What is Public Relations? The Public Relations Society of America defines it as: “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” Public relations is the art of crafting and delivering messages that inform and persuade the public, and get people to change opinions or take action. According to Public Relations Society of America some of the disciplines/functions within PR:

• Corporate Communications
• Crisis Communications
• Executive Communications
• Internal Communications
• Investor Relations Communications
• Marketing Communications
• Integrated Marketing/Integrated Marketing Communications
• Media Relations
• Content Creation
• Events
• Social Media
• Multimedia
• Reputation Management
• Speechwriting
• Brand Journalism

There was a time when many companies did not see the value of public relations, unless a crisis happened, which, unfortunately, is usually too late. Today, the lines are blurring between the traditional definition of public relations and other forms of marketing. With an increasing portion of commercial activities occurring online, attitudes are changing; and more executives now see PR as a way of earning–and not interrupting– people’s online attention, and with that, gain publicity for free from trusted, unpaid or earned channels. According to the American Marketing Association, “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Marketing is much broader than public relations; it involves communicating but is more comprehensive. One approach is to categorize the media assets as owned, earned or paid. Owned media is content and brand assets like images that you create and typically protect with trademarks and copyrights. Paid media is advertising where you are paying some media outlet to place or amplify your messages. Earned media is where others voluntarily share your message. Content marketing often supports PR goals; but content marketing goes beyond public relations. In a world of increasing information sharing, the line between public relations marketing versus social media marketing is often blurry. Both can provide value in positioning your brand messaging within their respective media outlets and audiences, with differences in reach, tone, immediacy and degree of customer engagement required.

Robert Cialdini coined[1] the term Social Proof to describe a social and psychological phenomenon where people copy the actions of others in a given situation. Social Credibility is the ability to connect and engage with other people and may be measured by the number of connections or followers on social media or audience sizes of other online media. Online media and digital marketing are intimately engaged and continuing to evolve. Audiences increasingly rely on online tools such as search engines to locate the information they need for purchase decisions. Establishing social credibility through reinforcement of messages from multiple sources becomes important for both search engines and the humans using them. While definitions and categorizations are helpful to understand the field, for commercial practitioners it is a matter of selecting the appropriate tools to meet the business objectives.

Business objectives for PR campaigns generally revolve around objectives such as: creating/ enhancing online presence; increasing brand credibility; increasing leads/sales/profits; or changing the way people thing about a business. These objectives could also be targeted towards particular audiences e.g. potential customers, investors/ acquirers, employees, regulators etc.  For many, the process of crafting the value proposition and messaging is itself of significant value because of the clarity it can bring to the business.  This is particularly relevant for early stage technology research commercialization efforts where startups may need to both pivot their strategies and validate their approaches with larger audiences as they attempt to scale. Such startups may have awesome content on their websites but struggle to bridge the chasm between early adopters in their niche and larger audiences who don’t know they exist or what value they can deliver. SEO optimization of the content does not engage broader audiences. Social influencers can provide some attention from their followers, but the fit of their audience may be difficult to match with the firm’s business objectives. Dedicated PR firms can provide value; but these may be expensive for cost conscious startups. Approaches like Macadamia Media may be a cost-effective compromise to raise exposure; and bring the traffic to the startup’s content.

[1] Cialdini, R. B. (1984). Influence: The new psychology of modern persuasion. Morrow.

You have a product and need to find a way to get it in front of the right people. Basically, a Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive action plan that details how. A GTM strategy is a business tool and a critical component of the organization’s business plans. More specifically, a GTM strategy is the plan of an organization, to deliver their unique value proposition to customers. Managers, product marketing specialists, and other decision-makers use the GTM strategy to coordinate their efforts and ensure a smooth launch of a new product, entry into an unfamiliar market, or the re-launch of a former brand/company. A regular marketing strategy is intended to be a long term set of rules, principles, and goals set in place to guide all of your messaging through the 5Ps of the marketing mix: Product/Price/Promotion/Place/People. A GTM strategy is a (relatively) short term, step-by-step map that focuses on launching one specific product. While each product has a different strategy, the end-goal is the same – to achieve a competitive advantage by optimizing the choices inherent in delivering the value proposition to. If your product is Point A and your customer is Point B, then a GTM strategy can be described as everything that happens along the path between the two. There may be lots of different paths, but a good GTM strategy is the plan for targeting the right pain point with the right sales and marketing processes, so you can grow your business at the optimum pace.

