PR isn’t just about media kits, interviews and press releases. In our rapidly evolving and diverse commercial landscape, this straightforward approach simply doesn’t cut it anymore. For B2B companies in particular overcoming the challenge of engaging other businesses, especially on social media, requires a specialised and targeted toolkit. With so much to consider and more platforms to choose from than ever before, it’s not always easy to know how to create and implement powerful PR campaigns that truly stand out.
In this article, we’ll walk you through expert tips, upcoming trends and real-world examples to show you how to unleash the power of modern PR through the fabulous framework known as the 5 Ps. Understanding and implementing these can help you to create compelling content and campaigns that engage and retain audience attention. The focus and approach for B2B PR is different from B2C, but these guidelines show that when you utilise B2B-focused elements correctly (social media platforms in particular), they can promise huge potential for brand awareness and business growth.
1. Purpose
If you want to deliver an outstanding PR campaign, you first need to establish a clear purpose. This is the foundation of any successful marketing effort and is specific and unique for every business and its campaigns. You also need to define your core goal at this stage – is it awareness, sales, generating leads, improving customer loyalty, or something else entirely? Purpose-driven PR delivers higher engagement and resonates more closely with audiences than a blanket, unaligned campaign. Defining specific objectives, identifying your target audience and ensuring you align with wider business goals and strategies is crucial. Expert PR strategist Sarah Jones sums it up nicely: “Purpose is the cornerstone of effective PR. It not only guides strategy, but also builds trust and authenticity with audiences.’’
We can see the success rate of focusing on purpose across many different real-world examples and case studies, and campaigns that prioritise and are guided by purpose tend to see an uplift in positive consumer perception. Patagonia, for example, publicly commits to environmental sustainability, and its PR efforts orbit around this mission. Each piece of content strengthens their message and builds brand reputation and credibility in this space. This cultivates a strong sense of trust with their audience and ensures that their content is always impactful for those it’s intended for. It’s worth noting that your purpose must be authentic and closely tied to your brand values and company culture. A recent study by The Guardian found that if a brand was seen as more purposeful, 58% of the uplift was driven by media placement, 28% of the uplift was down to the brand itself and only 14% was driven by the creative.
A crucial aspect of pinpointing purpose (and promoting it) is to develop a good understanding of who you are aligning with. What type of people will resonate with your purpose and want to engage with your brand? The next step then is to identify your target audience. Doing an in-depth audit of your current clients and partners is key to understanding who you need to be tailoring your campaigns to. Assessing industries, company sizes, needs and pain points of your existing clients should be a good place to start with this.
The importance of customer feedback is often overlooked, but this can reveal valuable insights about what they love (and what they don’t). Discovering the characteristics they value most about your services or products through this process will help you to flip the narrative on its head and lead with this as the focal point in your campaign. Focusing on the needs, wants, and desires of your customers will speak directly to their mindset and make your product a more obvious choice.
Within the world of B2B PR, there are three types of segmentation in the market you need to focus on: industry segmentation, role-based segmentation, and the company size itself. Is the audience specific to certain industries? Are you targeting decision-makers such as CEOs or partnerships managers? Also, is your business more suitable for larger corporations or the needs of small start-ups? It’s useful to develop audience personas that characterise your ideal future clients – detailing their demographics, interests, preferred comms channels, engagement patterns, day-to-day challenges and blockers or objections, as well as their overall goals. You can use CRM analytics, surveys, social media insights, social listening and interviews to source this data. These elements form the foundations for a successful PR campaign, but it goes without saying that testing and learning are some of the best techniques you can use to nail your content. Experimenting with messaging and channels to see which performs best with your audience is essential, and will help shape future strategy.
2. Planning
Strategic planning is the backbone of building a successful PR campaign. It requires identifying key stakeholders involved, budgeting, effectively developing timelines, and outlining the tactics needed to execute the PR strategy effectively. Engaging the right stakeholders at the right time can be a challenge, and partners, investors, customers, and agencies all need different levels of communication based on their influence and the level of detail required. These groups form a hierarchy ranging from those directly involved through to ‘inform’ levels of detail. Striking the balance of the information shared with each individual is a skill in itself, and not correctly engaging the right people at the right time can severely impact timelines and delay the success of campaigns. Not doing this effectively can lead to ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’, or on the flip side not engaging senior leadership early enough can pause campaigns as you’ve not received the green flag internally. Building strong relationships with key stakeholders and gaining their feedback and buy-in is essential to the planning phase.
Budget planning is also an essential component of the preparatory phase of any PR campaign. It’s important to determine the overall budget for the project, considering all associated costs from media buying, content creation and production to influencer collaborations, creative tools, and advertising. You’ll also need to focus spending on the channels that best align with the campaign objectives – for example, if brand awareness is the KPI, allocating an increased budget to specific media placements and influencer partnerships would be a good investment and budget efficiency. It’s also crucial to actively monitor the campaign throughout, and assess if the budget needs to be reallocated or adjusted based on the real-time data and any opportunities that emerge. A good rule of thumb is to allocate 30% – 40% of the budget on the content creation itself, and then 40% – 50% on the promotion of content or media purchase. Wherever possible, include contingency budgets and generously allocate funds during the planning phase just in case to prevent overspending. We’ve heard of many PR projects thwarted through insufficient funds, which can lead to an unfinished or poorly executed campaign and impaired results.
