Episode 93 - PR Questions I Get Asked the Most (Part 3)
Let’s cut right to the chase - as an early-stage founder, you have lots of questions.
Some of the biggest ones being: How will people find me, know me, like me, and trust me?
My quick and easy answer? Pitch yourself for press and media placements!
Not only is it a quick way to build authority and credibility, but having someone tell your story — especially in a major publication — is one of the best ways to launch your company with a bang.
You’ll get your name in front of thousands of ideal customers, save $1000s on expensive ads that require time and testing, and fighting the algorithm of Instagram in the hopes of catching a viral wave (in other words, you’re leaving your initial brand recognition and trustworthiness to the hands of an ever-changing platform.)
But I also know what you’re thinking. “How can I pitch myself for press when I haven’t yet launched my brand?”
It’s a common limiting belief that causes early-stage founders to push pause on their PR efforts, as if to say, “the right time will come when I have a certain amount of sales and customers.”
The way I see it, you have two resources when it comes to making your mark as a new company, business, and brand.
You pump $1000s of dollars into ad spend and thousands of hours into creating constant content, hopping on trend after trend with the hope that it’ll take off and you’ll go big.
You learn the $10,000/hour skill of pitching for press and let major publications do the work for you.
If option #2 has you nodding along, saying, “that’s exactly what I need,” then today’s podcast episode is for you.
I’m busting some major PR myths right open for early-stage founders in this episode. In fact, the questions I answer are submitted by pre-launched, early-stage, small business owners from our PR Starter Pack community.
So if getting your brand seen in Oprah, Buzzfeed, Good Morning America, and more is exactly how you’d like to launch your company…, but you just don’t know the steps to get there, hit download on this episode and pop in your headphones.
Because I’m answering important, must-know PR questions such as:
How many pitches should you spend per week to get traction?
Should you mention your competitor in your pitch for press?
How do you prepare for a powerful interview with major press and publications if you’re still in the startup phase?
What is a “founder’s pitch,” and how do you craft an attention-grabbing one?
Is it appropriate to send a press release on your crowdfunding campaign to press contacts?
Press release vs. pitch? Which one should you focus on if you haven’t yet launched your company?
If your press release is automatically picked up for distribution across outlets, is that considered a PR win?
How to sound credible without saying too much
Trust me, you’re not going to want to miss this one.
The CPR Pitching Method™ helped small business-owning entrepreneurs from PR Starter Pack members see themselves as a go-to expert with a point of view, instead of JUST a founder, seller, or consultant – a standout mindset that takes you far in the world of PR.
I hope you take notes throughout this episode and maybe even listen to it again so you can really nail down the three parts of the CPR Pitching Method™ and use it to your advantage!
So get ready to press send and get your message. And I can’t wait to see you featured in the headlines.
P.S. If you want your small business to go from invisible to visible, seen, and valued, register for my FREE PR Secrets Masterclass. Soon enough, your credibility and visibility will skyrocket. Register now at www.gloriachou.com/masterclass.
Resources Mentioned:
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community: Small Biz Pros: By Gloria Chou
Additional Resources:
Join the Small Biz PR Pros FB group
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Here’s a glance at this episode…
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00:00 - Introduction
Hey friends, I'm Gloria Chou, a small business PR expert, award-winning pitch writer, and your unofficial hype-woman. Nothing makes me happier than seeing people get the recognition they deserve. And that starts with feeling more confident to go bigger with your message. So on this podcast, I will share with you the untraditional yet proven strategies for PR, marketing, and creating more opportunities in your business. If you are ready to take control of your narrative and be your most unapologetic and confident self, you're in the right place. This is the Small Business PR Podcast.
00:33 Gloria Chou: Is there such a thing as sending out too many pitches to various outlets? This is kind of putting the carp before the horse. What you want to do is make sure that your pitch is really solid before you start sending it out. If you have a really good draft of the CPR framework, then you can just swap sentences out and refresh your headlines. Right? So the same just, just of it could work for spring, summer, fall, but you really, that's the hard work that we want to do first is get our draft of your pitch ready and get it super dialed into something relevant, that's specific.
01:01 Gloria Chou: That's again, peeling away the layer of it. And yes, three is a weirdness in the pitch where you include your competitor's brands to validate or highlight a trend. I don't think there's anything wrong to include a brand that's already known because it gives people a frame of reference of what it's similar to, but that is how you're doing something different. So again, I don't think it's wrong to include it. I don't think you're like saying something that's completely off or saying something terrible about them. You're just saying it's similar to this concept, but here is our unique spin. So.
