What is Tech PR?
lauryn preston
Table of Contents
At Kiopi, we work with entrepreneurs, business professionals and digital marketing agencies all over the United States. We help business owners from all walks of life. As social media management experts, we’ve recently come to the realization that many marketers and business owners don’t understand the premise behind tech PR.
If you’re running a business and you aren’t quite sure about tech PR, or if you just need a refresher, keep reading. Our social media marketing gurus will attempt to tackle the confusing topic of tech PR.
Technology Public Relations Definition
Tech PR is also known formally as technology public relations.
To make things a little easier, let’s divide this into two separate pieces: technology and public relations. We’ll start with the public relations portion.
Public Relations Defined
PR is short for public relations. This is the process of informing your stakeholders about your business, brand, or organization. Using PR, you can also encourage your stakeholders to form a positive outlook in relation to your brand.
The term “stakeholders” is a broad term. Stakeholders can refer to prospective customers, the general public, employees, investors, partners, or anyone else who could potentially be affected by your business’s values and decisions.
The ultimate goal of public relations is to maintain a positive outlook within whichever forms of media are favored by your customer base and target audience. For most businesses this includes social media, magazines, newspapers, or broadcast media.
So, essentially, PR strategies are all about using any media coverage possible to create a positive reputation for yourself and your business.
And, this is where public relations differs from marketing strategies and other forms of communications efforts. With marketing, you are responsible for highlighting the positive aspects of your business. But, with personal relations, the media outlets do this on your behalf.
Anybody can use public relations to boost their brand’s reputation: businesses, institutions, organizations, government entities, public figures, non-profits, and more. For smaller businesses, you don’t necessarily need to work with top tech PR agencies or a social media strategist to boost brand reputation management. You just need a little discipline and a social media management program, like Kiopi!
So, now that we have the public relations portion down, let’s move on to the “tech” portion.
Public Relations Defined
Technology public relations is the process of using various media outlets to create and promote a positive reputation for technology companies and digital business entities.
Tech companies can use tech PR to overcome a number or industry challenges. A tech business could use public relations strategies to communicate innovation to stakeholders, secure investments, win awards, or attract the best talent.
There are several various types of tech PR. Here are a few types, as well as how you may use them.
News and Press Releases
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a marketing professional looking to try tech PR for your business or client, a simple news or press release is a good way to get started! If you have a news-worthy story related to the business, there’s really nothing stopping you from sending a press release to a target publication to help get the message out to target customers.
But, there is one huge caveat to this PR move: you have to share real news that affects your target market.
So, if you or your client has invented a new piece of technology that will genuinely affect your target audiences and thought leaders, then a press release or news agency will be interested in publishing your story. But, if you’ve simply added another human resources staff member, it’s unlikely that your target audience will care.
You just need to be mindful of other people’s time.
If you’re working for or with a tech company and you truly believe that you have a valid, relevant news story, you’ll want to write a professional, engaging press release to start moving the ball forward. The press release should be informative, interesting, and concise. Don’t wait to put the good information towards the middle or the bottom, either. Put all of your most important facts in the introduction.
Influencer Marketing
Social media influencers can be an incredibly valuable marketing asset for tech startups and tech companies, in general. While some claim to be “influencers”, for the purpose of influencer marketing, an influencer is a person who:
- tech brands engage with to help them promote their technology products, services or messages
- has at least 10,000 followers
- is an industry expert
- shares information about tech companies or tech products they love
- understands how to promote content on social media channels
Social media influencers aren’t “celebrities” in the standard sense of the word, nor are they responsible for providing “breaking news” to their followers. However, both bloggers and social media influencers can wield a ton of selling power amongst their followers.
Using online content creators to distribute information on your company’s behalf is a fairly new public relations strategy. It involves partnering with bloggers, vloggers, or social media personalities to promote content to the influencer’s followers. So, you need to ensure that the influencer you partner with has the same target audience as your tech company.
For example, a tech PR influencer campaign could work with a blogger who reviews digital products or tech innovations.
Crisis Management
Crisis management and crisis communications is a specialized category of tech PR. This PR strategy is typically carried out by experienced tech PR agencies or PR professionals.
Crisis management for technology companies is a specific type of reputation management that is carried out in an attempt to minimize the damage or some negative event, which hints the name “crisis”. A “crisis” could consist of anything that could potentially have a serious impact on the business. This could include supply problems, legal issues, redundancies, company mistakes, product flaws, management misconduct, or anything else that could be perceived as a scandal.
