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 ...Read More

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, th ...Read More

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 likeli ...Read More

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 ...Read More