lot of good thinking about segmentation and pricing. The second post is a great follow-on from another author who took a different approach and charged a much higher price for his ebook. His strategy, rather than tiered pricing, was to focus on a single segment that was willing to pay a higher price because they understood the value of his offering. If you sell on the internet and are thinking about price points, these 2 articles are great reading.

Over at the CMI Institute blog there was a super post this week called 6 Start Me Up Tips for Novice Content Marketers – In my opinion the highlight of this post is the “Message Matrix for Product Launch” example. On the surface this looks a bit oriented toward big companies (we startup marketers don’t usually don’t do things like style guidelines given our teams are so small) but the examples of how you would document messages by elements and key audiences is spot on.

Have a great weekend.

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The first ad was very professional looking with good looking graphics, nice fonts and a green call to action button. The second ad was in his words “some shit ad I made in 5 mins in Microsoft Paint.” The ad was a hand drawn picture of a car with the hand written words “Need for Speed!!! Play free!!”  He tested the 2 ads for 15K impressions each and found the low tech ad generated a clickthrough rate of 0.137% versus 0.049% for the more professional looking ad.

Whoa. That’s quite a difference.

His conclusion that, “every idea you have is worth testing no matter how crappy it is”  is a smart one in my opinion, but also trickier than it might sound.

Your Test Results Tell you What Works but not Why

So we know the second ad generated a better CTR. Now what? Here is a list of reasons the second one might have gotten more clicks:

1. Novelty – we are inundated with ads and something that looks very different is interesting and click-worthy.
2. Free – research shows that this a bit of a magic word for folks and it appears much more prominently on the second ad.
3. Less Text – the second ad had much less text and is easier to read.
4. Single Image – A single image might make the ad easier to process.
5. Simplicity and Flow – The second ad is much simpler and it flows simply from top to bottom. The “professional” ad is more complex and flows right to left and top to bottom.
6. Weird Psychology – Maybe that hand-drawn ad reminded us of the doodles we made we were 5 years old and a Proust-ian nostalgia swept over us and gosh darn it we just had to click!!

OK, so the last one isn’t all that likely but hey, anything’s possible. So what does this test tell us? It tells us that we can improve our CTR in one (or maybe many) of these ways. It’s giving us some clues about what hypothesis to test next but without those tests, the “why” around the increased CTR is not clear.

CTR is not the Same as Conversions

Another important thing worth pointing out is that there was no mention of conversions after the clicks. If I look at some of the possible reasons that the CTR might have been higher I could see that maybe some folks are clicking just to see what the heck this crazy ad is all about but aren’t really serious about taking any other action. While the test might have proven the second ad generated more clicks, it did not prove the second ad “worked” better from a business perspective.

Related posts:

1. If Your Message Works, Don’t Tinker With It
2. Startup Messaging: Should You Differentiate Against Your Competitors?
3. A New Marketing Framework

You care about analyst coverage because customers care. Customers care because vendors can’t purchase it.

The only reason marketers care what some industry analysts have to say is because some customers respect their opinion. The moment customers suspect that this opinion can be bought, they would stop paying for their advice. These markets where an analyst opinion really matters are often those where the decision is made by a purchase team that doesn’t have the time/skill/money/risk tolerance to perform a complete evaluation of every vendor in the market. They trust analysts to educate/advise them enough to quickly get the vendor list down to a more manageable size. It varies by market/geography/company size of course but if you are selling to a Fortune 500 IT buyer in North America, you may not get on a short list if Gartner doesn’t cover you (if you are selling to consumers, you probably should stop reading this right now).

You can’t buy love. But you can purchase a date.

So the entire business model of an analyst firm depends on customers trusting that the analysts are not biased for or against certain vendors. Vendors cannot purchase coverage in a report, nor inclusion on a Quadrant or Wave. Analysts do cover companies that don’t pay for their services. So does paying an analyst firm increase your chances of getting favourable coverage in their research. Heck yes it does! But it doesn’t guarantee they will write nice things about you. Purchasing a contract gives you their attention. It gives you the ability to interact with them regularly (the biggest mistake you can make is pay for the contract and not establish regular meetings with the analysts, more on this later). This leads to several things:

• A better understanding of how the analyst firm views the market
• An opportunity to educate the analysts about the value of your offering and your point of view on the market
• The opportunity to influence their thinking about how the market is evolving
• Advanced warning about upcoming research and the ability to respond to questions and surveys before the research is published
• The opportunity to introduce them to your customers, further illustrating your offering’s value and increasing your chances of coverage.
• The ability to establish the credibility of your company and your depth of knowledge of the space, increasing the credibility of your offering in the eyes of the analysts.
• The ability to establish relationships with the analysts (hey, they are people too and it never hurts if you all know and like each other).

So buying the contract is a bit like buying your love interest dinner at Le Bernardin instead offering to split the bill at McDonald’s. It won’t guarantee that you’ll fall in love but it will increase the odds that they’ll show up so you can make your case.

The often-ignored but equally important reason you want to work with analysts – to learn from them

But here’s the thing. Coverage isn’t the only reason you want to work with an analyst firm. It may not even be the main reason you want to work with them. You want to work with them because you can learn from them. They spend all day thinking about the markets you are in. They spend a significant amount of time talking to customers. They know what your competitors are up to. Who else in your market can give you this kind of perspective? How valuable this perspective is to your company depends on a lot of things but here are some things I’ve used analysts for:

1. Feedback on messaging and positioning – they know the terms the rest of the market is using and they know how customers express themselves. That puts them in a unique position to give you feedback on how you are expressing your value proposition and your terminology. They also have a firm grasp of what your competitors have and can help you understand what really differentiates you.
2. Competitive insight – we are all under non-disclosure when we talk to analysts so they can’t tell you anything that isn’t already in the public domain (well technically anyway). but it isn’t always easy to keep up with what the competitors are doing especially if you are in a crowded market. Part of the analyst’s job is to stay on top of who’s doing what in a market.
3. Customer insight – Analysts do a lot of customer briefings. I find myself asking questions like “Have you ever seen a company with this problem?” or “We think that customers using competitor X’s product tend to look like ABC. Would you agree?” You should never trust any one person’s opinion as the final word on a market but the insight you get from an analyst can help you understand where to look next.