Once you’ve identified your audience, why you’re speaking to them and the budget you have to deliver your campaign, you’ll need to decide on the content type, channel, resources needed, and timelines associated with your promotional efforts. Deciding on the content types that are best suited for the message you’d like to convey is crucial. These could include blogs, podcasts, videos, organic social media, paid social media, user-generated content, influencer content, and webinars. The next step is to decide on the channels that these will be promoted on such as Meta, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, blog channels, websites, or elsewhere. A successful campaign can implement a diverse mix of different content types and channels to ensure you’re reaching and engaging the different audience segments. Flexing the right channels at the right time based on the strengths of each platform and content form can ensure you deliver a comprehensive plan to achieve key business goals.
Once the clear SMART objectives are defined (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), the next step involves developing a detailed content calendar outlining publishing dates for the campaign content. This ensures that the content is well-focused and consistently high-quality, with each piece of content aligning with your wider business content pillars. It’s also essential to map out key milestones and deadlines against a timeline that aids accountability and organisation, but be sure to plan in buffer time for flexibility to accommodate any unexpected challenges or opportunities. Monitoring progress regularly allows you to adjust timelines as needed, adopting an agile, responsive approach, and giving your campaign the best chance of success.
Once you’ve established the timelines and channel/content mix, you can use a range of tools to effectively plan your campaign. For social media management, platforms like Hootsuite, Buffer, Later and Sprout Social are brilliant for planning and scheduling as well as reporting and measuring the success of your social activity. For content creation Canva, Adobe suite and CapCut are some of the most popular choices for generating high-quality graphics and content. For analytics and monitoring Google Analytics, Sprinklr, and Brandwatch can measure the impact of campaigns and deep-dive into social listening which can inform PR strategies. Project management and collaboration tools are also essential, especially for larger-scale campaigns. Trello, Slack and Asana are all useful for tracking progress, organisation, and managing communication with stakeholders and team members which improves workflow and enhances the outcomes of your campaign.
3. Positioning
Knowing your unique selling point and strategically positioning this at the forefront of comms is essential to elevate your company’s reputation and general market presence. It’s the most powerful way to distinguish yourself from your competitors and offer value to your target audience – and companies that fail to recognise this often get stuck in a price war or ‘race to the bottom’ because consumers see them as one and the same and compare them based on budget alone.
Finding a specific place in the market for your offering is essential – and it’s the not-so-secret to success of many of the world’s most influential brands. Seth Godin famously shared these words of wisdom: “In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible’’. This means you need to use compelling storytelling to speak directly to your audience and highlight the reasons why you are the best choice compared with competitors, especially in an oversaturated market. Connecting with your audience on a human, emotional level builds meaningful connections much more quickly, and positioning your brand correctly through defining a clear and sustainable brand identity establishes a trustworthy and recognisable image customers can easily invest in.
Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ concept is a brilliant example of brand positioning at its best. Their long-standing campaign features real women of a variety of ages, ethnicities, and sizes paired with powerful storytelling to celebrate diversity, natural beauty, and body positivity. Through this they’ve challenged traditional beauty standards and this bold stance has strengthened their image as an advocate for real beauty and healthy self-esteem, which has continued to drive increased sales and boosted customer trust, loyalty, and engagement with the brand.
Sharing insights, research, and commenting on industry discussions makes your brand more credible and a leader in the industry, which in turn generates public interest. When positioned well, targeted messaging resonates with your desired audience on a subconscious level and enables increased engagement. One popular positioning strategy is to share positive testimonials and case studies from your business that demonstrate value and speak to your audience’s problems. Another great tactic is being experimental and exploring new approaches with your PR, delivering content that is creatively unique or shocking to stand out and get the cut through you need in your industry. Sometimes, following that old cliché ‘think outside the box’ really does pay dividends. This can leave a lasting impression and generate noise about your brand which leads to further interest and potential leads.
The biggest trends in PR content at the moment are personalisation, sustainability, and authenticity. That’s because these topics have been identified as the most important to consumers, so aligning your brand to these can really help your business stand out. The best way to deliver an excellent PR campaign is to align it to your wider marketing campaigns – consistency is essential in order to maintain audience attention and connection, so everything should sing off the same hymn sheet. All channels should share consistent and integrated messaging at all touchpoints and need to complement each other and reinforce your core values at every turn.
4. Promotion
For B2B PR, modern media platforms offer a wealth of opportunities to drive engagement, build brand presence, and connect with your key audiences. Modern PR perfectly blends digital opportunities with more traditional approaches to amplify the impact of campaigns. This is great news as it opens up many more opportunities for exposure and growth, but it’s also a challenge because each channel needs a bespoke and tailored approach to leverage the benefits of each platform.
