Can you explain how PR helps your launches? Does PR efforts work as planned?

The heyday of product launch PR is behind us. Ah, the good ol’ days. ;)

These days you need truly innovative product stories and/or proven business impact to get solid coverage. Customer or human interest stories can help, as can data-driven storytelling. Think about how to use PR in these ways post launch, especially if your product or feature isn’t particularly newsworthy on its own.

It’s hard to rely PR for any but the biggest brands, but professional audiences are more reachable through trade press. So we find that as we're targeting or influencing a professional audience, launch PR can help get awareness or can help sales teams close the sale. But it can't be in a vacuum -- it needs to be reinforced by other touchpoints.

That’s because PR will typically drive a spike of interest (aka traffic) and launch day conversions. Be prepared for that to drop-off pretty quickly. Because of the spikiness of PR, you’ll want to be prepared with day-two and engagement strategies regardless. Then, PR becomes the icing on the cake!

PR can be a major component of a launch plan & your marketing mix. At Dropbox, our PR teams engage with the major media outlets that cover Dropbox, like Fast Company, Wired, Fortune etc to help them understand what we are launching, what it means to the market, how it adds value to our customers & more. We support our PR partners, who are awesome, during the launch process to ensure we are telling a consistent story across our sales teams, customers as well as the press. If done well, the application of this consistent messaging approach can have a strong amplification effect in the market! Imagine your target customer is hearing Message A from you in a launch email, then hearing Message A again while watching a video of the keynote, then reading Message A reiterated again in an article written by an influential reporter. Companies like Salesforce do a great job at this with messaging like “Salesforce is the customer success platform” and are able to differentiate themselves from their competitors, despite the fact that many offer similar product functionality.

I think it really depends on the scope and scale of launch and your launch cadence. It’s important to strategize with company leaders and your head of PR to agree on an ideal product launch cadence in a given year so that PR has enough substance to work with (and enough notice to plan for it). For example, if your industry has any key dates, seasonal moments, or editorial debates going on, you’ll likely want to align at least once a year with one of those. 

That can magnify your PR team’s likelihood of gaining traction.

All in all, I’ve found PR colleagues to be helpful partners in my launches, but unless you’re really going all-in on large launch (brand new tech, new audience, new business model), I think you need to create a pretty big “platform” moment to capture the kind of attention that’s going to make a big difference.

For launches at Quizlet, I see PR as one part of a bigger puzzle and I trust the Comms team to advise on what makes the most sense, since the corporate comms narrative is usually much bigger than one key launch. 

For those reasons, I tend to spend a lot more time focusing on channels that connect to my direct target audience on- and off-platform.

A few ideas:

• As your company invests more in a thought leadership platform, you can think about launches as a great opportunity to create a big event like a conference to bring together leaders in your field and inspire your customer advocates.
• If your launch isn't suitable for top tier coverage, consider scoping your PR plan to the spaces where your launch will gain most interest. What industry publications are worth pursuing?
• Think about types of external validation that could be worth pursuing such as efficacy studies or reviews by experts in the field.
• It can be worth gathering inspiring customer stories with a human interest angle, especially if you have a beta launch and have to time to pull those together ahead of launch.

It all starts with a unique point of view.

So you need to have a strong messaging for every persona - across decision makers, business users, technical users, ecosystem, partners. And that messaging always needs to show a really strong human connection to a simple story. It has to be about a pain point, has to be about key benefits and why your product would be better placed than anybody else to get your customers to that promised land.

There's a ton of press and thought leadership opportunities related to a given product launch, but it has to be above the story and the value and even the emotions, not just the cold feature function type of story. Your story has to be bold, has to be challenging. It has to be human. And that will be the only way you could get any attention from the press.

Now, I will say PR public relations doesn't always work as planned because of the competing news you have no control over - which is why the moment of press launch really needs to be well thought through. If you're launching at the moment where there's a lot going on in the tech space or maybe even outside of it, then it's going to be a hard one to reach your audience.