In PR, we find a slightly excessive focus on the B2C market. It’s understandable since, traditionally, this was where much of the PR activity took place, but what about businesses that sell to other businesses? Shouldn’t they also be able to use these strategies and techniques to reach a larger market share and achieve enhanced visibility? With a B2B market worth $20 trillion globally in 2022, which is expected to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 10%, B2B PR is an important aspect of any organisation’s marketing toolkit, and it’s often missed.
Tailored PR strategies, in particular, play a pivotal role in driving visibility and growth for B2B companies. By sharing our proven strategies for B2B growth and offering tips to tap into PR’s benefits, we aim to inspire you with insights from industry experts and real-life case studies. This is your opportunity to see what’s possible and envision a future of enhanced visibility and accelerated growth for your business.
Why B2B PR matters
PR has always offered benefits for B2B companies, but in today’s increasingly busy, overcrowded commercial space, finding new ways and opportunities to connect with and reach clients (both new and old) are crucial. While there are general strategies that can be effective for most companies, there is rarely a ‘one size fits all’ recipe for success. That’s where tailored B2B PR strategies come in, offering a unique approach that understands and caters to the specific needs and objectives of your business, thereby enhancing your visibility and growth potential.
Most businesses think they have a pretty good idea of what PR is, what it does and how it works – but most of the models out there are based on the B2C market, where a different approach is needed. Although the focuses are often the same, how we reach out to and interact with these audiences involves an alternative approach. This is due to the nature of B2B relationships, which are often long-term and based on trust, and how they differ from what’s needed when forging a connection in the B2C space, where the focus is more on immediate sales and customer satisfaction.
What is B2B PR?
Communication is crucial when attempting to connect with any audience in any sector – but when it comes to B2B, getting your message across in the right way becomes even more critical. When your audience comprises of organisations rather than individuals, you need to adopt a different approach to PR that allows you to interact successfully with these more diverse (and sometimes more demanding) audiences. Although you are still looking to connect with key decision makers on an individual level, overall you are aligning your company’s offering with another, demonstrating that you understand their needs and objectives and are a good fit for them to work with.
B2B PR is the key to this enhanced level of communication – involving many different mediums, from blogs and advertisements to published thought pieces and social media. It’s the umbrella term for a wide variety of diverse techniques which market your business in a very specific way. That’s why B2B PR is often the missing piece in corporate marketing strategies where concentrating on traditional channels alone has left growth stuck and stagnant – as this is one of the most meaningful ways companies can connect directly with buyers and procurement teams.
The main goal of PR is establishing and then building a positive public image for your organisation. This is not just about creating a good reputation, but also about shaping how your business is perceived by your target audience. B2B PR can certainly deliver some quick wins, but in terms of getting results it tends to be a slower burn compared with other areas of marketing. That’s why it’s essential to invest in B2B PR as soon as possible and build solid brand awareness from the beginning.
While B2B PR is most commonly employed as part of a company’s wider marketing strategy, it’s also worth noting its effectiveness in crisis management. Whether it’s a reputational crisis or negative press coverage, B2B PR can offer swift remedial support, providing a safety net for individuals and companies alike. With the right PR involvement, a good PR agency can swoop in and save the day, ensuring your business’s reputation remains intact and your clients’ trust is maintained.
What does a B2B marketing agency do?
B2B marketing agencies exist to offer the expert guidance and support which is often necessary to help your business get noticed by the right people for the right reasons. They can assist in the development and execution of tailored B2B PR strategies, enabling you to outsource the complex professional aspects and the development of strategy so you can step back and see results with minimal input and effort needed internally. B2B agencies employ teams with specific knowledge and expertise in this area of marketing, so they are best placed to help you navigate the increasingly complex landscape and secure the highest possible return on investment. With this expertise, agencies craft bespoke, highly effective strategies and implement them on your behalf, helping your B2B brand flourish whilst taking the pressure off internal marketing teams.