01:30 Gloria Chou: I think this is fine. Again, I haven't read your pitch, so I don't, I don't know, but generally, I think it's fine. If your startup is still getting a pilot set up for your app, how do you prepare for an interview with the press or publication? I've done a lot of press releases for clients that's where they haven't launched, but it's in beta, right? So it's like, we've already started beta testing and we've seen great traction, and here are some interesting insights. And that's normal, right? Like you decide when your launch date is, it's, it's not up to them, right? So you can.
02:00 Gloria Chou: Always kind of making an art and not a science and say, we're beta testing, we've had great traction. And if you don't want to give them numbers, you can give them percentages, right? You can say, we've seen an X amount of increase or we're seeing interesting traction here. Sometimes numbers are not always what they want. I think what they want to see is what is an interesting nuance or insight into consumer behavior. And that's not always about numbers. So there is definite.
02:22 Gloria Chou: So there is a way to tell them something that's insight, that's not numbers. What are a few examples of how to begin a founder's pitch? So in the PR starter pack, we do have so many examples of various things for service-based entrepreneurs. I think it depends on your story and the kind of your value add. I probably wouldn't lead with just your founder's pitch. I would lead with, did you do a survey or is there something you have found that is interesting and different from what other people are saying, right?
02:50 Gloria Chou: Do you have survey results or something that says that you're taking a contrarian point of view, right? Maybe something like everyone in the industry says to do this, but I've found that this works better, right? Maybe it's tying it to something happening in the news with policy or what a Fortune 500 company is doing. And you're kind of adding your little unique spin. So again, I don't think it's enough to just always just be about your own story. It's kind of like, what are some of the things that you're seeing? And if you can position yourself and think about
03:21 Gloria Chou: How you are just a conduit of information and the way that you're pitching is saying, hey, it's not me telling you this, it's what all these people are saying, right? It's what all these people are saying and I'm just giving you the information from my customers, from my audience. So that is really what makes you valuable as a resource for the journalist. Is it appropriate to send a press release on your crowdfunding campaign to press contacts? Should they be in business publications or customer-focused industry publications?
03:50 Gloria Chou: So I have a whole training on the press release. I also have two episodes on my podcast about press releases. So for me, the best way to utilize a press release is to say that you're the first or only one to do something. And you can do that in conjunction with the fact that you've raised, right? So if you look at all the press releases I've written, you can go to GloriaChalpear.com. I've written stuff for FinTech, AI, NFTs, and books.
04:16 Gloria Chou: And you don't have to be the first to do X, Y, and Z, but you might be the first to do X, Y, and Z in your city or in this way, right? And then you can couple that with the crowdfunding campaign to be like, hey, we're the first to do X, Y, and Z, and we've launched and we announced that we raised, right? So this is one that I just wrote recently. It's an NFT-like social app. And I do this on my VIP day, by the way, it's a six-hour writing day. So we talk about how it works, why it's different.
04:44 Gloria Chou: It's talking that it's announcing, right, that it's launched in NFT, but like why? To empower users to own their data. And then the sub-headline talks about the how. So the headline is a what, and the sub-headline is a how. So talk about how you are the first to do something. I wouldn't do a press release announcement just to say that you've launched your crowdfunding campaign because it's not cheap to release a press release, right? So if you can couple two or three different things in there, that would be great.
05:14 Gloria Chou: If you have any questions on that, you can, you can set up a call with me to talk about your press release. I do it on a six-hour-long VIP day for startups. It's glory chopper.com slash VIP press release versus pitch, which one to focus on for my not yet launched company. Should I send out a pitch before the website's launch or better to wait? I think I think it depends. I always love doing press releases, especially if you're launching something because once it's launched, like you can't go back and say, Hey, we've launched. Right.
05:43 Gloria Chou: So it's a decision that you have to make. So for a lot of people who are launching something, like first thing of all, I just worked with Jamie on a press release. Like you want it to be out on the internet. You want it to be searchable. You want it to be like an index on Google. And that's why I say do a press release first. And what I would do is do the press release. But before you send out the press release, use it as a little bait and dangle it in front of the journalists and say,
06:13 Gloria Chou: Two weeks because of X, Y, and Z. I, you know, you're my top choice outlet to like to release this with. And since you cover children's gifts and tech, let me know if you want me to send over the press release. So do you see how that has like, it's like a double enforcement? It's like saying, hey, we're launching something. And then it's saying, if you wanna see it, like, let me know, right? So you're giving them a time-sensitive thing.
