We found great tech, entrepreneurship, and marketing communities in Barcelona! If you’re looking for after-work activities, you should consider joining communities that share your interests. Being part of a community is part of Barcelona’s culture. You get to learn about different topics, meet new entrepreneurs and projects, and also discover places that you never knew about.
Startup PR: How startups can increase their chances of getting press coverage
Especially after the initial product launch and after achieving the first milestones, startups most often try to get some press coverage, in order to increase the attention of venture capital firms, business angels and early adopters for their product or service. For that reasons, they usually reach out to local or international tech and startup publications. Getting featured in one of those can be as challenging as securing funding or getting your first customers. So it’s important for startups to take a close look a the publications they aim to target and to avoid common mistakes.
The tech and startup media landscape, internationally, in Europe, Spain & Barcelona: Aside of international tech publications like TechCrunch, TheNextWeb and Venturebeat, there are European startup/tech publications like tech.eu and EU-Startups, Spanish ones like El Referente and TodoStartups, as well as local ones in Barcelona like Barcinno and Barcelona Startup News. In order to get to know some of these startup publications better and to get a behind the scenes view, we recently organized a little round table discussion with Vivien from Barcelona Startup News, Sophie from Barcinno and Thomas from EU-Startups. If you’re interested in Startup PR, the role/state of tech media and the startup ecosystem in Barcelona, this one is for you:
During the discussion, there already came up a few tips and tricks. Publications like Barcinno, Barcelona Startup News, and especially international startup publications receive a huge amount of press releases per day, so in order to increase your chances of getting press coverage, you should really make sure to reach out the right way. To provide you with an overview, below you’ll find a summary from the discussion between Vivien, Sophie and Thomas, and some additional best practices:
What is news? The fact that your startup exists or just launched is usually not newsworthy. Unless you just invented a time machine or teleportation technology. Most interesting content for startup and tech publications is exclusive information and news that make their readers go „wow”!
Prepare a good press pitch: Provide all relevant information. Make it as simple as possible for the editors to understand your product, it’s USP and why your story is newsworthy! Keep your email pitch short and suggest an interesting angle for an article. Also: Don’t ask for permission to send a press release. Just do it!
Sending your press releases via email: Keep your emails to each of the contacted editors short and don’t send too many releases to the same editor in quick succession. Send them out individually, with a personal note (never: Dear editor…). If your email shows that you understand/read the publication, your chances of grabbing the editor’s attention clearly increase. Best case, the press release will be sent by someone the editor already knows.
Be a good communicator: When contacting editors, pick the subject line of your email carefully and make it stand out. Some editors of popular startup/tech publications get a few hundred emails a day, so you wanna make sure they at least open your email. If they do, and afterwards reply with some questions, save them time, by quickly replying. Sometimes it’s really a matter of minutes. If you don’t reply fast enough, the editor might already consider another story. On the other hand, if you are the one asking questions, make sure the editor can answer with one line or a simple „yes“ or „no“. Saving time is key!
Keys to good press releases: Great content and exciting news spreads automatically around the web. Your press releases should be a good read, easy to understand and as interesting as possible. Readers of startup publications, like pretty much all humans, like big numbers, interesting facts they didn’t know yet, successful people/stars, nice pictures, stories that spark emotions.
A sense of exclusivity: Media people like to talk to the people in charge. That being said, press releases should be sent by the startup’s CEO not by an intern or a PR firm. This is true especially for early-stage startups. And: Journalists like exclusives! By giving a publication the exclusive right to publish first (embargoed news) you will clearly increase your chances of getting featured there!
The perfect timing for sending your press release: Send your press release with advance notice. For example: If you’d like to see your news/story covered on Wednesday afternoon, reach out on Monday morning at the latest, saying that the day of the announcement will be Wednesday. The most important thing to keep in mind is: Editors don’t like old news! On the same day the first press coverage about a specific topic goes online, all other media outlets should have received the corresponding press release. Otherwise your chances to get additional press coverage are almost at 0%.
And if it doesn’t work out? Don’t take it personal if a publication doesn’t write about you and your startup! If your team and idea is strong, you will make it anyway! Other ways to get visibility for your startup are to properly present it on AngelList, Crunchbase, F6S, Product Hunt, Betalist, and of course on big social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
How to start a business from scratch
Every week we take half an hour to talk just about any topic that crossed our minds during the last days and create a podcast for you (Listen to it in Spanish here and subscribe to our feed). We call it an Open Mic Podcast as we want to invite different people to participate, new ideas to take form, and to shed light on various experiences and perspectives on business development.
Prepare For The Future Of Marketing — Build Your Content Factory
There are few startups or young companies that doesn’t have a blog these days. We all know the benefits of producing content in one shape or another, but exactly how to do it the right way?
There are several ways to establish yourself as a quality content provider, and some things you need to avoid when interacting with people through content.
Build Credibility and expertise
Content marketing is more about showing of your knowledge, to help people, than to sell something.
A common mistake companies often do, is to produce their content like a very good-looking ad for their product. Wrong.
A blog article will usually never lead to a sale or a direct purchase, it’s about building credibility as an expert in your field. So when your potential customers is ready to make a purchase he or she knows what brand to trust with his wallet.
