Refreshed September 2024

The public relations strategy for a growth-stage company is much broader and more complex than a startup.

In those chaotic early days, brands are laser-focused on introducing themselves to the world — convincing potential investors, customers, and media to buy into the vision, defining target audiences, and preparing to launch the first product or service.

In the next stage, you're not just planning for growth, you're executing it. You’ve proven there's a market for what you offer and are in a place to start enhancing your brand’s visibility and credibility. You now have data to fuel storytelling through case studies and owned content. Executives are ready to become thought leaders.

It’s time to find an agency partner that can help you build and run a sustainable PR program to achieve your business goals while discovering new opportunities along the way.

Your partner in growth should "get" the nuances of growth-stage companies and how to keep leveling a brand’s mission and its executives up. Here, I detail some of those nuances and questions to help you vet a potential partner to ensure they’re the “one.”

Growth-Stage Companies Need a Team Fully Focused on PR

In the early stages, you probably had a lot of employees wearing a lot of hats. Maybe the person overseeing PR was also in charge of BD?

As your company grows, you will need a dedicated PR person or team. Your Head of Marketing will typically be a generalist versus a specialist; they’ll oversee the entire marketing umbrella ensuring the different arms stay focused on overall company priorities and goals.

Keeping track of reporter beats and new newsletters, building media relationships, and jumping on opportunities isn’t a part time gig. The question becomes: should your PR team be in house or external?

Emily Kramer, who built up marketing teams at Carta and Asana and publishes the MKT1 newsletter, says that it almost always makes sense to hire external help for functions like media and influencer relations.

“There are economies of scale in the learnings from working with multiple clients and/or they can help you with the ebbs and flows of your business. Even as you scale to the growth stage and beyond, you’ll still want agencies in these areas because of these benefits.”

Think of a PR partner like Apple's manufacturing partners. Apple's internal teams focus their time and energy on developing iPhones, iPads, iMacs, and other cutting-edge products, on top of the software that runs on them. Its designers, engineers, and sales and marketing teams don't have the time or resources to handle the day-to-day work of manufacturing and shipping those products worldwide. So the company partners with manufacturers they trust to do so.

If you choose to go external with your PR expertise, vet your PR partner:

Can I meet some of my future team members?
What’s your process for learning the ins and outs of my business/industry?
When can we expect to start seeing opportunities?

Growth-Stage Companies Need a Partner Who Takes a Whole Company Approach

During the growth stage, companies need a public relations team with eyes across the entire business — building media relationships, flagging and jumping on opportunities, brainstorming new ideas and story angles, and more. That requires the agency to expand its working relationships beyond its day-to-day contact to incorporate those teams' objectives and perspectives into strategies.

For example, aside from our Slack channel with our day-to-day contacts at our construction tech client, we’ve joined an internal channel with salespeople to understand what they learn when they spend time with their customers. We’re there to craft angles from what they’re seeing and hearing and deploy them across channels – whether it’s LinkedIn or a case study in a pitch.

This whole-company approach helps agencies understand the brand's growth strategy to develop a targeted PR program. It allows them to ideate and run with ideas faster, whether or not there's an in-house person focused on PR.

PRO TIP: If you invest in owned content channels, prioritize an agency partner that will use those as a resource. Blogs could be repurposed, LinkedIn posts could become a media pitch – you catch my drift.

At more mature companies, we still recommend the whole-company approach; but usually, there's at least one full-time, in-house person who manages many of the internal relationships and communications priorities of the agency.

Relying too heavily on a single in-house team member or team to manage all the marketing elements on top of the PR initiatives can get risky. As a company grows, its PR needs will too. They need more sustainable angles, verticals to engage, events to attend, and so on.

But the solution isn’t always adding another employee; it may sometimes be about making sure your agency becomes an extension of the team.

Vet a potential growth-stage PR partner for a whole-company approach:

Tell me about how you’ve collaborated with departments outside of marketing with a client.
How do you evaluate which projects fall under “scope” and which ones don’t?
How do you measure the value of your work?

Growth-Stage Companies Need Agencies Adept at Collaborating with Other Partners

As a company scales, marketing programs become more complex. A growth-stage company typically has more external partners like advertising and digital marketing agencies, branding and event experts, website designers, and more.

