Many, today, know and celebrate iROKO tv CEO Jason Njoku but are unaware of his company’s success secrets. One of them is publicity. While most entrepreneurs struggle to find million naira investments, Jason got eight million dollars from Tiger Global just because Sarah Lacy wrote a story on iROKO on TechCrunch. The American investors read the story, they loved it and invited him over for a meeting. He didn’t even have to pitch; they just handed him money. Till date, Jason remains arguably Nigeria’s most vocal technology founder, garnering god-like adoration and followership and contributing marketing value to his company.
Wakanow.com is a Nigeria-based travel booking company founded in 2008 that has disrupted country’s travel booking space. It amazingly changed the once brick and mortar agent industry into a profitable web-based service industry. After an initial two-year struggle, the startup, like iROKO, received an unsolicited five million dollar funding after Tiger Global execs saw a feature of the little known startup on CNBC
Aside attracting investments, rightly crafted and targeted publicity can also jump sales. It’s the reason companies spend millions on advertising and marketing budget. Sadly, small business owners underestimate this fact to their peril. Most startups do not have a PR budget. Entrepreneurs launch a great product or service, labour hard everyday to run operations but make no effort to inform large audiences of prospective customers about their offering. The few that do, try to handle publicity personally forgetting it requires specialists, and most often get poor results and wasting advertising and marketing spend. It is important companies tell their stories and communicate it effectively. It is crucial to the survival of their business that their products are publicly known and understood.
A small business owner reached out to us at Enterprise54 after he had invested hundreds of thousands on online ads with no result to show for it. A quick market segmentation analysis by our team showed his customers where mostly upward and mobile middleclass men. Sadly, two-thirds of his adverts had been placed on popular media platforms followed primarily by middleclass women. He was unknowingly targeting the wrong market. The story isn’t much different from many other small business owners.
So what’s the way out?
1) Realise publicity is important.
2) Identify your target customers. What’s their gender, age range, social class, income and consumer behaviour? Where’s their residence?
3) Identify the media platforms your market demography goes to. Then identify the particular reporter or producer who covers their interest. For example, who is the financial reporter that covers the business stories my C-suite exec target market like to read? In a clime like Nigeria, being friends with these media persons is a valuable asset in getting your story covered.
4) Develop story angles and pitch to the right media contact.
5) All of these can be a handful for most small business founders so you can also hire a PR consultant that’s familiar with the special needs of the SME sector.
According to Daniel J. Boorstin, “Some were born great, some achieved greatness and some hired public relations officers.”

By Adegoke Oyeniyi, founder of www.enterprise54.com, a news and magazine website that covers entrepreneurship across Africa. The company’s PR arm helps small businesses tell their story and has serviced companies such as Jumia, Konga, House of Tara and Vconnect. You can reach him at goke@enterprise54.com

Very helpful writeup. In the process of figuring out how to get my site out, that is neither a service or utility and its alot more complicated that I thought.

If there's a company already doing what you do then understudy them thoroughly. If there isn't study what's nearest to the service. Before you launch, be sure to drum publicity for it and make it a highly anticipated launch.