5 Winning Ways to Support Startups
Who wants to service startups? Some agencies are put off by preconceptions around cash flow or payment challenges, unrealistic Founder ambitions and PR blocks around business longevity and viable case studies.
At Cherish, we think that’s short-sighted. Trying to shoehorn conventional PR tactics against the needs of a fast growth enterprise is a very rare success.
Today we were delighted to get invited to the bright and colourful Huckletree West, https://www.huckletree.com/locations, a West London co-working destination for media, fashion and technology game-changers. We met some enticing new and scaled enterprise business leaders. Our time was spent looking at the shape of their business, understanding its potential and explaining how a good communications strategy can help a business grow. And that’s where we will start!
To celebrate our 2019 series of growth workshops for startups, we want to share our unique approach. If last year at Cherish is anything to go by, we know that a winning growth and communications strategy for startup clients comes in many shapes and sizes.
- Be More Business
Throw away the cookie cutters! Startup PR and marketing growth is never about blue-print PR solutions. The most exciting part about supporting startups is that you get to collaborate. You and your client are on the same side and you get a view that is rarely seen by most other agencies. And our team love that! We get to see inside the engine. We stand at the surgeon’s table. But to stretch the metaphor even further – building out or fixing a fresh approach is not for the faint-hearted!
For agencies supporting the game-changers, innovators, entrepreneurs and disrupters, the real health warning is here: if you don’t understand the way the business is structured, its growth ambitions, opportunities and most importantly its challenges, you won’t get off first base. You will be wasting their and your time. So truly understanding the startup business is absolutely key before you recommend or implement anything.
- Roll back
Sometimes….no, lets say OFTEN, you need to pause, take stock and recognise that this enterprise client may not be ready to activate PR – even if that’s what they say they want. Sometimes on the journey where you dig a bit deeper and ask those tricky questions, you find there’s still some work to be done on the brand identity or there’s a lack of reality around the customer match. And sometimes there still exist unresolved challenges around the product itself. At Cherish we have worked out when to say no not right now or (what we prefer to say) yes, let’s help you with that!
- Make It Happen
As we all know, good PR needs a good PR toolbox. And with startups, the toolbox is almost always empty. We find that a lot of the work required for our startup and scaleup clients isn’t about activating story telling. It’s about helping them build a robust and professional strategy with us recommending and helping to make the necessary communication tools. So yes, we may need to refine the key messages, help build the brand identity, tease out the stories, commission the photography and build the growth marketing strategy. Yes we do and yes we will!
- Go Deeper
Integrating wider strategic marketing activity is something that sends many traditional PR agencies into a spin and we understand. Startup PR needs a customised approach and it’s not for everyone. We think however the rewards are incredible. Very quickly – we get to see the direct impact of our work and if we are smart and join up the digital marketing strategy with PR and SEO – we become directly responsible for finding and driving customers and growing the business. That’s got to be the best place to be!
- Collaborate
Collaboration is the final word (at least in this blog) in communications support for innovation and startup brands. At Cherish, this is one of our deep values and our most remarked upon approach. Close working and operating as a team within a team really makes the difference in helping a startup make those fast and hard decisions it needs to.
As long as there are new Companies emerging and new pioneers creating fresh innovative solutions, we want to be there, supporting, collaborating and ultimately helping the brand thrive.
If you would like us to talk to you about our support for startups – please contact info@cherishpr.com.