How this startup got crazy press coverage this month (and how you can too)

Alex Schulte, content marketing manager at Centuro Global, got his startup covered by The Times, The Daily Mail, and The Evening Standard. And didn’t have to pay them a penny.

Headlines like this: 

Results like this:

✅ 125 sign-ups from corporate accounts

✅ 92% rise in clicks from Google search in 28 days

✅ 3,000 clicks through Google Discover. 

How did the man do it?

TL;DR

1. Create something that links your ICP’s concerns with those of the public

2. Don’t expect instant results; it’s a long-term play

3. Leverage other people’s networks to get the story into the right hands.

Alex said: 

1. “Link your ICP’s concerns with the concerns of a wider audience”

Write something that doesn’t just appeal to your ICP but resonates with the public. 

For Alex, this was the broken British visa system, which linked directly to the needs of Centuro’s ICP: businesses that need to source overseas talent. 

Alex cautioned against any “arbitrary” mindset. 

“If you’re doing this just to get in the press,” Alex explained, “you’re going about it all wrong.” 

“You need to bring something to the table.” 

Through 3 months of painstaking research, Alex found that Britain’s post-Brexit immigration system would fail to “kickstart growth” because ‘skilled workers’ include: 

• Betting shop and takeaway shop managers

• Estate agents

• Driving instructors. 

This meant skilled workers like AI researchers and engineers were denied access due to Home Office backlogs. 

This was important news, as Alex said. “This was in the public interest, useful to anyone invested in the economic success and institutional integrity of this country.” 

The government wants to kickstart growth. Take on the NIMBYs. Expand the grid. Unleash infrastructure projects. Mainline AI into the veins of the economy and public sector. Achieve Net Zero by 2050. 

As Alex said, “You can’t kickstart growth unless top private sector companies have easy access to genuinely skilled labour.

2. Remember, it’s a long-term play

Alex was lucky—his bosses encouraged him to pursue the research. 

“They took a punt on a piece of thought leadership content,” he said, “knowing that it wasn’t going to have an immediate commercial payoff for several months.” 

It wasn’t easy. 

For several months, he pored over Home Office statistics, constructed representative data sets, and cross-referenced them with data on industry skills gaps, writing, and formatting while doing his actual full-time job.

“It took a lot of fiddly hours.” 

But within months, he had written a landmark report on the broken state of the UK’s skilled visa system, one that spoke of a wider national story: of decaying infrastructure and institutional incompetence.

Next, he knew he had to:

3. Leverage other people’s networks 

Alex isn’t a journalist or a PR professional—he’s a content marketing manager. “I don’t know how to pitch to journalists,” he said.

Centuro hired a PR agency they’d worked with on prior campaigns. A company that knew the industry and the business. 

This “definitely helped”, said Alex. The PR agency knew the right journalists to contact. 

Alex also: 

• Generated hype with a pre-launch sign-up

• Motivated people to join and retargeted them

• Gated the content initially.

Then, once the report had gone to press, they made it publicly available. 

“This was important to us. We were shedding light on something that really needed attention.” 

The results… 

“... surpassed all my expectations,” said Alex. 

The Daily Mail covered it, The Times and The Evening Standard. Yahoo Finance, Eastern Eye, and a whole host of major industry publications. 

Within weeks of publishing the report, they’d signed up over one hundred major corporate accounts. 

“Some really big British and American multinationals,” said Alex, “though I’m not at liberty to divulge their names.”

If you want to read How to Fix the UK’s Broken Visa System, you can do so here.