B2B PR agencies provide diverse, dedicated services, usually employed as part of a tailored strategy designed to keep your brand relevant and memorable. This mix often includes (but isn’t limited to) media relations, thought leadership, crisis management, and even aspects that cross over into the realm of digital marketing, such as content creation and social media.
Understanding B2B PR
To really understand B2B PR and its objectives, how it works, and the impact it can have, we need to dive a little deeper and look closer at its fundamental elements. It’s useful and important to determine not just the objectives of B2B PR but also how these and the strategies we employ may differ from a B2C approach.
How does B2B PR differ from B2C PR?
Broadly speaking, B2B PR uses many of the same strategies and techniques to work towards what are ostensibly the same goals for both B2C and B2B companies. There are several essential elements that are found within both types of PR – from sculpting a positive public image and circulating press releases to generating buzz around specific products or services and crisis or reputation management where needed. But where B2B PR differs is that it is dedicated to B2B connections, where the expectations and motivations of buyers are different as is the relationship between company and client, meaning the type and tone of communications must also diversify to fulfil their needs.
One of the simplest and easiest ways to explain B2B PR at a glance is with the 4 C’s of B2B marketing: Connection, Content, Communication, and Conversion. Each of these elements is crucial in B2B PR, and understanding their role can help you develop a comprehensive PR strategy.
1/ Connection: This one’s crucial (that’s why it’s first in this list). Without meaningful connections with your target audience, whatever you do afterwards will have little impact. Connection is also one of the most challenging aspects of B2B PR, as each client and business has different needs.
2/ Conversation: Communication is an integral aspect of PR, and within B2B PR, this relates to tone of voice, copywriting, and channel selection. Forming a continuing conversation helps you develop and maintain that all-important connection with future clients.
3/ Content Creation: Generating a steady stream of consistently high-quality, targeted content that is shared across a variety of channels, from traditional press outlets to social media. This is much easier said than done and requires preparation, planning, and close collaboration to get it right.
4/ Conversion: The bottom line most companies focus on – converting potential buyers into loyal clients, aka money in the bank. This can be a natural result of your PR approach or involve a strategy to maximise the other methods employed.
Within each of these 4 C’s, B2B PR uses a wider variety of tactics to attract and retain audience attention, including blogging, thought leadership, media relations, and crisis communications. The primary objectives of B2B PR involve focusing on all of these elements together to produce the best possible results, so the best strategies enable us to deliver on the 4 C’s cost-effectively and holistically.
How can B2B companies leverage PR to build a positive brand image?
Most B2B companies can benefit from focusing on PR, which can be an incredibly powerful strategy compared with marketing techniques that tend to excel in a B2C market, like social media and traditional advertising.
To illustrate the advantages of leveraging PR in the B2B space, it’s helpful to briefly look at the four types of B2B markets: producers, resellers, governments, and institutions. Within each of these sectors, several stand-out attributes are required for clients to fully engage with you. These include trust, authority, proven results, and credibility. B2B PR techniques focus on cultivating these crucial emotional connections, in turn helping businesses reach and make a positive impression on many more potential clients.
As is the case with B2C PR, before any thought pieces are published or press releases can be submitted, it’s absolutely crucial to have a clear impression of your target audiences and how best to communicate with them. Getting the most out of any B2B PR campaign involves first understanding your market and then going deeper to get to know your audiences and how you can reach and connect with them in the most cost-efficient, impactful way.
Effective B2B PR strategies
Seeing tangible, meaningful results and ROI can be challenging, even for companies who already appreciate the value of PR and know that they need it. That’s because any PR campaign or promotional efforts must be underpinned by an effective, carefully engineered strategy developed with audience needs and goals in mind. When creating an effective strategy, B2B companies must seek out specific techniques and approaches that best serve their sector and tailor them to fit their unique audiences and objectives.
