

Ask YC: How do you feel about offline press/marketing for your startup? - shafqat

As we try and focus more on customer acquisition and marketing (my cofounder is working on the product, dont worry!), I'd like to see what the HN community thinks about offline marketing?<p>Our core audience is the mainstream news reading public rather than early adopters or techies. As such, we're starting to reach out to mainstream journalists to try and get press coverage in their respective newspapers or local websites. Have people had success with this approach? I know Weebly has gotten some amazing mainstream press coverage - part of my inspiration was reading their blogposts about it.
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glen
I think getting some good online coverage can lead to traditional press
coverage. However, that said, there are a lot of good strategies to get direct
PR from traditional outlets. The bulk of it seems to be creating narratives
that people can easily pick up on. I'd check out Full-Frontal PR as a good
guidebook.

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shafqat
Great, will definitely check it out. Agreed on the narrative. You always need
a good story to tell, and I feel like traditional press/readers need a
different story than the web crowd. I guess thats obvious since our target
users probably haven't heard of Digg or NetVibes or any of these popular web
2.0 service.

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babul
Many startups have spent millions on such advertising without much success. If
you pay for it, it is expensive and often poor ROI.

Instead, I'd try to get organic mentions/articles based on the USPs of your
offering or some quirky/funny story the press love to write about. Learn from
the early days of milliondollarhomepage
(<http://milliondollarhomepage.com/blog-archive.php>), weebly, and other
successful startups/ventures that grew mainly due to organic media exposure.

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bprater
Mostly, poor ROI is due to bad targeting. Advertising on NBC and advertising
in "Mississippi Dog Breaders" journal are worlds apart.

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babul
Getting the demographic and targeting right is hard as most of them don't know
who their consumers are or are too vague?

