You Must Avoid These 4 PR Mistakes in your Crowdfunding!

You’ve probably heard about a lot of things that you should do when it comes to getting your product featured. However, not many people focus on things that you shouldn’t do.

Let’s talk about the top 4 PR mistakes you must avoid.

They’re the little things that you think will help make your story more interesting, but let me tell you what happens:

making these mistakes means reports will roll their eyes and ignore you.

Do Not Exaggerate Your Product Details

For the love of the almighty being.

Even if you genuinely believe your new product or app will be the greatest innovation since sliced bread, don’t overuse words like “breakthrough” or “revolutionary” in your pitch.

Side note: if you’re thinking of using Kickstarter, that’s also something they frown upon so get in the habit of writing with chutzpah without exaggerating words.

These self-serving words will trigger all gag reflexes and send your email into the inbox trash faster than you can say “oops”.

Instead, get specific with reasons why people will be interested in your product and include those compelling reasons in your pitch.

Do Not Get Bogged Down With Industry Jargon

When you’re pitching to journalists, don’t try to impress with knowledge of the industry jargon.

Many crowdfunding creators get too focused on the scientific words or industry-specific slang that they forget that the readers at the end of the line might not be interested in that.

Readers that journalists write for are interested in new products that create tangible benefits. Those benefits (and the examples you give) will likely be what grabs the attention of the journalist, not your technical knowledge of a product.

It’s the relationship, the compelling reason, and how you show you’ve done your background research to send through something extremely tailored.

Do Not Ghost A Journalist

This might sound counterintuitive but I’ve seen this PR mistake happen way too often to skip over this point.

If you’ve got someone’s attention, don’t stop there; it’s really just the beginning of this whole pitching process.

It’s incredibly irritating for a journalist who’s agreed to cover a story to suddenly find themselves an hour before their deadline without all the information they need just because their contact at the company is nowhere to be found.

Go into this entire relationship expecting that they’ll probably have questions about the app, the technical specs, the actual usage of the product, and many, many more things.

Even if last-minute issues come up, it definitely helps to keep the reporter informed.

Any communication about the product (good or bad updates) helps to establish a good long-term relationship.

And honestly, keeping them in the loop is just plain old polite.

Do Not Forget To Follow Up

Internet Marketers have a saying that “the fortune is in the follow-up”. Although you’re not directly making any money from these journalists, it’s still safe to say that being featured on any publication will be worth a fortune to the credibility of the company and product.

While you don’t want to come off as pushy or annoying, be sure to follow-up on your messages. Sometimes things just take longer, a reporter is caught up doing another story, or it just isn’t the right time when you first reach out.

No matter what it is, be sure to always follow up.

In these follow-ups, it really helps to make sure you’re offering something new and timely each time you contact the same journalist.

If you’re pitching the same old story again and again in the same way, you’re probably out of luck. The silence is just the journalists’ way of telling you that they’re not interested and you’ll be wasting your time.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, these journalists are just trying to find new and exciting content for their readership. When you approach the entire process in this way, getting press and media for your novel idea really isn’t too difficult.

I’ve managed to help my clients raise millions of dollars on crowdfunding just by going through these strategies and not tripping up on these mistakes.

If you want more people to see your product, want big names like TechCrunch and Mashable to feature you, and want to drive more free traffic to your crowdfunding campaign, be sure to check out the Media and Press Pitch Pack in the Crowdfunding Resources.

Originally published at https://crushcrowdfunding.com/