The founders guide to PR that actually moves pipeline

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most founders have wasted money on PR. A funding announcement goes out, a few articles appear, the retainer keeps rolling, and three months later nobody can point to a single deal it influenced…but it doesn’t have to be this way! 

The landscape has changed (and that's actually good news)

The UK now has roughly 10,000 PR agencies, but dramatically fewer journalists. Reach PLC made 53% of its workforce redundant over two years. TechCrunch scrapped its entire European operation. A single journalist at a major publication received over 1,120 emails before lunch on one day.

And yet earned editorial media has never mattered more strategically. Around 84% of content cited in LLM responses (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) comes from earned editorial media. Even Reddit has a data partnership with OpenAI. When your prospects do AI-assisted research before they ever visit your website (and they do, increasingly), consistent press coverage in high-authority publications is how you show up in those answers. PR went from a vanity play to a GEO strategy almost overnight. 

Why PR keeps failing founders

A funding announcement with no follow-up is a missed opportunity, full stop. You raise £5 million, you get a few articles, everyone high-fives, and then... nothing. The journalists who covered it move on and the prospects who might have been nudged never were.

This is the result of a deeper problem: many businesses start PR before they know what they want to be known for. If your PR strategy isn't aligned with the problems you solve and the buyers you're targeting, you're generating noise in the wrong rooms. Coverage in the wrong publications is worse than no coverage; it sends the wrong signals to the wrong people.

Then there's the issue of measurement, or the lack thereof. For about 50 years, PR was evaluated using AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent). The premise is that a page in a major newspaper is worth 3x its ad rate because editorial content is more trusted than advertising. Everyone in the industry quietly knew this wasn’t true. If you speak to a PR agency today and they offer you AVE figures, walk away.

What modern PR actually looks like

Even though the execution has changed, three things still apply: storytelling, multi-channel distribution, and consistent presence.

Journalists now largely work remotely. They're under enormous pressure, filing 26 articles in a 12-hour shift at some outlets, and they need reliable sources who bring actual stories, not press releases about version 3.2.7.1 of an operating system nobody cares about.

Your expertise is your most powerful asset. Journalists want to speak to the founder who personally experienced the problem, the CTO who can explain a technical development in plain English, the COO who has views on where the industry is going. Multiple spokespeople also make a small company feel like a larger operation with a founder, a technical voice, a commercial voice each talking to different press verticals.

Data is your second most powerful asset. Proprietary data that journalists can rely on arriving regularly (think Rightmove's monthly house price index, or Reed's recruitment stats) turns your business into a trusted source rather than a PR supplicant. When a journalist knows your data is coming on the 15th of every month, they plan around it.

Press releases were declared dead for years but they're quietly coming back  because LLMs can scrape them instantly, and a well-structured release creates a clean, pullable record of what your company has done.

How to connect PR to your sales funnel

Enterprise B2B deals involve six or seven touchpoints before a decision. PR is several of those touches: it just operates in the background, building familiarity and credibility before your SDR ever makes contact.

The question your PR strategy should answer: where are my buyers reading? A story in The Sun is irrelevant for a B2B cybersecurity company. A piece in a specialist trade publication your buyers check every week is worth 10 times a national placement, because it reaches exactly the right person at the right moment of consideration.

Sales teams are an underused source of PR intelligence. They hear objections daily. They know which competitors are being mentioned. They know what prospects are worried about. That information should be feeding your PR strategy and the stories you tell, the concerns you address, the credibility signals you build. 

Tools like Profound now let you track your company's visibility across LLMs specifically, running 200+ prompts to see where you're surfacing (and where you're not) relative to competitors. That's a metric worth tracking alongside traditional press coverage, website traffic attribution, and engagement from specific outlets.

Getting started: what good looks like

• Know what you want to be known for before you spend a penny. Pick 3 audiences and 3 problems. If you can't clearly articulate what you want a journalist to say about your business in 2 sentences, your PR will be incoherent.
• Build a story pipeline, not an announcement list. Funding rounds, product launches, and customer wins are great, but the real value lies in proprietary data, founder interviews, industry commentary, partnership announcements, and your perspective on news as it breaks. You need a minimum of 2 proactive stories a month for at least 4 months to build real momentum.
• Commit to a sprint. Four months minimum, even if the first few months are quiet. Relationships with journalists take time and momentum will compound. Stopping after one cycle is like cancelling a gym membership after 6 weeks because you don't have abs yet.
• Track AI visibility alongside traditional metrics. Start measuring where you appear in LLM responses now, while most of your competitors aren't. Use tools like Profound to map coverage against what you want to be known for.
• Bring your PR team into the business. The best stories don't come from a briefing document; they come from being close enough to the company to spot them. An HR conversation, a customer objection, a market shift your team spotted before anyone else. PR should be a strategic lens on everything the business is doing.
• PR won't hand you a lead with a clean tracking pixel on it. Anyone who promises otherwise is lying. What it does is compound credibility over time, influence buyers who never fill in a form, and give your sales team something real to work with when a deal is on the line. The attribution might be imperfect, but the impact is real.

If you want to talk about how your positioning and go-to-market strategy fits together, we're happy to have a conversation!

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