DTC 116: Bad, worthless PR to avoid

Public relation (PR) has been a challenging marketing channel. It's meant to give authority and recognition, but immensely hard to get. This has created opportunity for bad PR players. What are these?

👋 Hola! Welcome back to Out of Singapore. By now you know that I am building businesses out of Singapore. The goal is to create a few large businesses in next five years. Let’s see where I reach. For now, I have a big news!

We crossed the SGD 100,000 monthly revenue milestone in May. 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳. I had been chasing this milestone since January. It felt quite dramatic and satisfying since our DTC channel helped reach the mark. I will write about this soon! Excited 😄

Today, let’s talk about public relations, with focus on the news media. We will cover -

1. Basics - What is PR?

2. How PR matter for DTC brands?

3. Problems with PR?

4. How do I execute PR?

Let’s get started!

#1 What is Public Relations?

ChatGPT says - “PR aims to build and maintain a positive image, enhance reputation, and foster good relationships with the target audience, which can include customers, investors, media, and the general public”. I would disagree with “positive and enhance” keywords. PR helps create a specific narrative - positive, negative or neutral - with the target audience.

Political parties and governments across the world are the masters of PR. All possible PR channels are most pronounced before a national or state elections.

ChatGPT also gave an apt list of PR channels -

Media Relations: Build and maintain relationships with journalists and media outlets to secure positive coverage.

Press Releases: Write and distribute official statements to the media to announce news or updates.

Event Management: Organize and promote events to engage with the public and media.

Crisis Management: Handle negative publicity and mitigating the impact of any adverse events.

Social Media Management: Use social media platforms to interact with the audience, create and manage brand’s online presence.

Content Creation: Produce content such as articles, blog posts, videos, and newsletters to convey key messages.

Reputation Management: Monitoring public perception and working to maintain a positive image.

I write from the POV of new and growing consumer brands. In this respect, the most important PR channels are ( in order of priority) -

1. Content creation Story creation - Stories to share with your audience. Stories that can publishers and consumers can share. Building relationship with customers is a gradual process and involve several stories from different sources.

2. Press release - News about founder, brand and products in news media.

3. Online publications - ChatGPT misses this (or maybe it will classify as SEO). One example is blogs like “Top 10 skin supplements” and “top 5 NMN supplements”. Others would mentions or product comparison on high authority and traffic niche website like Healthline. Niche online publications have become main PR drivers for consumer brands.

4. Events - Pop up events, and not events with media. Goal as a brand is to connect with customers.

5. Social media - This a channel to share stories and news about the brand. It could be our own social media account or influencers.

Note that digital channels work best for digital brands while physical stores have to invest a lot on in-person PR events.

#2 Why PR matters for brands?

Here are some quick reasons

1. It builds presence and authority. It gives the existing customers reason to be proud of their purchase and buy again. It gives reason for new customers to make their first purchase and try the brand.

2. It drives traffic to the store. Stories drive consumers to check the products and brand. They will also search about the brand to find more. In essence, it improves overall online presence of the brand.

3. It improves a brand’s authority with Google. This will result in better search rankings. Better search ranking improve reputation and drives traffic.

4. It improves sales. Some articles are hugely profitable. Good story and placement in big news publications can drive tens of thousands of revenue. This is easy to track with UTM links.

5. It helps reach new audience. You can only spend so much on Facebook Ads to get new customers. PR allows to reach multiple audience with specific stories. Imagine publishing in New York Times, Straits Times and Vogue. Each have their unique audience. It is a great way to train Facebook Ads. 😉

So simple, right? Good thing about PR in news media and online blogs is that they stay relevant for few years. It will give returns for several months.

Have a look at these two “as seen on” snippets from two brands - Xandro Lab and Lemme Supplements. Next answer the question later.

Xandro lab’s media features

Lemme supplements media feature

#3 What’s the problem with PR then?

PR seems all good until you realise the problems with it. Here are some -

1. It is highly competitive. Publications have limited space to publish new articles. Articles have to be curated for their audience. Hence publishers won’t publish anything given to them. Either the story has to be great or the money paid has to be a lot.

2. It is expensive - Imagine paying USD 10,000 for one article in one publication. Achieving scale on PR is almost impossible for a new brand (unless you are backed by a celebrity or large brand). Shark Tank is a short cut that new brands use to get PR. Again, not cheap. Paying for PR on monthly basis is severely restricted due to cost.

3. Not performance-led - Publishers don’t care if you get returns on your investment. They stand for providing impressions. Most of the times they fail to deliver impressions as well. Most of the news media is not metric driven and won’t promise even impression target.

4. Manual and relationship based - The reason digital media is scaling and becoming everyone’s favourite is this. Traditional news media is difficult to be featured in, even more difficult is to catch hold of their journalists and convince them to feature us. If you haven’t been in the industry for long, it is difficult to break in.

What happens due to all of these factors? The rick keeps getting rich. In the sense, large brands with established media presence continue getting most media mentions. New brands struggle to break in.

#4 PR for startup consumer brands

PR isn’t a single day job. It has to be done consistently over months to become meaningful.

1. Do not use any PR distribution service such as this. All of these PR distribution services are crap and waste your money.

2. Use performance driven PR platforms like Linkby. While our results have been abysmal but we only paid for the performance delivered. I expect this to scale as we continue working with them and a few specific publishers.

3. Avoid PR agencies at this stage. Like media mentions, they are expensive and don’t yield much result. They are also not performance driven. So if they waste your money, you cannot complain.

4. Leverage social media. This is going to be the best bet. Start with nano and micro creators. Increase the creator profile as you grow. Maybe use large creators a few times.

5. Target and focus. Find 1-2 relevant publications in your niche and publish articles every few weeks or months. Leverage different forms of articles - brand story, product comparison, new launches and collaborations. The best example of this is Inkey List’s partnership with The Allure. Sometimes it feels they are one single company. Allure builds the hype for Inkey List and then other publications follow suite.

Beyond this, regularly scout for journalists and influential personalities in the specific niche. If they like you, the brand and the products, they will speak about you. Possibly you will get featured. I haven’t been able to do this yet.

That’s PR in a nutshell. Please write to me about things I might have missed.

In another edition, I will focus on only performance driven media coverage (mostly Linkby and similar solutions).

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Thank you for reading again! Means a lot! Please like and share 😍

Today has been late. I started writing at 6. Almost felt like I won’t be able to write today’s edition. Fortunately I have made it to the end.

Will I get to meet Jisoo? 🥹

It’s cuteness overload with Jisoo. Cures all the stress of life.

Hope Jisoo helped you today. Have a great week ahead! Cheers!