Why Your Funding Announcement Needs to Be Supported by Year-Round PR
It’s the morning after your company announced its latest funding round. After all of your team’s hard work, you’re thrilled to see multiple outlets picking up the big news. You proudly forward these links to colleagues, investors, clients, and friends. You hit send on one last email and sit back, feeling rightfully accomplished.
Then a new thought creeps into your mind: what next?
Funding announcements are an essential part of growth communications for any early-stage business… but their impact is limited if treated as a one-off campaign. Here are three reasons your announcement needs to be supported by a year-round PR and marketing strategy.
1. You need to take advantage of the momentum
You’ve earned features in trade publications, mentions in national outlets, and buzz across LinkedIn and Twitter. This may be the first time your company has generated significant media interest. So why the heck would you stop now?
Think of the announcement as a powerful but brief gust of wind. Without a sail—or, in this analogy, an integrated comms strategy—you have no way to harness the momentum. Having a strategy in place and ready to implement allows you to make the most of the moment.
Your strategy should tie together a number of key PR and marketing efforts, including…
- Thought leadership and executive visibility: Bylines, blog posts, podcast appearances, and speaking engagements demonstrate that your company and its leaders are driving industry innovation.
- Customer and partner success storytelling: Nothing demonstrates the value offered by your brand better than stories about the success of the people and organizations you help.
- Media relations: The better you know the journalists and publishers in your industry—and the better they know you—the more successful you’ll be in getting your story out there. This requires careful and consistent outreach to the right people.
- Amplification: The work doesn’t stop when you’ve secured that coveted feature story. Now you want to get that credibility asset in front of your target audience using owned channels like social media, email, a company blog, etc.
Remember, the wind is at your back. So hoist the sail and get moving!
2. You need to align effort with outcomes
All of that media coverage is great, but ask yourself this: how is it helping you achieve your core business outcomes?
Having a communications strategy in place at the time of your announcement ensures that your PR and marketing efforts are aligned with core business goals. It makes sure all of your team’s hard work is moving you towards the place you want to be. There’s no point harnessing the wind if you’re not sailing in the right direction.
By business outcomes, I mean those core goals that define success for your company over the long term. Remember, you’re not doing PR for the sake of PR. Coverage is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Building investor support ahead of your next round is an outcome; earning coverage from a top industry publisher is a means to accomplish that outcome.
At N6A, our Outcomes Relations model begins with our clients selecting one or more outcomes from a list of six common categories.
Your business is almost certainly focused on several—if not most—of these outcomes. The thing is, you can’t expect to accomplish them with a single campaign. These are big, important goals that require a consistent, year-round PR and marketing effort.
3. You need to maintain visibility from your target audience
Brands who have great reputations seem to have a never-ending presence in the media. From feature stories to executive interviews to viral social posts and videos, they’re everywhere all the time. But that kind of media saturation doesn’t happen overnight.
These businesses maintain consistent media visibility through a steady drumbeat of outreach, content creation, and amplification.
Look at this from the perspective of your target audience. Let’s say that’s an exec at a potential investment firm who’s had their interest piqued by the coverage of your funding announcement. Over the next six to 12 months, that exec keeps coming across your business in social media posts, media features, executive interviews, award nominations, and blog posts. How much more likely are they to back your funding round when you come calling?
On the other hand, a burst of coverage followed by silence can make your funding round look like a flash in the pan.
Business growth boils down to consistent execution on the tactical level. Success is defined not only by big leaps, but by careful, methodical steps. By preparing a communications strategy to support your funding announcement, you’ll be sure to maximize the impact of your big news over the long term.
Is your comms plan optimized for long-term success? Let’s talk.