HOW TO LEVERAGE PR TO ESTABLISH YOUR US PRESENCE

You’re in Europe and you’ve created an amazing brand. You’re ready to sell to the US Market, but have no presence or brand recognition in the North American market. How do you establish your brand among the millions of players in the US market?

Well…it’s not easy, especially when you’re a startup, but it’s not impossible. Taking tricks that we use with startups in the market already, you’ll be able to make your brand stand out with the best of them in 3-6 months. We love the number five here, so here are five critical things you should do to establish your brand in the US market.

Discover your competition – Identifying your key competitors will help you learn about their positioning and how you may need to position yourself to differentiate your product and elevate your brand. You may also be able to see how they are securing customers and who they targeting their target audience. This may or may not be the same audience you are looking at, but bets are that they’ve tested the market a little bit to determine who is responding best. Don’t reinvent the wheel watch their progress and see how, why and if what they are doing is working for them.
Reveal your target audience’s pain points – Work for your audience. When establishing a brand presence, it’s most important to be solving a problem. Many brands often have such an acute focus on their vision that they fail to position themselves as a company that is solving a problem for a key audience. Focus on solving your audience’s problem, create brand loyalty and you’ll see that customers will be coming to you much faster and easier.
Create a niche in your category – Like any good marketing approach, you want to create a niche within your category. What are your best assets? What differentiates you from the competition. What are you doing best, better or first than the others? Leverage that as your winning point.
Establish thought leadership – Recently we wrote a whole blog on establishing thought leadership. This is an important way to establish consistency and credibility for not only your brand but your executive team. Our amazing client, Zoom.ai, has done an amazing job in establishing thought leadership and offering insights on The Future of Work with AI. They are a good example of how to establish credibility, drive thought leadership and solve customer pain points.
Make a lot of noise! – When you have all your elements in place (press kit, strategy, messaging and product timeline) start reaching out to media to make a lot of noise. By now, you should have identified the most important media in your sector. Determine what the call to action is and start researching the reporters that are covering your industry. Reach out to them via email, LinkedIn or social media. But remember to craft a compelling pitch. See these 5 Tips on pitching journalists that we’ve pulled together to get started.

Now, this is a bit of a process, but if you start following these steps, you should be able to lay out an amazing strategy to start making waves in the US market fairly quickly. The most important thing is establishing where your brand is a leader and highlighting those key values.