Social media is often a sore spot for B2B brands who often struggle to carve out space on these platforms and attract attention to achieve tangible growth and ROI. LinkedIn is a top-tier platform for B2B marketing and offers benefits for most B2B companies. It’s ideal for sharing industry insights, and networking as well as long-form content that can be targeted to your specific audience. Meta platforms have traditionally been seen as more of a B2C tool – but don’t forget that the professionals you are targeting are individuals too and use these platforms both personally and professionally. Targeted ads on Facebook are accessible and can help you to reach companies themselves and key decision makers, and businesses can also access specific industry groups and deliver live events. As a more visual platform, Instagram is useful for brands to share company culture and BTS content through feeds, but also IGTV, reels and stories. X is the perfect platform for engagement with your audience, whilst using hashtags to increase visibility when engaging in industry conversations.
Video content is increasingly sought after, and YouTube and TikTok offer brilliant platforms for product or service demos and tutorials and can add a face to your business – which makes your business more human and relatable. These platforms build relationships, increase brand loyalty and visibility, and are invaluable for researching your target audience which will also inform your future content strategy.
The highest-performing content provides value of some kind to your audience, either through educational content, high-quality visuals, success stories, engaging content such as polls, personalised content and user-generated content which enhances authenticity. Regularly reviewing your content’s engagement metrics, reach and impressions, follower growth, traffic and click-through rates, share of voice and sentiment in the social space is the best way to continuously refine and develop your content.
Keeping up to date with the latest trends in PR promotional techniques can also help you stay ahead of the curve. Current trends include data-driven content which uses customer data to tailor content to your audience’s unique preferences, dynamic content which changes based on the viewer’s interests and previous interactions, and AI integrations that predict behaviour and personalise content in real time. LinkedIn and Facebook’s advanced targeting allows B2B marketing to be tailored to specific audiences.
5. Performance
By now, you’ll likely be aware that measuring, evaluating, and adapting your PR is essential for growth. It brings accountability and transparency to your work and allows you to justify and benchmark your budgets, as well as showcasing the importance and impact of PR for your business.
Following the data and adjusting marketing activity accordingly allows you to make informed decisions and spend carefully. Keeping a careful eye on performance is also useful for tracking against your overall business goals to identify your PR’s contribution to overall business reputation, awareness, and most importantly acquisition of new customers. It generates a sense of continuous improvement and a growth mindset, allowing you to solidify best practices and guidelines for your PR strategy. CCO at MarketingProfs Anna Handley rightly says that “Data-driven PR is about more than just numbers; it’s about using those numbers to tell a story that resonates with your audience and achieves your business goals’’.
With lots of potential stats to monitor it can be overwhelming to know which ones you should be assessing when reviewing your PR’s effectiveness. Media coverage is a good place to start, with volume of mentions as well as the quality of coverage. They say no press is bad press, but taking note of the sentiment of messaging is important, especially if it can be directly compared to competitors. Social media engagement is another key opportunity to review and allows you to assess a wide range of analytics including engagement rates, reach, impressions, and general growth of your platforms. The many tools mentioned previously are brilliant for collating this quickly, as well as categorising your lead and conversion traffic. Your website traffic is important monitor too – determining which views come from direct organic searches and how many have come through your PR efforts. There are a number of useful platforms available to quantify the public perception of your brand through social media listening as well as collating your feedback forms, but you can also take a more direct approach to gathering feedback by sharing polls and surveys with your audience or even planning focus groups for in-depth feedback.
To develop and deliver impactful, well-optimised PR campaigns, implementing information gleaned from insights from past campaigns can help you to maximise efficiency and reduce overall spend, enabling you to see results in a shorter period of time. Leveraging the data and analytics you have from previous campaigns should be a top priority, before actively adjusting campaigns in real-time following what works is the best way to stay on top of emerging trends.
Aligning your plans with a wider business marketing strategy is the best way to ensure you maximise your budget and push out the messages that are core to the campaign and your brand values. Regular reporting to track your progress makes it easier to share ROI with your stakeholders and push for further data-driven campaigns. Segmenting this data will help you to understand how different audiences respond to your campaigns, and which content and platforms work best for different groups. This enables you to notice industry trends and patterns as soon as they emerge and actively implement them. It’s useful to compare your results to industry benchmarks but also specifically to your competitors to understand your relative performance. Researching their content and auditing what works well and what falls flat is another underrated tool for developing your campaigns, and experimenting is essential (even if you get it wrong sometimes).
To stay competitive and ahead of the curve, leveraging the 5 Ps of PR is a no-brainer for B2B brands. They give us a structured framework to guide us and comprehensive advice to excel in the ever-changing world of modern PR, especially within social media and B2B marketing.
Through implementing the tools offered in this article, your efforts can be more strategic, impactful, and measurable. The most important takeaway is to test, learn and use your data to influence your future campaigns and continue to build on your success incrementally. Gini Dietrich, CEO of Arment Dietrich puts it best: “In the ever-evolving world of PR, those who are not afraid to experiment and take calculated risks are the ones who drive the industry forward. Experimentation leads to breakthroughs, and new ways to engage with audiences’’.
