Put up your feet, grab your favorite drink and settle in for another Prowly #PR Chat where we get to sit down with Anna Lebedeva.
As Co-founder of Top Voices Media, a media platform dedicated to startups, and former head of Marketing for Semrush, a leading online visibility management SaaS platform, Anna is out there making waves in the business world and beyond.
We picked her brain on her newest projects, the AI revolution, and her key to long-term success in the PR world. And we’re here to share all her valuable insights and experience with you.
Can you tell us a bit more about your work at Semrush and your new project, Tribume?
I’ve spent seven fantastic years as marketing lead at an amazing company, Semrush, and a few months ago I co-founded Tribume, a media platform for early-stage startups.
Tribume supports this mission by providing free quality content through newsletters, our web platform, and social media.
Our mission is to help startups navigate complicated ecosystems and build awesome products.
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What’s one successful PR tactic you are using at the moment?
I have a very polished LinkedIn account that represents all the major projects I’ve been involved in, both commercial and non-commercial. I use LinkedIn a lot, especially for different kinds of relations management for Tribume, including interacting with journalists, tech enthusiasts, VCs, accelerators, and others.
I invest a lot of my time in building relationships with tech journalists and analysts to secure the rights to republish their content on the Tribume platform.
Another major focus is community relations: I work hard on building a positive reputation for Tribume in the startup community. Our product is community-driven by design. We aim to give tech professionals a voice by publishing their expert opinions and articles, much like journalists do.
How do you feel about using AI in PR? Do you use it in your work?
As Chief Editor at Tribume, I need to stay up to date on the massive information landscape, reading a lot of news, reports, studies, and more to grasp the most important happenings in the startup and technological industry.
I frequently use ChatGPT to summarize huge reports from platforms like Crunchbase, Sift, and others that offer valuable insights on tech companies, funding data, and market trends.
I can also see that AI is being effectively used in media monitoring, sentiment analysis, and even in creating initial drafts of press releases. I hugely support this trend as automation helps streamline repetitive tasks, allowing PR professionals to focus on strategic activities, such as storytelling.
What skills do you think PRs need to be successful long-term?
I think storytelling is a major one.
Technology changes the tech stack, channels, and they may even start writing for us soon, but real human storytelling will remain something only people can do. So, the skill of creating a compelling narrative around a brand and crafting stories that resonate with the target audience is the main skill you need to fine-tune on a daily basis.
Today, companies act as media outlets, creating their own content and telling their stories directly through blogs, podcasts, and video series.
You need to know how all this storytelling seeding works to get the right harvest out of it.
What is a commonly held belief in public relations that you passionately disagree with?
Some people consider PR as something close to advertising, which it is not.
👉🏼 PR is about managing the information flow between a brand and its audience and building strong relationships.
It is like in normal life: the better relationships you have with people, the better they understand you.
So PR is exactly for that purpose, to make people understand your brand, its values, and its long-term mission. It is a much bigger and more long-term strategy than simply advertising, which is about one-way communication.
What trends do you see in PR that you’re excited about?
The PR landscape is evolving rapidly, with several exciting trends that are shaping the future of the industry.
The first one is data-driven PR, which is what Semrush does a lot and very successfully, using its own data to create beautiful data-driven stories for not only industry publications but for mass media as well.
More tools are helping PR people work more effectively, with Prowly being one of them. I really like it! It helps form more personalized pitches, leading to better-targeted communications and higher engagement rates with journalists.
Another big trend is the continuous development of integrated marketing communications. PR is increasingly integrated with other marketing disciplines, like social media, content marketing, and influencer marketing. This holistic approach ensures consistent messaging and maximizes the reach and impact of campaigns.
Coordinating PR efforts with broader content strategies helps in creating cohesive brand narratives that resonate across multiple platforms.
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💡 Looking to take your PR game to the next level?
Prowly provides a unified platform for PR and Media Relations, centralizing all your internal and external communications for maximum efficiency and impact.
As part of the Semrush family, Prowly is uniquely enhanced with Semrush data, offering insights and capabilities not available in any other PR tool.
