Coming off ~3 years as ‘Head of Local Communications’ @opendoor, plus a few months of fun consulting gigs, a quick thread on the importance of local PR

Local press is often overlooked or not given the weight it deserves in comms orgs and within growth teams/companies, which is a mistake. It’s a bias a lot of people in tech have. Just because YOU may not be consuming tons of local press, it doesn’t mean your customers are not.

Local press is really important to the media mix because

IT IS OFTEN THE CLOSEST THING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS,

physically and mentally.

In normal times, you might be sitting in a tech hub city, but if your customers are Anywhere USA, you need to be thinking about and deploying a local PR strategy.

Especially if you’re deploying other more traditional growth marketing tactics like direct mail, radio, SEO and paid social. Local press is another trust layer between the company and its current or potential customers.

Think about what you’d want your customers to see if they googled “Your Brand” + “CITY” = those results are what local PR can help you shape.

Yes, SEO will dominate page one, but what are the more authentic narratives you want people to see? Tell those stories via local PR.

Local comms can also touch everything most companies care about: trust with consumers, economic impact in the local market, policy, hiring, BD/partnerships - the list is really infinite.

A few examples:

If you’re a company with inherently local operations, local should be a seat on your comms team or the purview of one your team members. Build the playbook, build the media lists. Make local an element of every initiative and announcement.

You customers are not just reading @NYTimes, @WSJ and @TechCrunch. Now more than ever, they’re sitting at their kitchen table with the local news on, trying to make sense of what’s happening in their own backyards.

Meet them there.