Push your B2B messages with PR

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PR, Public Relations, is a broad church. Essentially, it is about managing your company’s external image by influencing the media’s coverage of it. PR represents a great opportunity for B2B technology companies. As well as the traditional trade press, the online sphere offers many opportunities to influence and direct conversation towards positive representations of your company, products and services. Taking lessons from what has worked well for B2C companies, how can B2B technology companies use this route to further their image and profile?

Find your prospective audience – Before you can communicate to them, you need to get to know the key voices in your sector. Signing up to Google news alerts will help, as will searching all the national and trade press for key words pertinent to your company and identifying the writer. You can start your own list of interested journalists and influencers. Don’t forget to find out who the key bloggers are. They can be incredibly useful to B2B tech companies.

Get to know them – If you simply started bombarding a list of names with messages you are unlikely to get anywhere fast. The easiest way to get to know them, their interests and specialisms is to phone them. Call them, introduce yourself, say you have seen they article they wrote on “X,Y or Z” and pro-actively ask for their email address so you can keep them up to date with your company news.

OK, you’ve found the bloggers and journalists interested in your sector, you’ve introduced yourself to them via phone or email, now you want to utilise your new contact and get some positive messages out into the media sphere about your company. This is best done via a press release. A press release is a short informational document that the press use to inform their writing. In order for it to stand out from the crowd, it needs to have something that makes it newsworthy.

Find a hook for your story – Journalists want something new, they also want an angle that hasn’t been over used. A hook for a B2B tech company would be something like a new product launch, an innovation in the marketplace, evidence your product or service works better than anyone else or an award win.

Less is more – limit your press release to one message and keep it under one page. Journalists receive hundreds of these a day. They want to know at first glance what it is and whether it is worth covering.

Personalise it – as with sales, the one size fits all approach does not work. Craft a standard press release, then tailor it to the people you wish to target. This followed up by a phone call will have a far greater effect than one press release going to a BCCed list. The most effective communication campaigns are those that have been tailored. It is clear to the recipient that great care has been taken to contact them.

Feeding stories into the press and online is not as easy as it looks. By becoming a key influencer or thought-leader yourself it is more likely that your company’s press releases will have a kudos attached that ordinarily would not have been there. Trade publications, bloggers, journalists have space to fill. Find something noteworthy to fill it and you will reap the benefit of it.