What happened to the media and whether it should be placed in startups

What do most young startups care about today? - Investments, startup incubators, smoothies and, of course, PR. There are also various start-ups where IT industry gurus share secrets copied from Google. Although this is also about smoothies. And these are your online stores, suppliers and the entire small business - for wimps.



And so, they tasted the smoothies, read about Silicon Valley, watched the interview with Sam Altman, meditated, collected money ... well, first, let's take up public relations. True, it is necessary to bring the product to mind, and there are no sales. Do not worry, there will be PR - there will be sales. Maybe.

Offline edition

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And to whom to give an interview? Where would the publication be placed? If we take the level of our innovativeness, creativity and ambitiousness of the team, then if we promote in offline editions, then only in the top and most quoted federal newspapers.



But how to check the effectiveness of such a publication? - What for? The main thing is that you can then put a beautiful logo in the “Write about us” section. The newspaper wrote about us - as solid as! And think about sales later.



Although we initially understood this ourselves, but for the full “kit” we still placed our articles in several editions. True, it cost us nothing except the time spent on preparing the material. So, the personal experience of posting information about one of our startups - the freelance platform for language professionals 2Polyglot.com - showed almost zero results in glossy magazines. After the issue of several printed journals, the growth rate of the main indicators of the online resource has not changed at all. And why would he change if the reader of the paper version, after seeing information about the new platform, does not begin to google the name 2Polyglot on his smartphone. People are essentially lazy, all the more so if they are not fully targeted. And who now reads offline editions at all? Nowadays even electronic books are being read less and less often, and there’s no reason to talk about gloss. Even electronic longrids are no longer popular. It is difficult to say what it is connected with, perhaps with an overabundance of available information, which is why our brain follows the path of least resistance, filtering out too much, and maybe we are just getting dull.



That is, even the radio has overtaken the print editions! Yes, it turns out that everything is so bad! Print media is dying out like dinosaurs or press releases. Although they themselves do not believe it. By the way, the same applies to offline advertising on billboards, etc.



But startups are people who always go against the system. They are not looking for easy ways. They need to come up with an innovative bike, riding backwards with a fingerprint scanner and a built-in front camera that will take a selfie and send it to Instagram.

Online media

Advanced startups are quite logical to believe that you first need to strive to get into the online editions, which are a much effective tool ... SEO, not PR, as they might have thought. Absolutely all the media can be useful to a startup only as part of raising brand awareness, which a startup does not have at all, because it is because a startup because so far very few people know about it. And what does a startup need for rapid development? - Oh, just do not fool your head again with your investments. Sales, gentlemen, pro-da-ji. The brand is gained through sales, not PR. PR is only a catalyst, but sales are always primary. It is terrible to imagine how much paid publications on resources cost, where practically no one will buy anything from you. What is better read in the media? - Who is the money nafandreyzil, as well as success stories from zero to a million. These are the most popular topics. Here you can even guess who reads them. Potential buyers of your innovative salt table lamps? - I doubt it. Rather, even competitors. A lamp obviously need to sell elsewhere.



Of course, we are talking about paid publications. If you can stay for free, then no one will refuse, because an extra reference will not hurt.

Media startup

This category refers to the online media in general, but deserves special attention. "How? About you have not written in Zuckerberg? - Losers!". Transitions, of course, with such resources - mad. But a high attendance of a resource is an indicator that a SEO can only use in a report to a boss on salary, if it’s really about a startup, and not a blog, where advertising is the main source of income. But sales from these transitions - the cat wept. Placed article in a media startup has become akin to a status accessory: it practically does not perform any functions, but it increases the number of Ponts. If the primary goal is to increase sales, then the effort expended in the form of time and manpower or money is absolutely not worth such a PR. Well, if you have sales and so on top, and every mistress has a car, then to increase your status you just need to order a paid publication with a large “Advertising” icon in one of the top resources so people can see that it’s not reading worth it.



Placed in the top media, whether online or in print, is up to you, of course. Just remember that it takes a lot of resources: in time or money. If you have a startup that does not yet have enough organic traffic and sales that would allow you to score on the frail nature of sales activities to generate sales, then concentrate on the sales themselves, and not on public relations for the sake of increasing brand awareness, which you have not.