PR teams that specialize in crisis management know that this form of traditional PR isn’t reactive. In order to maintain your company’s online reputation, your PR team needs to plan a strategy for “if something goes wrong” before it does.
In general, only large technology companies need to invest in crisis management PR firms.
Depending on the nature and size of your tech company, crisis management may be an essential part of your overall tech PR strategy.
Thought Leadership
For most technology firms, thought leadership PR strategies will be the most successful.
Thought leaders are typically known as the influencers in the tech world. Those who advance technical science through thought leadership are considered trusted experts in their field. They’re widely respected and have a huge network of connections in the digital industry.
Thought leadership, in terms of tech PR strategies, would involve writing a featured article, typically that would solve a large or universal, real world problem. You can choose to write the content yourself, or you can have a tech PR agency write it on your behalf.
You don’t have to be a billionaire to be a great thought leader. You simply need to have a great idea that solves a real problem and have effective communication skills.
Internal Communications
Internal communications is one tech PR strategy that is often overlooked by digital marketing executives. Unlike most PR strategies, this PR campaign focuses on the internal brand strategy, instead of outside PR or marketing.
If executed properly, internal communications can be one of the most valuable corporate communications efforts that your business can make. Your employees are the ones promoting, creating, and delivering the tech product or service your business is offering. So, if anyone needs to have a positive outlook on your tech firm, it’s your employees.
While, at a glance, this looks like more of a human resources problem, all channels of communications could potentially be affected by this.
Social media can help position your tech company as a great place to work, an interesting newsletter can help to keep your staff members in the loop with respect to your latest advancements.
Integrated Communications
This isn’t a specific type of PR campaign. Instead, it’s a way to incorporate PR strategies.
Integrated marketing communications isn’t a difficult concept. Essentially, it simply ensures that all messages across all forms of communication are seamlessly linked together. So, all of your business’s promotional tools should work together for the best results. This would include paid advertising efforts, content marketing efforts, thought leadership, internal communications, search engine optimization efforts, press releases, influencer marketing, etc.
Integrated communications involves taking every part of your tech PR strategy and making it a part of a holistic overall strategy to grow your tech firm’s brand. It should also incorporate a SEO-optimized website, a captivating social media presence, and a well thought-out email marketing campaign.
If your tech firm currently doesn’t have a great social media presence, this is where Kiopi can help!
Kiopi Makes Social Media Management Easy for Tech Companies
Social media management has turned into a great tool for sharing valuable insights and growing tech firms. Having a strategy that gets your technology firm social media attention is one of the best ways to reach your target audience and engage with prospective customers.
Social media marketing provides opportunities for honest communications between your technology business and your customers. This makes the experience for your potential customers and customers more rewarding. It allows you to have a professional personality that reflects your brand strategy.
At Kiopi, we provide a range of social media tools for our clients, including the following:
Social Media Content Scheduling
Kiopi is a cutting-edge social media management platform that allows tech firms to plan, schedule, collaborate, and promote content on various social media platforms. Our program was created with technology at the forefront! Using Kiopi, you’re able to schedule media pitches and content on all major social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google My Business.
With a single click of a button, the program distributes technology information across any and all social media channels you select.
Social Media Calendar
Created by a team of digital marketing and PR experts, Kiopi’s social calendar is intended to grow your technology firm’s earned media.
The need for consistent posting on behalf of your business paired with positive consumer or follower engagement can quickly become overwhelming when you aren’t working with a PR agency. This often results in the account or social managers feeling overwhelmed.
With Kiopi’s content calendar, you can schedule and organize deliverables easily!
Data Analytics
Your marketing or tech PR efforts are only as good as the data you have to back them up. Big data can lead to big results. Content marketing analytics can be extremely beneficial for gaining a better understanding of which efforts are working and which aren’t.
With Kiopi, you have access to all of the big data insights that your tech business needs to have a successful PR campaign. Our program provides real time data to help you make the best decisions for your technology firm. This will help improve your tech PR and digital marketing efforts as well as save a ton of time, effort, and money.
Social Media is Essential to Grow Your Tech Company
Some of the largest tech companies today harness the power of social media for business. When you balance content marketing, PR objectives, and social media marketing, you’re setting the foundation for your tech company’s success!
Kiopi offers a free 14-day trial period, so your technology firm has nothing to lose and everything to gain. You don’t have to hire tech PR specialists to reap the benefits of a successful social media campaign.