Public Relations is one of the trickier parts of the marketing game.
It’s not like digital advertising or email marketing, where you can push a button and make measurable things happen right away.
A year ago, I hired a savvy PR agency to book me for speaking, podcast interviews and syndicated articles. Back then I was a consultant, not the founder of a company with proven products or services.
That PR push didn’t make much progress, so I stopped it after six months. I continued consulting and kept building what would become my new company, Scaling Point.
I launched Scaling Point in December 2017.
Within three weeks of launching, I had two major articles about Scaling Point in serious business publications.
No PR agency this time, no proactive outreach to make stories happen.
The first article about Scaling Point was in the Phoenix Business Journal. The tech/startup journalist, Hayley Ringle, wrote a great front-page article about how Scaling Point helps CEOs pinpoint and solve early-stage growth problems.
The second article in Inc. was written by Phoenix startup founder David Dodge who writes about entrepreneurship. I helped David a year ago by spending a few hours in his office learning about his startup, Codakid, and offering some advice that he found useful.
David wrote about his challenging “startup ADD” problem and how I showed him that creating an “OCD focus” on his best customers is the only way to grow up. It’s a great article that describes exactly what Scaling Point is and specifically how identifying it and executing on it helped his company.
How did I get great PR results this time? The answer is, by taking a dose of my own medicine.
Last year, I didn’t have a clear and credible story that was interesting to enough people to write about. I didn’t have a Scaling Point, as I call it. No amount of effort or investment would make the “Greg Head” story go, because my business story did not have a sharp focus.
If your execution is reasonably good but you aren’t getting results, the answer is not to double the effort, invest more or switch leaders. Something deeper is going on that needs to be fixed.
A powerful Scaling Point delivers MUCH better results for the same effort.
Your Scaling Point simply describes how your product or service is best in its market at something important for someone specific. Without that story, no amount of execution improvement is going to create big results.
When I did the work to create a sharp “Scaling Point” focus for my business, I got results. It wasn’t easy, but it made all the difference.
Is professional PR help really necessary? Absolutely–once you have a credible Scaling Point. Public Relations is a great investment when you have a story worth telling to a larger audience.