5 Critical Strategies for B2B Public Relations
It’s hard to think of a profession that has changed more in the past 10 years than Public Relations (PR). In today’s world, PR is a business that progresses in real-time. It’s new ‘technology backbone’ has quickly evolved the B2B PR ecosystem and has created more opportunities for engagement. PR professionals can now feed valuable information in a timelier way to influencers, while at the same time, develop long-term relationships with their audience and other businesses from even greater distances. In order for PR professionals to fully pursue a future with PR, it will require a different approach to thinking. To help you get started with this pursuit, I would like to briefly introduce 5 critical strategies for boosting your B2B PR efforts.

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1) Integrate PR within your digital marketing planning process

The future of PR will require a new thinking paradigm. Rather than simply thinking about press releases and media communications, think of ways to integrate PR within your overall strategic digital marketing planning process.

2) Integrate PR across multiple marketing channels

PR is a vital tool that can be integrated harmoniously within multiple marketing channels. With this thinking, planning and strategy, you will be able to better reinforce your communication needs within your critical market segment and help generate increased awareness, credibility, increased share of voice (when compared to your largest competitors), as well as more leads and subsequent conversions to a sale.

3) Collaboration across the PR team is critical to success

To get the best work out of your team, you must be motivating, inspiring, generous, helpful and genuine. Encourage them to operate in real-time and to be digitally interested and invested. It may be hard to find these people, but once you have them, encourage them to try new things, form new ideas and take risks. Help them in their pursuit of continuous learning.

4) Organize your influencers into tiers

Every market has an ecosystem of influencers. The best PR programs organize their influencers into tiers. For each tier, they design a communication program specific to that group–-frequency of communication, message type, and method (face-to-face, email, video conference, social media, etc.). It used to be that the influencers were a fairly concentrated group. Today, almost anyone can quickly become an influencer if they have a well-respected blog, newsletter, conference, or consulting practice. It’s critically important that you understand that your influencers are not all the same, and that you must make your PR communication programs specific to their differences.

5) Don’t simply look at PR as a way to generate leads

Many of the most successful companies never use PR to generate leads. They use PR to generate awareness, change perceptions, and build the top of the funnel. In addition, when evaluating PR initiatives, you should be looking at web traffic, number of inbound links, ratio of new to repeat visitors, branded searches, fans, followers, tweets, retweets, comments to posts, likes, etc. From my experience, the most important part is consistency of measurement. When you use the same metrics over many periods in a consistent way, you can see patterns and trends that lead to better insight into what’s working and what isn’t. Furthermore, it is important to use measurement not to assign blame, but for learning purposes. I have learned more from mistakes than from successes. It’s important that you can tie measurement to your specific goals and keep coming back to them as time moves forward.