It’s hard to deny the importance of proper PR to your business. Long gone are the days when all that mattered was the quality of your products and what they could offer to the potential customer. These times, your image is equally if not even more important. To illustrate the point, no matter how good your smartphone design is, if someone starts a rumor about you cutting down forests to expand the production lines, you may have a potential crisis brewing and ready to explode in full force.
The same, except worse, applies to B2B relations. Your business partners are even more cautious about their image than particular clients and may decide to jump ship at first sight of a major crisis. As such, it is imperative to have a modern approach to PR work to either nip such a disaster in the bud or at least resolve it as quickly as possible. You can develop a strategy yourself, with the help of a freelancing professional, a PR agency, or a government relations agency – depending on how you operate and what your needs are.
To help you get started, we’ve prepared a concise guide on how to build a B2B PR strategy, with steps like defining your goals, identifying your target audience, deciding on the best media outlet, determining the best approach to implementing it, assessing the success of it, and finally implementing corrective changes to ensure relevance. Follow the advice below and learn how to master B2B PR!
Step 1: Define Your B2B PR Goals
The first step to building a successful B2B PR strategy is defining what you’re trying to achieve with it. For example, if you want to raise awareness about some new product or service you’re offering, your goal should be to get as many people interested in it as possible.
However, if you’re aiming to increase sales by doing some PR campaigns, then your goals should reflect that. Needless to say, the more specific you are about your goals, the easier it will be for you to create a winning strategy.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
You could have one of the best products or services on the market, but they’re only as good as the people who buy them. Thus, you need to identify your target audience. You may be thinking that you already know who your target audience is. However, this isn’t always true. For example, if you’re a financial institution and you think that everyone can benefit from what you do, then you’re wrong.
Instead, you should identify who would use your services most often and focus on delivering your messages to them. This way, you’ll be able to reach out to a larger audience as well but only to those who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
Step 3: Decide on the Best Media Outlet
To get the word out there, you’re going to need the help of some media outlet. If you work with a small company, then you may be able to spread your message via social media and other platforms or with the help of influencers and bloggers.
However, if you have a larger business, then reaching out to other companies would be a better idea. For example, if you’re selling financial products and services, reaching out to related magazines would be far more effective. Similarly, if you’re selling gardening products, you should focus on getting your message out there via gardening magazines.
Step 4: Determine the Best Approach for Implementation
Now you know your goals and audience and which media outlet you’ll be using. However, this doesn’t mean that the PR campaign is done. Now comes the hard part: actually coming up with a winning approach. While there are a lot of ways to go about this, each one of them has its own pros and cons.
For example, while outreach is considered one of the best things you can do when creating your B2B PR strategy, it also requires a lot of time and effort. There are less reputable companies that use spam emails and social media posts to get their message out there. And while these methods may seem like an easy win on paper, they have their own set of problems.
For example, if you send a bunch of spam emails, then your message will become buried in the hundreds of similar emails tons of people receive every day. And despite their best efforts, most people will end up deleting such messages without even reading them. As for social media posts, they may seem like an easy way to get your message out there, but the sheer amount of posts people see daily can make it harder for your post to stand out.
However, you can use other methods as well. For example, if you’re selling a large-scale product, then sponsoring an event might be a good idea. Similarly, if you’re selling a service or some kind of app, you could try to get it featured on a special website or as part of something else.
Whatever you choose, ensure you control the whole process so that it’s carried out properly.
Step 5: Assess Your Success
Now that you’ve come up with a winning approach and implemented it, it’s time to assess how it worked out. Did you manage to spread the word? Did you attract more potential clients or even business partners? If you did, great! If not, then why not? Was your message too boring? Did you offer something no one was willing to buy? Or is there something else you should have done?
The most important thing about coming up with a successful B2B PR strategy is that you’re always ready to take feedback from those around you. Listen to what others have to say about your marketing efforts, and think about what could have been done better. Even if you disagree with some of the things people say, remember to avoid making the same mistakes again.
Step 6: Implement Corrective Changes
If your PR campaign wasn’t successful, it’s time to make some changes. Whether they’re big or small, you need to do something different. For example, if your outreach didn’t yield any fruit, then maybe it would be a good idea to change your approach and try something else.
At the same time, if your posts on social media didn’t stand out or were forgotten too fast, then you should also rethink your approach. As such, once you figure out what went wrong with your PR campaign, come up with a plan to fix it and try again. Don’t give up too easily!
Conclusion
Starting a PR campaign is no easy task, but it’s also not impossible, especially when you have the right tools to help you. Start by defining your goals, identifying your target audience, and picking your media outlet, then make sure you come up with a winning approach.
Finally, assess the success of your campaign and implement corrective changes to improve it. Hopefully, this guide has helped you with your PR strategy, and you’re now ready to go out there and conquer the world! While it might seem like a lot of work, you’ll soon see that it’s all worth the hassle. Good luck to you and your agency!