.png)
In the ever-evolving (and increasingly more difficult) landscape of Digital PR, securing links and coverage for a brand is becoming more challenging than ever. With the competition for journalist attention at an all-time high, emerging brands and start-ups often find it difficult to cut through the noise. In this blog post, Annie Hanily, the SEO and Digital PR Manager at Lottie, shares her invaluable insights on how to navigate these challenges.
Drawing from her experience at Lottie—a later living marketplace founded to revolutionise perceptions of ageing and care—Annie offers a blueprint for startups to achieve national coverage. From developing captivating campaigns to making the most of data and building relationships with journalists, Annie's strategies are designed to help new brands establish a strong presence in a competitive market.
–
Founded by brothers Chris and Will Donnelly after experiencing their own personal struggles to find care for family members, Lottie is a later living marketplace on a mission to debunk common misconceptions of ageing and care. From care homes to home care and retirement living, Lottie is a free service that helps families across the UK find the best care option for their loved ones at an affordable price.
When I joined Lottie in 2022 as a Senior SEO Executive, I knew our Digital PR strategy would be crucial for spreading Lottie’s message. Fast forward two years to 2024, and I’m now SEO & Digital PR manager, yet still focused on that very same goal to spread Lottie’s positive mission with care seekers across the UK.
Digital PR is important for startups because it increases online visibility, supports SEO efforts, and builds brand awareness and credibility. In just two years, we have secured authoritative backlinks for Lottie in highly respected publications such as the BBC, The Telegraph, and Business Insider. As a result, Lottie is now seen as a leader in the care sector on a mission to drive positive change in an ‘age-old’ industry.
However, our success in securing national coverage for a startup with a big vision hasn’t come without challenges, and we’ve learned many lessons along the way.
Developing a digital PR strategy from scratch involves several key steps—starting with knowing your audience, identifying your key messaging, and aligning these to business priorities. For example, you could support a new product launch, raise awareness of issues impacting your sector, or increase brand awareness.
If you’re a startup and unsure where to begin with Digital PR, here’s a blueprint for securing national coverage and making your brand known far and wide.
The Top 4 Steps for Building a Foundational PR Strategy to Land National Coverage for a Startup
1. Tell Your Story And Find Your Niche
Every business has a story, once you’ve found your product-market fit, kick-start your digital PR activity by sharing yours - it’s really that simple.
Every business starts with an initial idea, whether it’s personal struggles, finding a gap in a market, or creating a new innovative technology. Sharing the ‘why’ behind your business can help you reach your target audience faster.
💡Key Tip: Focus on making your story emotive, relatable, and thought-provoking.
For example, some of the very first pieces of digital PR we secured for Lottie focused on the
storytelling behind the business and brand. The headline ‘Our Nan’s Care Needs Made Us Start Our Own Business’ saw Lottie’s secure coverage across a range of media, including startup magazines and national news outlets.
2. No Idea Is Too Big
As a relatively unknown startup, you often have to work twice as hard to grab the attention of
journalists, readers, and your target audience compared to well-known businesses, because of this, you need to bring new and innovative ideas to the table.
Start by brainstorming your ideas, goals and digital PR visions for your startup. The bigger the idea, the better the outcome. We have always followed this rule when brainstorming a new campaign idea at Lottie. It is also the reason behind our most successful campaign to date, ‘Never Too Old For The Spotlight’, where we worked with care home residents across Bristol to recreate Oscar-winning film posters in celebration of the 2023 Oscars.
Our campaign was featured on BBC News and naturally picked up by radio stations and online media. By the end of the campaign, we had secured 10 pieces of coverage with an audience reach of 103 million.
💡Key Tip: At Lottie, we’ve learned that putting a creative spin on popular events helps us reach audiences far and wide. We’ve applied this learning in the run-up to Taylor Swift’s UK Eras tour and have worked with Bartlett’s Care Home on one of our most exciting PR campaigns to date—recreating Taylor Swift’s most famous album covers with care home residents.
3. Find Facts And Share Them
As a startup, data is your best friend when it comes to landing national PR coverage. Never neglect the importance of sharing trends and insights from your own internal data. You can use your own data insights to land coverage in a number of ways, including sharing additional information with a journalist about a topic they have previously covered, highlighting the importance of an awareness day, or creating your very own data set that can be shared far and wide.
For example, at Lottie, we used our internal data to find the cost of being a carer, revealing how much money unpaid carers are out of pocket after their caregiving responsibilities. We’ve been able to update this data for 2023 and 2024, creating evergreen content that has been covered by The Sun, The Daily Mirror, and many more.
💡Key Tip: Free data tools are also a great way to share data insights. You can use Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and TikTok Creative Centre to gather a new data set.
4. Relationship Building Is Key
Building relationships with journalists is key to landing consistent national coverage as a startup.
However, it’s important to remember good relationships with journalists work both ways. In
exchange for covering your content, you should provide journalists with exclusive insights and data that are most relevant to them.
After working on a new article with a journalist, share their feature across your social channels and tag them in—a little thank you is always greatly appreciated and goes a long way. Journalists are busy people. By building a good working relationship, they will keep you in mind for future features and often ask you to share expert insights and data before seeking support from someone else.
💡Key Tip: Identify two or three journalists at different publications relevant to your audience who cover topics and content that are most relevant to your business and reach out to them with personalised data and insights.
The fast-paced environment of a startup offers the benefit of learning lots of new skills and applying them very quickly. I’m grateful that over the last two years at Lottie, I’ve developed my SEO and Digital PR skills and ultimately learned how to create a successful Digital PR strategy from scratch.
Over the last two years, I have learned that persistence is key. By never giving up and learning from mistakes (and yes, there have been quite a few), we’ve been able to create a Digital PR strategy that works for Lottie—and we’re only just getting started. I’m excited to see what the next two years will bring.
Here Are My Final Top Three Tips Guaranteed To Deliver PR Success At A Start-Up:
Find what works and stick with it: every startup is different, and what works for one business may not work for another. Learn from any mistakes to find your niche and build upon it.
Always think big: Nothing bad has ever come from believing in yourself. Often, the greatest things come from the craziest of ideas.
Consistently improve: Never settle. Before starting your next PR campaign, set yourself a personal goal that will make this one even better than the last.
✨ Make sure you follow Annie on LinkedIn.
Opmerkingen