Choosing an angle for your story

Your first thought when you wake up is about your company. Your last thought before you fall asleep is about your company. This is what you eat, sleep, and breathe. Conveying that passion to reporters is an important part of your communications strategy, but finding the best ways to convey it is sometimes difficult.

When you are writing a pitch for the press, you must keep your audience in mind. Reporters are sensitive to the key performance indicators of user engagement and page views, but they also want to tell a story that's authentic. No news outlet wants to copy-paste marketing literature to their readership, but they will gladly print a story if it has a compelling angle that helps tell the story of technology.

Don't try to sell

Even though the purpose of your public relations push is, ostensibly, to bring in revenue for your company through increased attention and sales, your outreach to reporters isn't a time to sell to consumers. Reporters are experts at seeing through sales pitches, and they expect a little more from an article that is going to be published in a major outlet.

Appeal to emotions

Even if your facts are singularly compelling, they don't make for an interesting story when they are laid out without context or emotional appeal. A powerful angle plays on the emotions of your readers, while still being honest and forthright. At the same time, overly dramatic appeals to emotion that are not backed up with fact can turn your audience off and decrease the reliability of your brand message.

Finding your angle

Let's imagine a startup that has created a mobile application that allows farmers' market customers to remotely order from their favorite vendors so their orders are waiting for them when they show up to the market. There are basically four types of angles you can develop.

1. How does your technology help your audience?

• A town used the app to network their local farmers' market to more than 10,000 local consumers. Surveyed farmers claimed the app led to 20% increases in their sales and a 50% increase in repeat business.
• Customers are able to increase the amount of fresh produce in their diets without relying on off-season produce from their supermarkets.
• The average user saves more than two hours every week by ordering produce ahead of time before arriving at the market for pickup.

2. Interesting facts

• Farmers on the platform make an average of $41,000 during a typical season.
• Farmers' markets in the United States supply almost 20% of the fresh produce consumed by the American household.

3. Future plans

Remember, when you use future-plan information in your pitches, you must only include publicly available information (or information that you want to become public) — you should never send undisclosable information to media outlets and unnecessarily complicate your media requests.

• Starting next year, the company will open its membership to new categories of markets, with plans to expand nationwide.
• The company hired more than fifteen new developers, with plans to open a new headquarters.

4. Interesting background of investors or founders

• The founder initially created the app to serve the members of his own CSA, then realized the potential in the broader national market after being contacted by dozens of other local farmers to license the platform.

What makes a great angle?

The best angles for startup PR are the ones that immediately relate the startup to an existing problem faced by the readers of the publication.

There are some problems that nearly everyone faces — making the pitch very compelling. Even if your startup does something relatively obscure, find a way to relate the benefits of your product to customers by explaining how it could reduce stress, reduce environmental impact, and so on. Think about what motivates you every day and see if you can take that passion and funnel it into your pitch.