Now don’t get me wrong – I have worked with analysts that I though had a spotty level of knowledge of their market, had obvious biases toward certain vendors and seemed to be incapable of constructive feedback. Every profession has a few that maybe should be doing something else with their lives. Fortunately for me that has been the exception rather than the rule.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you will have a much deeper understanding of the particular slice of the market that you play in than any analyst you will meet. They on the other hand will probably understand the broader market better than you do. You need to keep this in mind when you are filtering their feedback.

Two big cautions for startups!

1. All of the good stuff that you get from analysts only happens if you do the work. You have to establish a regular calendar of meetings with multiple analysts. You have to prepare for those meetings. You have to find customers that are willing to talk to them. You have to have interesting new news to talk about. You have to complain like heck if your analyst is a dud. If you simply sign the cheque and wait for the good stuff to come rolling in you are wasting your money. Without an analyst relations plan, it’s pointless.
2. Don’t forget your other marketing priorities. If you are a B2B startup working with analysts is going to be on a long list of things you have to do including lead generation, sales support, enabling your salesforce, building content for your site and campaigns, securing customer references, etc. etc. You have to weigh working with an analyst firm against the other things on your list and take your budget into account. If you only have $60K to spend on marketing, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone spend half of that on a Gartner contract. Even though I think analyst relations is very important for certain companies in certain markets, you need to be smart about it and make sure it makes sense for the value you will get.

Related posts:

1. Working with Analysts is a Pain (but you Should do it Anyway)
2. How to Build a More Targeted Startup Pitch
3. Your Company Can Ignore Social Media but You Can’t

Here’s my list of Do’s and Don’ts

Do This

1. Cultivate relationships before you need them – Did you ever have a friend that only called you when they wanted something? Don’t be that person. There’s generally a ton of runway pre-launch you can use to establish relationships with bloggers and journalists. Meeting face to face (at events, social gatherings, industry meetings, etc.) is always the best way but I’ve had good relationships that started out with me commenting a lot on their blogs, sharing their content, and linking to or blogging about their content on my company blogs. The goal is to get a better understanding of the person (what do they like/dislike, how can help them out, etc) at a stage when you aren’t asking for something.
2. Have something newsworthy to talk about – this isn’t just about having a great product, it’s about having a great story to tell that people will want to read about (and yes, great products make this easier). Why should people be excited about your news? How does it relate to other newsworthy things (market/buyer/cultural/economic trends for example) people are interested in? Most startups are great at tying their solutions to technology trends which works well for tech/startup publications. If you want more mainstream press your tie-in’s will need to be more mainstream. I talked to a startup recently that got good coverage tying their product news to the Occupy movement, and another that had a great story related to wedding planning that launched at the time of the royal wedding. You need to answer the question – why is your news interesting right now?
3. Pitch writers that are a good fit for your news – I’ve seen few examples where folks have been successful by blasting large lists with a generic pitch. Do your homework and understand what the writer covers, their likes and dislikes, whether or not they have written about other companies in similar markets and if so, what were the stories like. Build a personalized pitch that includes why you chose to pitch them specifically. If possible tailor your story angle for the publication or for them personally.
4. Make it as easy as possible – I like to have a media page that I can direct folks to where writers can get quick easy answers to basic questions (i.e. who/when/why was the company formed, who are the noteworthy employees/customers/partners/investors/advisors involved, what is the value the company delivers and to what markets) and get easy access to logos, screenshots, video, graphics etc. Write your press release so that it’s easy to copy sections from it to create a story (hard to believe but this happens more than you would think). Video and/or images (I seem to be the only person on the planet that’s sick of infographics) that compliment the story work well because they make it easy to create a visually interesting post.
5. Kiss butt (a little) – Just like regular folks, bloggers generally like working with people who are nice to them more than they like dealing with jackasses. In my opinion, putting a little sugar on it just helps move things along. Tell them you loved their most recent post, say thank-you when they cover you, send them a happy holidays note – this stuff seems simple but so few people do it that you will stand out when you do. Just be careful not to spread it on stalker-thick.

Try to Avoid This

1. Phoning people (or pestering them on social media) – What’s the definition of zero? The likelihood anyone will return your unsolicited phone call. I could have also said the probability that a blogger will pick up the phone when you cal,l but you get it. There’s a reason most folks don’t publish their phone numbers. Most publications have a preferred method of contact for pitches that they publish (usually a dedicated email address that is monitored) and going around it just annoys people. This goes for sending private messages to people over social media. Those channels are full of spam and using them when you don’t know the person makes you a spammer too.
2. Getting the names and/or genders wrong – My name isn’t Apple but I get a lot of email addressed to her. It’s hard to take people seriously after they have mistaken me for a fruit. Also confusing someone for a member of the opposite sex is just no way to start a relationship.

What am I missing?

Related posts:

1. Infographics: 5 Tips for Product Marketers
2. Politics in Startups vs. Big Companies
3. Startups: 10 Reasons Customers Won’t Switch to Your Product