This video focuses on how to gain traction for a business, emphasizing controlling the press by researching and directly engaging with reporters, and reaching out to users for feedback in the early stages.
What this video covers
The first thing that you want to do is, you want to control the press to a certain degree. You want to do your research, you want to know which reporters are covering your segment, which ones could be interested in covering your business, and getting those reporters to dive deeper into what your business does, what are some of the ins and outs of it.
The way to do this, and the big mistake that I always see founders making, is that they hire a PR agency, and they delegate to others to do this. Now, we live in a world where everything is transparent. You can see who is excited about your specific segment as a reporter, and there is no reason why you can not reach out and build that relationship via Twitter, via LinkedIn, or via other mechanisms.
Then, you want to go where your users are. Especially during the early days, you want to make sure that you’re getting as much feedback, as much quantitative and qualitative analysis on what they think about your service and what they think about your product.
The next is invite testers, people that are going to be early adopters, like people that have an interest in this. They may be very influential, and by them using it for free, they would tell their friends, maybe they have a large following. So, things like that where you’re building a network of people that are using the product and creating that nice word-of-mouth that ultimately is going to give you momentum. Sometimes, giving it for free to certain people could end up being a really nice advantage to kick it into high gear when it comes to progress.
Let’s face it. Places like LinkedIn, where you’ve worked so hard at developing a network – all these people that you’ve made over the years, maybe there’s a certain keyword that you can use on the search of LinkedIn.
Then, there are going to be certain people that are going to pop up that can make the right introduction to either the right customer or to the right company for a business-development deal.
Then, you want to track the data. There are great tools like Google Analytics, which is free, or Kissmetrics for tracking how people are interacting with your own platform because having access to that data is going to help you understand what some of those channels are that you’re using to onboard people that are working, and what are the other channels that are not working.
So, what you want to do is, you want to see what those challenges are that are giving you the absolute best return and double down on those, whether it’s an advertising channel, whether it’s a content channel, marketing; on the communications side, PR.
Whatever that is, you really want to know which ones of those not only are bringing people in, but also people that are engaged with your product and engaged with your service because, at the end of the day, you may have a graph of people that are coming in, but then, eventually, that may go to zero.
You want to have the graph that goes up, but then also, the graph inside of that, which doesn’t go to zero, but the people that you are going to be able to maintain – those people that are going to be engaged and that contribute to a positive retention of your customer.
