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3 easy tactics for B2B digital PR success | B2B Marketing

Although in many ways B2B Marketing can be very different from B2C, PR is one of the areas in which there are many tactics that can be shared across both. Here I’ve outlined three of the easiest tactics that we’ve found success with that shouldn’t take huge amounts of time or budget to start using.


1. Journalist requests

This is probably one of the easiest ways to secure press coverage in both B2B and B2C as, rather than pitching a story that you’re not sure a journalist will like as you usually would be, you’re answering something they’re definitely wanting to write about. There are numerous paid services that allow you to receive journalists’ requests such as ResponseSource, however, one of the best ways is actually free and that’s using the #journorequest on Twitter. 

The best way to do this is to search #journorequest, but also pair this with a relevant term. For example, you might be working in recruitment, and so ‘#journorequest HR’ would be a good search. I tend to set the most relevant searches up within Tweetdeck, so I can monitor the feed constantly without having to go back and type the search in each time. This also allows me to view multiple search requests at once on one screen and alerts me when a new one comes through.


2. Newsjacking

Newsjacking is another quick win for generating positive PR as, again, you’re following the news agenda rather than trying to create your own. We combine a proactive and reactive strategy for newsjacking; we plan for events in advance where possible and actually created our own newsjacking calendar to help others in the industry plan as well. We also then monitor the news agenda constantly throughout the day to look for relevant stories that we can offer some form of opinion and data on. Once we have either a planned or reactive story in mind, we then contact a journalist to offer them expert comment from our client on that particular topic.

With regards to the planned activity you can also take this a step further than newsjacking and move more into the realm of thought leadership, which is perfect for B2B marketers. In B2B one of the main things customers will care about is that you’re an expert in your field, and what better way to prove that than by being quoted and written about in your top industry publications? Most will publish a forward features list online that you can also add into your planned events calendar and you then know exactly what thought leadership features you can pitch to them and when. 


3. Data

I find many companies are sitting on a goldmine with regards to data, and they don’t even realise it. B2B companies in particular capture a lot of data about their customers and trends, but they don’t realise how potentially interesting this data can be when used in the right way. For example, data around regional sales trends or even seasonality around sales of a particular product or service can be a great hook for a journalist. Add in some form of visualisation of this data and you have yourself a great story ready to sold-in to the media.

It doesn’t even always have to be your own data that you use for a campaign. As an example, for Black Friday in 2014 we found an interesting piece of data from a credit card supplier that predicted how much money people would be spending per minute during Black Friday that year. We took this data and did a simple interactive counter visualising this adding up over the day and managed to achieve coverage in national and industry publications such as the BBC, Daily Mail and The Drum.

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