PR Campaign Examples For Startups to Inspire You in 2023

 Raising awareness of your startup can seem like a long, uphill climb with no end in sight. Especially when traditional marketing efforts don’t have the same pull as they used to. Utilizing a strong PR campaign can help resolve these issues by putting a positive spin on your brand and presenting yourself as a solution for your target audience’s problems.

PressKitHero is always concerned about ensuring startups get the coverage they deserve with their own media kit. So, in this article, we’ll take you through how you can benefit from a well-planned PR campaign as a startup and share a few examples of companies that did it right. 

What is a PR Campaign?

A PR campaign is often confused with a marketing campaign. A marketing campaign intends to drive sales and increase revenue. In contrast, a public relations campaign focuses on creating a positive brand image. It’s important to note that PR campaigns don’t directly affect sales. 

Your PR campaign should have specific goals from the onset that you wish to achieve. For example, gaining attention for a new product, bringing attention to a cause your business is part of, or simply building your brand’s public persona. Unlike a marketing campaign, a PR campaign has a specific time frame in place to cater to a particular goal.

How Can a PR Campaign Benefit Your Startup?

PR helps you stand out from the competition

It can be difficult for a startup to stand out in a competitive marketplace. The best way to start is with a great PR campaign that puts you on the radar of your target audience and keeps you there. Don’t underestimate the power of your unique story and demonstrate how it sets you apart from your competitors.

Increase your brand credibility

As the content you put out in PR is very close to your brand’s identity, it will be more authentic and informative. With a structured PR campaign, you can ensure an element of control over the media's stories on your brand. With this in mind, you should maintain high levels of authenticity, as it will be much easier to establish credibility with your audience. 

Boost your SEO

 According to BrightEdge, over 64% of website visitors come from organic search, so SEO is something positive to consider for your PR campaigns. With solid SEO PR campaigns, you get relevant mentions and backlinks from online platforms that believe your story is worth telling, and this helps Google notice you.  As your campaigns spread to high-authority publications, such as Forbes for example, the SEO quality of your website can significantly improve. 

Increased opportunity

Even as a startup or small business, if you execute your PR campaigns well, you can be featured on other websites, blogs, social media platforms, podcasts, and more. Such opportunities can help you build your business as an authority in your niche. With marketing campaigns, you don’t get the same organic opportunities.

Things to Consider When Creating Your Startup PR Campaign

  1. ### Determine your PR campaign goals, KPIs, and channels

Goals

Your goals determine exactly what you want to achieve, so make sure they’re SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). If you have this controlled framework, you can ensure you meet your goals. 

KPIs

Your KPIs (key performance indicators) should be chosen according to your goals so that you can measure them effectively. After your first PR campaign, you can use metrics like social media reach and engagement, web traffic, and any brand mentions, including their sentiment, to determine how good your campaign was.  

Channels

When choosing your channels, think about if you want to collaborate with influencers, create a press release, or host an event. You can start with digital channels as a startup because they guarantee a wider reach. Digital channels include other websites, social media, blogs, guest posts, and earned media. You can determine your channels by focusing on your target audience’s preferences. 

  1. ### Select your target audience

Having a target audience helps you develop your message in a structured and meaningful way, ensuring your campaign has an impact and nets you maximum results. If you’re targeting everyone, you’re essentially targeting no one. 

Here are some details you can look at to define your audience:

  1. ### Develop a strong message that resonates with your audience

Once you’ve identified your target audience and what they care about, developing a message that resonates with your audience will be simple. Connect your audience's interests with your message so they can engage with what you have to say and decide that you’re the solution they’ve been looking for. 

  1. ### Create a strong press kit

So what’s unique about a press kit? A press kit is an information package that details every newsworthy aspect of your company and your unique backstory to share with journalists and media publications. With a solid press kit, you can inform many sources at once, control your brand’s narrative, and promote your company’s identity and achievements correctly. 

Fortunately, PressKitHero’s press kit builder can help you achieve this. Our no-code builder allows you to tell your brand’s story the way you see fit and impress journalists with your efficiency as a small business. Feel free to view our demo press kit to see what you can achieve. 

PR Campaign Examples to Inspire You as a Startup

Here are some successful startup PR campaign examples from which you can gain inspiration when making yours. 

#1: Womply

Womply is a software service for reputation management catered to small businesses. Early on, the company realized that one of the biggest PR hurdles for a startup is getting journalists and industry influencers to notice that your company is worth talking about. The company decided to start with PR instead of advertising to help them attain that initial attention and maintain relevance online.

In a recent campaign, Womply used the data that powers their software to develop a useful analysis report of the correlations between small businesses’ revenue and their online review profiles. They then published that report on their website before issuing a press release and sending out their small internal team to pitch the report to regional, national, and industry outlets in ordered phases over six months. 

As a growth-stage startup with no PR agency, this is what they achieved with that campaign:

The takeaway

#2: GreenPal

GreenPal is a lawn care service provider that has achieved good press coverage because of its community-focused PR ideas. The company emphasized the importance of growth hacking as a startup and decided to merge this with their PR strategy. GreenPal’s first idea was to find a repeatable way to leverage the activity of their lawn mowing platform to get free PR and exposure for their marketplace.

The GreenPal team started small and implemented a program to connect with their local community in Nashville, Tennessee. They asked the lawn care professionals that use their platform to submit households for free lawnmowing, usually as the owners of those households were going through a tough financial or personal time. Now they have a monthly program where they go and mow a stranger's lawn. 

These people mainly include single mothers but could also be those facing situations like foreclosure.

With this heartfelt campaign, GreenPal has secured local media coverage in every market they operate in and have achieved its goal of gaining consistent local earned media coverage.

The takeaway

#3: The Outfit

The Outfit is an e-commerce fashion tech startup that’s based in Romania. Its goal is to offer a new shopping experience using a combination of stylists and data. Users complete a style profile online and are assigned a personal shopper who selects their items. Customers only pay for what they keep and return what they don’t. 

To gain more attention, they targeted their PR campaign to young women who struggle to decide what to wear. Additionally, they launched their campaign through social media to keep it in tune with the youth.

The Outfit’s social media campaigns utilized influencers with varying audiences but were all looking for the same solution. What set their social media PR campaign apart is that every platform (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) had different types of content to cater to the users of that platform.

The takeaway

#4: Soleadify

Soleadify is a startup that provides business data enrichment with coverage of small and mid-sized businesses, and in-depth insights based on real-time updates. 

Because their company is data-based, they decided on an educational LinkedIn campaign that includes a data dictionary to answer any business questions, such as “What is data enrichment?” Soleadify also launched a podcast to support their LinkedIn campaign so that they could gain more coverage in their industry.

What helps their campaign is that their content is valuable for their target audience, which is early entrepreneurs, and it supports the product they offer. 

The takeaway

Wrapping Up

As we’ve seen, the best startup PR campaigns need you to think outside of the box while staying true to your brand. Your inbound strategies are crucial to maintaining the heat you get from your campaigns. Remember, as a startup, you need to treat your first customers or subscribers like VIPs so that you can set your business, as well as your clients, up for success in the long run. 

You can also treat the media like VIPs by providing them with your unique and well-organized press kit you created with PressKitHero’s builder. You can first view our demo press kit and sign up for free so you don’t miss out.