Partner Article

10 things to consider when developing a B2B PR strategy

A B2B PR strategy and B2C PR strategy have a lot in common. The key difference is the target audience. A marketing strategy or PR strategy that targets a business is very different from one that targets consumers.

Generally, B2C PR’s goal is to increase brand awareness for a client, while B2B PR is all about building trust. This is why you need a completely different strategy.

Here are 10 key components to have in your PR toolkit:

Assessing your target audience

Purchasing decisions with b2b are much more complicated than most consumer purchases. It’s likely that your target audience will be research led buyers. These are the buyers responsible for purchases for an entire company, not just individuals.

B2B businesses need to expand to utilise multiple channels, such as business and trade publications to increase their reach. Therefore, your PR program needs to target the correct buyers and decision makers.

While you can’t get to know and please everyone, you can create helpful buyer personas that represent your customers. These buyer personas will help you appeal directly to your client’s needs, interests, and pain points.

Clearly define your goals

The most successful public relations and marketing campaigns are always built around clear goals and objectives. Whether that is increasing brand exposure, generate more enquiries or receive more media coverage, it is important to set your strategy around your goal.

Longer term ambitions are your goals, while objectives are the smaller tasks that need completing in order to meet your ambition.

The SMART method

The key to setting objectives is to make sure they are SMART. PR professionals use the SMART method to help shape campaign activity and ensure their objectives are attainable. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time bound

A good example of a goal would be to increase media coverage of your new software system. A SMART goal would be to include an exact increase of 15% over a six-month period. Each of the SMART parameters have been met, and you have a clear timeframe for your objective.

Optimise your content creation

Content optimisation is becoming an increasingly important factor in a public relations strategy .With the PR world constantly evolving and new digital channels emerging, the way we communicate needs to evolve too.

Both PR and content marketing focus on consistent, on-brand storytelling which attracts and maintains an audience. Whilst communication skills are important in both, PR is based around managing perceptions of your clients to advance their brand.

By creating consistent content, your reach on search engines will increase, thereby increasing website traffic. This will help increase your brand exposure and get in front of the right audience.

Paid media and earned media coverage

Securing B2B coverage is a simple process, but one that needs professional execution. In the past, PR campaigns would involve issuing a press release and then sending it to any journalist who would listen.

Now, there are numerous ways to get your content out there and achieve the biggest impact for your business. Well rounded marketing and PR campaigns will utilise both earned and paid media.

Earned media is free publicity. For example, when someone shares a news story about your company, maybe trough publishing a press release our sharing a blog on social media. Paid media is traditional advertising - crucial for a PR strategy.

Thought leadership

Positioning yourself as a thought leader is an extremely useful PR strategy. If you have particular knowledge on something you feel isn’t well known or talked about, you could be onto a PR winner.

When thought leaders are seen as a reliable source of information, they can rapidly increase media coverage and power engagement.

Whilst maintaining though leadership means creating content on a consistent basis, it can really be worth the effort. In fact, thought leadership significantly influences brand perception and business to business buying behaviours.

Amplification on social media outlets

The use of social media as a tool for Pr and marketing has grown rapidly over the last few years. If you aren’t using social media as a part of your strategy, you’re missing out big time.

B2B decision makers are on social media more than ever, only adding to the benefits of social media. A recent study found that 80% of b2b leads come from LinkedIn, 13% on Twitter and 7% on Facebook.

Stakeholder mapping

Not mapping out your key stakeholders is a key reason why many projects do not meet targets. Stakeholder mapping is a great way to avoid this.

Stakeholder mapping involves identifying and categorising your key stakeholders so that you can identify and monitor their needs.This is why stakeholder mapping should be a key component to your b2b pr strategy.

Competitive analysis

Keeping tabs on what your competitors are doing is an important part of a B2B PR strategy. A competitive analysis is the process of assessing what one ore more of your competitors are doing compared to your business. This will provide you with useful information that you can use to your advantage.

The goal of an B2B competitive analysis is to identify any threats, weaknesses or opportunities. For a PR strategy, you should analyse the communication function and activities of you0r competitors.

Six steps of competitive analysis

Analysing your competitors can give you great insight into industry trends, how they communicate with stakeholders and their audience engagement tactics. These are the general steps to performing a competitor analysis for you business:

1. Determine who your competitors are
2. Determine what they offer
3. Research their sales tactics and results
4. Take a look at their pricing and any perks they offer
5. Take note of their content and PR strategy
6. Perform a SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis refers to strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your business. Once you have an awarenss of the operations going on around you, you can build a more informed PR strategy.

Using SEO and Google news

SEO is a huge part of Digital PR strategy. Research has shown that the number one result on Google gets more than 30% of all clicks. Ranking highly on Google will generate far more traffic to your website, and highlight anything newsworthy about your company.

With its recent update, pr firms are leveraging Google news for its increasing placement opportunities. The top stories carousel at the top of the SERP features the most relevant news articles to the search.

If your article features factors seen as beneficial by the algorithm, it will be placed at the top. This makes it more likely that your content will be seen by your target market.

Measure success

Being aware of the impact of your PR campaign is key to the success of future PR strategies. Measuring your success will allow you to see the results of your efforts, and what strategies have and haven’t worked to receive maximum impact. It will also give you an accurate picture of what your audience wants to see.

There are a many of ways to measure your campaign success. Using a media monitoring tool, allows you to track metrics across socials and monitor brand mentions. Having a predetermined goal in mind will help you understand the sorts of KPI you’ll be tracking.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lis Anderson .