06:39 Gloria Chou: You're not saying like, hey, we're doing this. Like, hopefully, you'll cover it. It's like, we're going live with this announcement, regardless of whether or not you cover us. But because you have a history of covering this, and this is pretty neat, I'd love to share with you the draft of the press release before it goes live. So that way you get both the benefit of doing the press release, which is gonna go live anyways, but then also using that as a way to start conversations with journalists. So that's why it's so great to do a press release because you get to check all those buckets. You have something to say.
07:07 Gloria Chou: You have a way to contact them and you have something that goes out onto the internet. If you put out a press release and it automatically picked up for distribution across outlets, do you consider that a PR win? Okay, so, well, I think that anything that brings you traffic and visibility, and backlinks is a win. But I also think that what you can do is that you can now say that it's been picked up by X, Y, and Z outlets and you can put that in your pitch going forward.
07:33 Gloria Chou: You can put that in your slide decks going forward, if you're meeting with investors or VIP people, or even just on your press page, right? So sorry, this loud in Brooklyn. If we're going to do something that's like a smart activity, I would rather do that than like post on Instagram. That's not searchable. So I think I do think it is a win. I think it, yeah, I think it is a win. And you can use that when for your future follow-up pitches as well. So that's just something to think about. So another thing is I'm struggling with the credibility portion of
08:04 Gloria Chou: I don't want it to be long or sound like a biography. So definitely that's kind of the beginner part that everyone struggles with, right? When you start, you're struggling with fitting everything into a pitch, right? I think you've heard me say this all the time, which is it takes more skill and expertise to hone in on a pitch and write in shorter sentences.
08:24 Gloria Chou: Right? The hallmark of someone who's just beginning, this journey is writing a long pitch. And that's okay. We all start there, right? I started there as well. Dr. Norr started there, right? Marcia started there. And as you refine your pitch and as you get even better at what is the best first two sentences, what is the most relevant thing, whether it's seasonal, whether it's trending news, whether it's commenting on a Fortune 500 coming, whatever that is, you're going to be able to just realize everything else is fluff and you can just get rid of the other.
08:51 Gloria Chou: Kind of like sentences that don't matter much. If you go into the portal, you'll be able to see how I write pitches. I don't write, hi, how are you? I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Well, but like, no, like the first two sentences, what is going on with the world? What are people looking at? What's happening in the news? What season are we in? Do you have any data? So that's really what I mean by, you know, just don't even worry about the credibility part. That is in the last portion. And again, credibility is more than just confidence. Like, do you have the confidence to send this pitch? That is all it is.
09:21 Gloria Chou: So that's really what I mean. So again, having a long pitch, everyone starts there. That's okay. As you go through the training and the portal, and attend these calls, you'll be able to see how I write pitches. You have so many people here who have also done the work and the more you kind of pick away at it and the more concise it is, the more you've done the amazing work, which is the skill of.
09:42 Gloria Chou: Knowing how to communicate and that's, it's a process, but it's so worth it, it's going to help you with your Instagram captions, captions. It's going to help you with your newsletter. It's going to help you with your web page, right? It's just, it's all copy. So that's really why I say it's, it's really like some of the most, the most important work that you can do. 13, is there a specific strategy one would use to draw attention to a crowdfunding campaign? Well, I would say that PR helps. I've worked with a lot of crowdfunding entrepreneurs like Tanisha, who is the first person that I interview on my podcast. Well.
10:11 Gloria Chou: In episode number three, she was on fund women and trying to crowdfund. And she's since pivoted and she's not doing that business anymore. She's still getting the traffic and SEO, right? Because her whole mission is to help people thrive and take care of their wellness and that hasn't changed. She just happens to be doing it differently. So, you know, in terms of a crowdfunding campaign, um, I'm not a crowdfunding expert, I'm not a money raising expert. So there might be different ways that you can do your slides, but I think that the CPR method can apply all year round because it's about.
10:41 Gloria Chou: How can you be relevant and what is your point of view? Right? And how can you pitch that credibly with confidence? So that's a structure that people have used to, you know, get on South by Southwest, to speak at a panel, to land a partnership. I mean, Dr. Greta has used it to get a paid partnership, paid consulting, whatever it is, right?
10:59- Outro
Hey, small business hero, did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, The New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you're not yet launched or if you don't have any connection?
That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR secrets masterclass where I revealed the exact methods, thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought-after industry expert. Now, if you want to land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig, or just reach out to that very intimidating editor, this class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now at GloriachouPR.com.
That's Gloria Chou, C-H-O-U-P-R.com slash Masterclass. So you can get featured in 30 days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free, so get in there and let's get you featured.