Founders always ask us: “What’s the difference between thought leadership marketing and traditional public relations?”
To help visualize the difference between the two, let’s begin with a quick visual exercise.
Imagine this …
You are a tech journalist. You feel underpaid, stressed about everyday life, and every day your inbox receives 100-200 pitches about startups who are changing the world.
Your editor has assigned a story on the rise of lab-grown meat and you are looking for a startup to include in your story. You narrow it down to the following two options:
If you were a journalist, who would you want to reach out to as a source? The bigger company with more funding, but very little collateral to showcase their expertise? Or the startup that’s smaller with less funding, but that you’ve exchanged emails with multiple times? The bigger company that when Googled shows tons of ads and self-serving content? Or the startup that has dozens of articles, their own podcast, and self-published research on their industry?
The answer is obvious: You’d go with Startup B. Every day journalists, customers, and investors are making the same decision.
To help visualize the difference, here’s a chart we made that compares the two:
Traditional PR plays the short game while Thought Leadership Marketing plays the long game.
Traditional public relationships may work for bigger more established companies but for technology startups, thought leadership marketing is far more effective at helping you solve all the problems that founders face as they build their company.
Let your competitors burn their time, money, and resources on traditional PR. Invest in thought leadership marketing and give yourself an edge.
