Securing media coverage can elevate your DevOps company’s brand, attract more motivated prospects, and establish your company and its leadership as thought leaders in the DevOps space. Here’s how to craft an effective DevOps PR strategy, as well as compelling pitches to the news media that captures the unique value of your DevOps offerings, whether you’re working in an early-stage SaaS startup or a custom software solution provider.
Understand your audiences: Journalists and buyers
The foundation of a DevOps PR strategy starts with understanding who you are reaching out to. When pitching to journalists working in the DevOps and software development verticals, do some research to better understand what they have covered in the past. Does it pertain to what your company offers, or is it far afield from your knowledge and experience? Make sure what your company does and the products and solutions you offer are aligned with what the journalist typically writes about. If not, you risk wasting your time and, worse yet, annoying a journalist with irrelevant pitches. Better to find and pitch fewer journalists than to pitch 50 who could care less about receiving your email pitches.
Do your best to figure out ways to highlight the relevance of your solution within current tech trends, such as DevSecOps, CI/CD, cloud-native development, or AI’s impact on DevOps. Tailor your message to the specific interests of the publication or reporter you’re targeting, making it clear why your news is essential to their readers, some of whom will make up your buying audience.
Craft a strong narrative: What’s your story?
Journalists are often won over by stories with a strong narrative. If you’re in a DevOps startup, write the origin story about your founder(s) and what prompted them to embark on the challenging startup journey. Regardless of startup status, your narrative should position your company’s journey within a broader industry context. For instance, how did your team’s experience in tackling complex DevOps challenges inspire your product or approach to custom software development? Whether you’re addressing gaps in the market or innovating in response to emerging tech demands, weaving a compelling story that adds color to the technical specs of a pitch could be the difference between an email getting read versus relegated to the trash. For startups, consider making this one of your earliest campaigns as you look to develop a DevOps PR strategy.
Highlight your differentiators: What makes you unique?
The DevOps market is a crowded one, with as many as 80% of orgs responding to a 2023 survey saying they either had or were in the process of adopting DevOps, so figuring out how to stand out among the competition is crucial. Clearly articulate your unique selling points (USPs) in your pitch to the DevOps news media. Is your product the first to offer a particular feature? Does it solve a problem in a way no other solution does? Has your custom software team tackled some tricky coding work recently, or added a new service line? Journalists are on the hunt for announcements from DevOps companies doing truly innovative or disruptive work.
Leverage data and surveys: The numbers add up
Journalists appreciate hard evidence, especially in the form of numbers. It’s no exaggeration to say that journalists will salivate if they receive hard numbers buttressing your pitch about trends impacting DevOps in new ways, such as the adoption rate of AI technology in DevOps platforms. You can follow the lead of Gearset, the Salesforce DevOps platform provider, and run a survey of DevOps professionals / customers to figure out key industry trends impacting the Salesforce DevOps ecosystem at large. It’s an annual report that gets news coverage because of the story it’s able to tell with hard survey numbers. You just need to make sure that your survey population is large enough to be statistically representative, which is typically north of 500 respondents. A survey with over 1,000 respondents – golden. At the end of the day, tangible proof makes your pitch more convincing and newsworthy, making it integral to a successful long-term DevOps PR strategy.
Lean into Thought Leadership: Let your experts do the talking
Think beyond product announcements. Tap into the knowledge, experience and points-of-view your leadership team has when it comes to the topics shaping your industry today. There’s no better way to do that than to create a robust content creation machine for your DevOps company. Start by mapping out the media outlets that will give your leadership a chance to publish their ideas, which can include industry pubs like DevOps.com and InformationWeek, but also sponsored content opportunities like the Forbes Technology Council, which costs in the neighborhood of $2,800/year but guarantees 10 articles for a company exec, usually a founder or CTO.
Be sure to come up with a list of categories for which your experts can create numerous credible, insightful articles: AI, CloudOps, CI/CD, training and career development, DevSecOps, GitOps, etc.
Developing a consistent thought leadership PR strategy involving multiple company leaders serves to expand your company’s brand awareness, provide shareable content to customers and prospects alike, and build the perception of market leadership in the DevOps niche in which you operate.
Trend hacking and seasonal topics: Offer expert quotes
Journalists need a constant source of content sources to keep up with the latest trends and round out the content needs of their publications. One way to gain an edge on the DevOps competition is to develop relationships with key journalists covering DevOps and offer up timely quotes from your execs about any breaking trends or announcements. Also, keep your eyes peeled for seasonal articles that certain news outlets post with quotes from industry experts. These kinds of articles often cherry pick points-of-view from leading software experts to give their readers a 12-month look ahead, and occasionally a reflection on the past.
To be successful in the expert quote game, make sure you maintain a list of your key execs and subject matter experts and the topics they prefer to talk about so you can pull in the appropriate person for a quote. Also, set proper expectations with your internal quote sources. Not every quote gets picked up by the media, so they should never assume it will get published then be angry if it doesn’t pan out. Also, they need to be prepared to provide a quote on short notice, so they should be prepared to drop what they are doing to spend 15 minutes on coming up with a great sound byte. After all, if there’s a chance for the company to get into a John Edwards’ article in InformationWeek, the expert needs to treat it as a company priority.
Provide a call to action: Make it easy
It’s always a good idea to finish your media pitch with a clear and concise call to action. If you are launching a new product or introducing a product extension, include that in the final paragraph with a link to a product sheet and one to a demo. Also, invite the journalist to schedule an interview with your key spokesperson to help better explain the offering and provide some additional quotes. It’s never a bad idea to offer access to additional information about the product and your DevOps company by providing a link to a press page where the journalist can download headshots of key spokespersons, an image of the company logo and/or product brand, and detailed case studies. In short, make it easy for the journalist to come up with an article about your company and its newest DevOps innovation.
Final thought: PR will boost your DevOps marketing strategy
For marketing professionals at DevOps companies, creating and executing effective PR strategy is a vital piece of a broader marketing strategy. The benefits of solid PR coverage can range from short-term demand gen in the form of driving foot traffic at a trade show to longer term branding goals such as positioning your company as a dominant player in your niche within the broader DevOps ecosystem.
By understanding what journalists want, crafting compelling narratives, and backing up your claims with data, you can secure the media coverage that elevates your brand and drives growth.
Many DevOps marketing professionals will not be equipped to implement a DevOps PR strategy from the ground up. It may make sense to hire a tech PR agency or bring on a fractional PR resource. For some DevOops companies, taking that step involves preparing the executive team and setting aside budget, which can be a hard lift in today’s lean economic times. Swyft has some suggestions on how to stretch your PR dollar to help you figure that out.
If you need more advice and want to reach out to chat, feel free to visit our Swyft PR contact page.