How can B2B companies create and implement an effective PR strategy?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this question – because each company is unique and has varying goals at any given time. For example, startups will need a strategy different from an old-fashioned institution looking to revamp its image or a CEO requiring some remedial support to polish their profile post-scandal. Good B2B PR evolves and adapts continuously to match a company’s changing objectives, audience needs, and social landscapes.
We can, however, share some of the must-haves you generally find within any good B2B PR strategy. Some key components of a successful B2B PR campaign include:
Content as king – The average person consumes a massive 74GB of data per day (roughly translated to watching 16 movies within 12 hours). This is excellent news for businesses on the one hand, as there are many more opportunities to reach and attract audiences, but at the same time, it poses a challenge as attention spans are more restricted, making it easier for your content to be missed and drowned out. This is why a focus on content is crucial for B2B organisations – as carefully planned, well-executed creative collateral (from blog posts and articles published in print to social media posts and visual media) is what captures the attention of your target client and cuts through the noise.
Inclusivity – It’s easy to get caught up in targeting specific niches and audience groups, and satisfying your potential clients’ unique needs is key. But companies need to strike a balance between satisfying the needs of their target markets whilst also ensuring people of different ethnicities, cultures, ages and disabilities are visible and considered within your approach. Inclusivity is increasingly becoming more of a priority in terms of audience values, particularly in the corporate sector, where brands are often seen as out of touch with their clients or biased towards specific demographics.
However, your promotional activity must be backed up with genuine intention, which can be demonstrated through your company values and culture. Both B2C and B2B consumers are wiser than ever to deceitful tactics like green- and pink-washing, and with information spreading faster than ever before, the potential fallout of this can be incredibly damaging. Avoid using allyship and social justice causes as an advertising ploy – instead, build these values into your offering and make them an integral part of your company’s MO to help build trust instead of damaging its reputation.
Personalisation – Although this is often listed as a B2C tactic, it is also a frequently overlooked but essential aspect of successful B2B campaigns. Your audience needs to feel as though you intimately understand their needs and are speaking directly to them.
Cross-promotion – Contemporary PR campaigns tend to work smarter, not harder. They zoom out and adopt a holistic approach that enables content and campaigns to be duplicated, remodelled, and reshared in different ways across multiple platforms for maximum impact.
Insight-informed, data-driven approaches – One of the benefits of the evolution of technology and digital platforms is the significantly enhanced and more detailed feedback available to help us monitor the progress of PR activity and inform future campaigns. This is also a challenge because of the sheer number of different actions and numbers you can track and decipher. Many organisations neglect data entirely or use broad (and often inaccurate) metrics simply because they’re overwhelmed by the complex nature and sheer number of measurable elements available. Quite simply, they don’t know where to start! Setting up analytics is one thing, but businesses must read the data they provide.
No matter what direction you decide to take or which approach you choose, it’s crucial to remember clear goals and target audience segmentation when developing your strategy.
Empowering growth: Harnessing the power of tailored B2B PR strategies
Adopting and implementing tailored PR strategies is more important for companies in the B2B space than ever before. Increasingly crowded markets and media channels make enhancing visibility and driving growth key priorities for brands, enabling you to make the most of the many opportunities to gain exposure and get your company noticed.
It can be daunting to embark on a PR campaign with so much to think about and so many new skills to learn, but focusing on the fundamentals is a great place to start. In this article, we’ve covered the basics you need to know to get you started – and some key areas to focus on to help you hit the ground running. By concentrating first on the audience and putting robust plans and analytics in place, you can try different approaches to see which works best for your company.
Without expert guidance on your side, it’s riskier, but setbacks can be a valuable opportunity to learn from your mistakes and put the insights you’ve discovered into practice next time. To maximise long-term growth, ongoing evaluation and adaptation are also crucial during PR strategy development to ensure you’re continuing to connect fully with your audiences and avoid wasting resources or funds on promotional activity moving forward.
If you need expert support with your B2B PR efforts, we’re here to help. Give our team a shout today to learn how we can help your business stand out.