This means that you can’t fake being an expert if you really want to get something out of your content. This blog you’re reading right now is not existing for you to buy or invest anything in itnig.
We want to be a real resource for the startup community, so that our startups benefits from the reputation itnig has as a good provider of useful knowledge.
If you’re company full of experts or people with a lot of experience you should take advantage of their knowledge, and present it through your content.
If you’re a startup, with a young team without experience, you can bring in external people from your network, experts or others for an interview, but present it through your brand, so both you and your external expert benefit from it.
Stay Relevant
Staying in touch with trends is getting harder, as trends are changing every day.
One of the ways of staying in touch with what’s relevant for your audience is creating a balance of current and evergreen content.
To only cover current trends is great when it’s hyped, but it’s a big risk to take if it fades away in a month or two. In other words, many hours of hard work can be wasted. To stay relevant you also need to present evergreen content; videos & posts that explain timeless topics which have been discussed, and will be discussed for the next ten years:
All of these articles are evergreen, and will bring people to the itnig blog for the next years. With a balance between this kind of content, and current events in the industry you’re in, you’ll be sure to create a brand that shines of relevance.
Avoid content shock
We are reaching a point in content marketing where publishing 500 word articles for SEO isn’t really working anymore.
As everyone is creating content we need to know our customers or users much better. Do the research, and instead of creating tons of short posts, create longer content with higher value. Also because Google now favors that kind of content. The average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words. Also Medium favor longer content, as a 7 minute read will rank better in their algorithms.
If you’re building or running a company I guess you spend a good amount of time getting to know your customers. Use this information to shape your content.
It’s however worth mentioning that if you’re doing video content, the rule of length does not apply as much as with written or audio content. If it’s not a super interesting keynote, try to keep it shorter, around 1–2 minutes, especially in social media.
Across platforms
There’s tons of places on the internet where you can promote your content.
Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, the list goes on..
The key is again to know your customer and your content. All platforms has their target audience and one or more types of content that performs well. Medium is obviously good for text, especially longer form. Facebook and Youtube is great for video. Twitter is great for spreading the word fast.
Have you seen the itnig blog lately? It's full of great resources for you and your startup! https://t.co/XYUPFSkte7 pic.twitter.com/M2bJnjZ88t
— Itnig (@itnig) October 21, 2016
The different social media channels all serve their particular purpose, and you can’t stick to only one. When itnig writes a medium article we always try to include:
- Videos
- Photos
- Social media content
It should be a goal to do this in all posts, but it’s hard and resource demanding. It’s however these posts that people read and share the most.
Now, go build your own content factory!
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This post was written by @sindre hopland, media manager at itnig, and based on Scott Mackin’s talk at itnig this fall.
How Playfulbet Grew To 400K Followers On Facebook And 300K On Twitter
Even though Playfulbet’s product is e-sports and sports betting games, our success in capturing thousands of users and followers has not been left up to chance.
Behind Playfulbet there’s a young team that first and foremost love what they do, as we get to work with our biggest passion — games. And it feels even better to share these insights when our devotion is bearing fruit, as our social media following have been growing exponentially the last few years.
We recently reached a couple of milestones in our social channels, as we reached 300.000 followers on Twitter and 400.000 followers on Facebook.
As mentioned earlier, nothing is left up to chance, and at times we’ve been overwhelmed by the massive growth from some of our campaigns, especially as Playfulbet has been expanding internationally.
LOVE
We love our followers, and have great respect for everyone that follow our social media channels. And here lies some of the key-elements to our growth, we have a big emphasis on entertaining our audience every single day.
It’s important to see you social media as an extension of your product, as our social channel is an extension of Playfulbet’s betting platform.
We focus on communicating with our audience, and not just broadcasting a message. In this we use all kinds of media tools like pictures, video, GIF’s, surveys and contests that can steal a smile or a reaction from our followers.
If you have a product to leverage through the platform, use it for what it’s worth. We give away our virtual money (Coins) that users can take advantage of on the platform to win prizes.
The precious feedback
To maintain a high interaction rate in your social channels is key to keep growing. As we are a sports betting platform we base a lot of our content on actual sports news. In that way we’re staying relevant to our followers, and not only entertaining. I think this is one of toughest nuts to crack — stay relevant.
If you’re interacting with your audience every day, you’ll be sure to get feedback, which is very valuable. It’s important that you follow up on all your feedback, as your brand will be more credible, and your followers will be more faithful if they feel they’re being heard.
Having depurated non-toxic social networks where the user feels comfortable also serves as a real time barometer of what’s going on in your company. At Playfulbet the users may ask for support about prizes they’ve won or they aspire to win, they report cheaters and people who don’t play clean by using multi-accounts, which are forbidden, or they simply alert us about canceled or suspended matches they want their coins back from. All of this is super helpful for our team, and makes our platform better.
Right now we’re engaging our followers all across Europe and in Southern America, giving away hundreds of prizes every month, while creating entertaining content. Follow us for some inspiration on how you can do the same, because our team rocks!
Playfulbet, the adventure continues..
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This post was written by Jorge Badenes, content manager at itnig startup Playfulbet.