The components of a GTM strategy include figuring out marketing segmentation and messaging, a sales method, your ideal customer base, attractive pricing, and the unique problem your product solves or improves. This may involve engaging with a new market, or, may simply be presenting a new idea to your existing client base. The pricing strategy and the distribution plan aspects will certainly impact the results, but it is easy to bias these with company constraints if you start there. Today, however, businesses need to start with the customer before building pricing and distribution strategies. Your Target Market should provide a clear definition of your target audience. This definition involves the demographic, psychographic, geographical, and other variables that can help you narrow down your focus. While statistical data can provide some perspectives here, you’ll also need to create buyer personas to pin-point the ideal profiles that you want to target. Not all segments of the total market will be equally attractive. Market can be segmented in a variety of ways; but comparing the segments in terms of the business value vs implementation complexity can help focus on particular segment (e.g. between easy wins from those segments with high business value and low implementation complexity). All markets have their unique aspects, but broad categories such as Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C) or platforms supporting Consumer to Consumer (C2C) transactions can be helpful because target markets in these categories tend to have similar scale and regulatory issues. For example, B2B transactions are different to consumer transactions with an average of seven people involved in every business buying decision e.g.:

• The initiator (who identifies your product/service as relevant)
• The End User
• The Buyer (funding the purchase)
• The Decision maker (approving the purchase)
• The final approver (depending on the organizations schedule of authorizations)
• The Influencer (convincing decision makers of the purchase need)
• The gatekeeper (who can kill the purchase decision for other reasons e.g. compliance with corporate security policies)   

The Value Proposition and Product Messaging (the problems it solves, etc.) are two other key components of your GTM strategy. These help you position your brand and provide clarity to your potential customers. The value proposition can be thought of as a compelling story that helps customers understand why they need the product or service to address a particular pain point. Developing buyer personas around these pain points can help clarify the value proposition and product messaging around that pain point. In the B2B context, additional personas for the other people involved in business buying decisions can be helpful. For example, an end user pain point might be the time taken on a particular operational task. The value proposition can then be derived around the time saved and appropriate messaging developed to emphasize saving time on this task. The pain point for an influence might be considerably different (e.g. the quality of data obtained from the operation) hence requiring different value proposition and messaging.  

For those of us who are attempting to build a new business, an incorrect or suboptimal GTM strategy can cost years in going the wrong direction with product development and marketing. Having a GTM strategy helps you keep a realistic, practical perspective, and lets you identify and pay appropriate attention to the less-exciting bits that are still fundamental to your success, if it is developed with quantifiable data rather than “gut feel”. Crucially, a solid and comprehensive GTM strategy will also give you a framework for measuring your progress along the way, and help you detect and diagnose any issues that are hampering your success before they have the chance to run your venture into the ground. Identifying appropriate metrics and benchmarks can help you evaluate the performance of implementation efforts, as well as validate the GTM strategy itself. Some interesting metrics include: pipeline coverage (ratio of prospects earlier in the pipeline to forecasted sales), Sales team performance (% above vs below forecasted quota); lead conversion rates, marketing /sales budgets as % of revenue.

Commercializing technology research obviously requires a GTM strategy when planning for commercial success. Any particular GTM strategy would depend on the specific circumstances of product/service characteristics, targeted markets, company resources etc. Even with a customized GTM strategy in hand, research commercialization efforts can experience difficulty gaining attention/traction in their target markets for a variety of reasons; but failing to develop an adequate GTM strategy significantly reduces the chances of success. An often overlooked aspect of the GTM strategy for startups is the role of public relations in establishing an online presence, building a brand and messaging the key value propositions. If you would like assistance developing your GTM strategy you can contact me.