A PR agency must be willing to work closely with other outside consultants. For example, you may decide to hire an event marketing team to focus on trade shows for the year. They'll focus on experiential elements, client entertaining, and more.

Who will take advantage of the onsite media or thought leadership opportunities? Who will convince the media to stop by for a product demo, sit for an interview, or work with the conference organizers to develop a session description that will engage audiences and drive business? That's where your PR agency comes in.

PRO TIP: Don't hesitate to charge your PR agency with scouting for outside experts who can take the lead on specific tactics. We've brought everyone from video experts, comic book designers, talent bookers, graphic designers, and SEO pros into the loop when it made sense.

Vet a potential growth-stage PR partner for collaboration:

What has your most successful working partnership with another agency been like?

Tell us about a time you applied learnings or inspiration from another partner.
Do you have a process for onboarding and collaboration with another agency partner?

Growth-Stage PR Agencies Must Embrace Flexibility

Early in the agency-client relationship, the agency develops a plan that maps to the client's strategy and goals. Everyone may agree on that plan at the outset, and the results may even be good, but change at a growth-stage company is inevitable.

Mastering the art of the pivot is a non-negotiable skill for a PR agency. Some of the most common pivots include:

Pitching. It’s not uncommon to find out a reporter we’ve been working with recently left the publication after having a story in the works. Or, we might hear crickets from the media when sharing news about an upcoming announcement. We adapt the angle, reach out to some new targets, and reframe the narrative to see if it resonates.

Capabilities and offerings. Media isn’t the only place a story can be told. We know influencers and LinkedIn are channels that have the opportunity to move target audiences to action. To meet the moment, we doubled down on our expertise and built out Advocacy Relations and Executive Thought Leadership programs.

Client/brand goals. It could be a brand re-launching or releasing a new product or service to the market and they need to find ways to break into new audiences. It’s your agency partner’s job to find unique ways to break through the noise and bring big ideas to the table.

Whatever the catalyst, you should expect your PR agency partner to not only help define a core narrative but also be flexible enough to pivot and revise that narrative (or even craft a new one) to support your company's strategy. This is why growth-stage companies typically work with boutique agencies.

Just like steering a naval aircraft carrier is a slow, laborious process, a large agency can have trouble making that narrative or strategy pivot.

PRO TIP: Don’t just focus on chasing media coverage in big-name outlets or hold the TechCrunch’s and Forbes as the gold standard. You have to focus on trades and verticals to support the sales team. These outlets represent highly-targeted audiences; decision-makers and potential advocates spend their time here).

Vet a potential growth-stage PR partner for pivoting:

Give an example of a recent last-minute change. What was the outcome?

How often do you stop and re-evaluate whether the PR or content strategy is working? What do you do if you’re seeing less-than-ideal results?
When a pivot needs to happen, what do you require from us?

Growing With Your PR Partner

When you grow together, both parties expand their areas of expertise with new opportunities. For example, we started working with Lockly, a manufacturer of the most advanced smart locks in the world, in 2018. They were a relatively unknown brand outside of Hong Kong looking to raise U.S. awareness for their products.

For the first two years of the partnership, PR was their only marketing spend and they secured national retail partnerships with Lowes, Home Depot, and other national retailers as a result.

Once the customer base was established, the next phase of our partnership was focused on penetrating new commercial markets. To do so, we tapped into trade and vertical publications to insert Lockly into decision-making conversations. Lockly also launched a trade show strategy to build relationships within the industry, published bylines to establish themselves as experts and provide readers with tips and tricks on protecting their data, and collaborated on webinars with stakeholders to directly educate the security technology community.

We’ve since added advocacy campaigns to our scope and, today, Lockly is a top-five brand in the smart lock space sold all over the country.

The partnership and the institutional knowledge were deep, and the results strong, so growing together made strategic sense. It also gave Lockly peace of mind knowing they were already in good hands and could continue on their trajectory with a trusted partner by their side.

The old saying that "the only constant in life is change" describes working for a growth-stage company. You have a product or more in the market, a roadmap, a solid customer base, and are maybe even pursuing another funding round. Your top-line business objective is growth, and that requires moving into new markets, raising money, hiring, and launching new products or services.

A public relations agency can play a key role in the success of all of these initiatives. The challenge is identifying one that will serve as your trusted partner throughout your company's evolution, not a roadblock.

The Nuances of Growth Stage PR