When all PR, really is good PR
In his eighth article, Mark shares a 2016 experience – when he was overjoyed to be on the front page of the NYT, despite their choice of headline image.
“Why is there a picture of you coming out of the men’s room on the front page of The New York Times?”
This heart-warming question came from my brother Bob, when in 2016 I was elated to have Nexient on the front page of the nation’s second largest newspaper. But I guess you can always trust a sibling to bring you back down to earth.
At the time, Nexient was still a company that most people had never heard of. We were investing a lot in our marketing and communications with our primary objectives always being to raise awareness and build our brand. This included bringing in a PR agency to help us create content and grab the attention of leading media platforms. As a small firm trying to put yourselves on the map, you dream about getting a large, national brand like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to highlight your company. The reality is far less glamorous of course. You can usually get placements on lesser known platforms that focus on your industry, or on specialist podcasts and blogs. These are a great way to build your brand, and are often channels where you can gain visibility with in-house created content, without the need for specialist (and pricey) PR support. However with subscribers for The New York Times sitting at over ten million, our PR investment in this instance paid off. Our visibility had just gone stratospheric.
There’s an art to finding a newsworthy story that journalists for leading sites will want to tell:
It should be a current and compelling societal trend that has not yet been told;
It should be something that your company is a great example of, but with other examples to substantiate the trend;
It has to be attention grabbing. Reporters are constantly being pitched stories so it has to be something that excites them (and their audience).
We had been working with an agency called Firebrand, to craft Nexient’s story in an attempt to get inches in leading publications. With Firebrand’s help we managed to differentiate the company and get spots on a number of platforms. We were beginning to get our story out. The story we were really keen to tell was around moving from engineering outsourcing to product development outsourcing. We later called this the journey from project to product for enterprise IT and felt it was something we could really own. Bigger IT suppliers were providing project-based budget friendly and risk averse solutions through developers implementing products with little thought to their clients' diverse needs. Startups (like us) were taking a more product development view - building delightful user experiences tailored to each client’s specific requirements. It was a story that got us excited but we realized for broadsheet readers, probably not so much. It simply wasn't an interesting enough trend.
So we continued looking for a big story, spending a lot of time trying to find one that was a national trend, that we were a good example of, and also that gave us a chance to get at least part of our core story out. We finally landed on the idea that we were countering a massive trend by setting up an outsourcing company that had all of its employees in the United States. This story really flowed into the national political discussion at the time. One of the key issues facing the country (and central to the national elections) was how many manufacturing jobs had moved outside the US. While the storyline usually highlighted factory and goods manufacturing jobs, the same trend was happening in software for large enterprises and was an equally difficult issue facing the country.
In the IT sector, the trend broadly started in 2000 with most Fortune 500 companies starting to move more and more IT projects offshore. In 2000, there were more than 40 IT workers in the US for every one in India. By 2015, there were fewer than one in the US for every one in India. Our whole company was in the outsourcing industry with 100% US based employees. This was counter to the landscape and enough to get a story going. We had been positioning ourselves as the leaders of change and through some connections and our agency, we were able to talk with a reporter who was considering a story on this trend.
Searching for the right hook, caught us a big break
Once we did the interview, it became clear that we could have a prominent place in the article. Although you can never be sure what a story will say until it is posted, we were encouraged by the fact that the NYT had asked to send a photographer out to take some pictures of me. We were in the midst of building a new office and all agreed it would make a good backdrop for photos. It can be difficult to capture interesting shots of software outsourcing - they’re mostly of people looking at their computers.
We spent close to an hour taking a wide variety of photos so I was confident they’d pull a good one from the shoot. To this day I’m still not sure why they selected one of me coming out of an unfinished closet (it wasn’t actually a bathroom despite my brother’s interpretation).
When the article published, it was on the front page of the print edition above the fold. We were the first company they highlighted. They even used a quote from one of our clients. The client was actually my previous employer who I’d been trying to lure for several years. I was delighted they also got a mention after making the move to us.
The article also covered many of our US competitors, but our placement couldn’t have been better. I’d appeared in The New York Times with other companies before, but buried in one of the sections and in a small reference late in the article. The fact that we were the first company mentioned, they’d quoted our customer, they’d put a picture in, and it was all on the front page was really crazy.
The impact of the article was significant. We started to get a number of inquiries on our website and landed at least a couple of new clients from the story. We also were able to put the article on our website and refer to it in company presentations. It provided instant validation for our small company to any large potential clients looking to see if we were credible - even if it did look like I was just leaving the bathroom.
Aim high
If you’re looking to increase your visibility through mainstream PR then dream big. It’ll make the investment worthwhile in the long run. This is what I learned from my experience:
Find a platform with a huge number of subscribers or followers. Figure out what they are looking for and invest the time to find a way to get them to cover your company.
Don’t be afraid to deviate from your core story when looking for a lead. The story we really wanted to tell was Nexient’s ability to help large enterprises move from a project to a product mindset. Instead we focused on the national trends for IT outsourcing and our ability to counter that trend. This is what got us the exposure. But once we got the placement, our core story came through.
Work with experts who can help you craft a story and get it on the right platforms. It took a long time and a lot of effort working on how to tell our story and what might be relevant to large, national platforms like The New York Times. When the opportunity to pitch our specific story to a reporter finally arose, we were ready with the right angle.
