B2B PR & Influencer Marketing

Introduction

The concept of Public Relations (PR) primarily refers to the mechanism for building credibility, authority, and trust for your organisation/brand within target markets through professional media outlets. Thus, the key enabler underlying this channel relates to your organisation forming and maintaining healthy relationships with key stakeholders within the broader media space.

It’s worth mentioning early on that although you can utilise and manage this channel in-house, this is one of those occurrences where a professional agency could dramatically boost your PR strategy effectiveness. Ultimately, an agency will have pre-built relationships with these media stakeholders and have expert knowledge of the fine nuances present with the PR sector. This of course doesn’t mean you can’t execute your strategy internally, but if PR forms a large part of your broader marketing strategy (and you have both ambitious objectives and a budget to match) then at the very least you should consider a dedicated PR agency to assist.

Due to the structure of this complete guide that separates out content marketing and each channel individually – it may give the perception that PR is an ‘isolated’ channel when the reality is much different. Ultimately, the PR channel is directly enabled by your brand, content marketing strategy and wider marketing channel mix to deliver value – so it’s a fully integrated channel as opposed to being isolated. Due to the fact these key areas have been covered in above sections, this PR section will take a narrow focus (but this isn’t a reflection on the actual proportion or number of components within the PR channel).

1. Public Relations (PR)

As noted, the broader Public Relations channel is primarily used to help your organisation/brand drive positive sentiment and standing within target markets and sectors through professional media outlets (utilising owned, paid, and earnt sub-channels).

1.1 – Step 1: Prepare

• Objectives: Increasing credibility and trust in your brand is very difficult to measure – in fact, anything related to the broader brand topic carries difficulty with attribution and measurement. With that in mind, you need to be specific with your objectives and ensure you have the mechanisms in place to measure them.
• Agency Selection: A dedicated agency doesn’t necessarily need to be used, but as previously mentioned, they need to be considered if you are to drive maximum value and usage from this channel. You need to use a comprehensive agency selection process here, and ensure they have experience executing PR campaigns within your target markets and sectors.

1.2 – Step 2: Develop

• Audience Exploration: Here you need to refer to your brand strategy and marketing intelligence data to surface key insight related to your target audiences and personas. Put simply, before you can craft key messaging and content that will resonate and drive credibility – you need to fully understand the profile of your audience and buyers.
• Focus Areas: Here you need to decide the key themes and areas that your PR strategy will focus on. This doesn’t just include your products and services but should take your broader value proposition and brand into account. Further to this, you can utilise key company milestones and events such as launches and major news announcements to form the core of your PR campaign.
• Key Messaging: Once you have decided on the key personas to target and your key focus areas – now you need to distil this into a set of key messages (ideally for each target persona and the industries/segments you are attempting to reach). This is a great example of where a dedicated agency with experience in your target markets will be able to help as not only will they have an understanding of what will resonate with your target audiences, but also with the journalists and media stakeholders who will ultimately engage and action your PR strategy.
• Assets: This includes the broader content that will be utilised as part of your PR strategy – from articles, to press releases, to briefings that will be used to both engage media stakeholders and target audiences. It’s essential that your audience exploration, focus areas and key messaging are developed for this stage to ensure alignment.

1.3 – Step 3: Execute

• Outreach: Whether you run this internally or through an agency, this stage is where your PR content assets are proactively delivered to media contacts and stakeholders with the goal of them resonating and ultimately being featured in target media spots, publishers and web
• Monitoring: PR is a real-time and on-going mechanism – so it’s key you keep abreast of industry and market developments. As your credibility grows, the more opportunity you will have to create reactive content and assets to ‘piggyback’ off trending and popular topics within target markets. Through consistent monitoring and continued relationship building with media stakeholders – you can generate a solid stream of opportunities to build your thought leadership position.
• Measurement: As previously mentioned, attribution and reporting can be difficult with the PR channel – so the key is utilising diverse objectives that collectively cover all bases.

2. B2B Influencer Marketing

B2B influencers are primarily individuals or commentators who hold a certain level of credibility, influence and appeal within a particular industry, market or niche – meaning that endorsement of your brand, product or service by an influencer can drive significant value in the form of positive awareness and interest among their captive audience.

Although there is a mix of paid/non-paid influencers across the B2B space, the below will list five key elements contained within a B2B influencer marketing (paid) strategy.

• Objectives: An obvious first step is to develop the key objectives you are aiming to achieve with your B2B influencer marketing strategy. If you can answer the question ‘why?’ – then any key details will naturally flow enabling, you to develop several key objectives.
• Focus: Here you need decide exactly what you want your influencer strategy to focus on, or in other words, what you want your chosen influencers to actively promote. This not only refers to the core of your focus (such as company, brand, product, or service) but also the key messaging, USP’s and value proposition that will be bundled with it. Further to this, you need to craft relevant CTA’s and decide a clear user flow from the point of awareness to soft conversion.
• Asset: Once you have decided exactly what you want to promote and have developed the relevant marketing considerations, now it’s time to craft the content and creative assets that the influencer will use to promote your core focus area (company, brand, product or service). Depending on the preference of the actual influencer, they may require a certain level of creative freedom and flexibility when creating the assets, particularly if they abide by a certain style (not that this includes both visual and verbal elements). The key here is balance and collaboration as flexibility should be provided, but you brand visual and verbal identity should both be heavily followed).
• Search & Select: This doesn’t necessarily need to fall late on in the process, but its optimal to have a good idea of what your key focus and assets will be along with your choice of target markets and audiences. Along with any other criteria, you need to compile a list of suitable influencers within your target industries and markets. After this you will be ready to make an actual selection based on your criteria, using data points such as price, current engagement, number of competitors worked with etc. Once you have made your choice, you can contact the influencer and initiate proceedings.
• Measurement: As always you need to measure your influencer marketing campaigns using a variety of soft and hard metrics. From impressions and clicks to leads generated and total cost – the aim is to report on the overall ROI and effectiveness of the influencer’s efforts.