I’ve seen the power of PR work firsthand with startups, enterprise businesses, and everything in between. In this article, I’ll share some of my favorite brand-building PR strategies that I’ve seen implemented across my B2B clients’ businesses. I’ll also link to a few cool tools I’ve learned about along the way.
Laying the groundwork
A lot of the foundational steps our PR consultants have done overlap with general B2B marketing strategy level setting, such as determining ICP and analyzing competitors.
Here’s a quick list of what we did during the learning and planning phase.
- Define our audience and ideal customer profile
- Review existing messaging/positioning to see if we are highlighting the right points
- Analyze the competitive landscape, including competitor messaging and PR actions
- Refine our value propositions and key differentiators
- Create a calendar of upcoming events, trade shows, and industry milestones (ex. if a new policy that will affect the industry is rolling out in Q3)
- Build target media lists based on our industry, expertise, and competitor saturation
- Create a rough timeline of narratives to build campaigns around
Different PR tactics for brand building
The most successful PR campaigns are composed of multiple simultaneous and often ongoing tactics that feed into each other. The more of these we can manage and keep organized at the same time, the more they can lift every other channel up. For example, if we win an award for our expertise in supply chain, we can reach out to a supply chain reporter mentioning that and offering to be a resource on the topic.
Here are the top channels I’ve seen our most successful PR consultants focus on.
- Podcast placements: Appearing on relevant podcasts as a guest.
- Media interviews: Interviewing with the press about certain topics to be featured or quoted in an article.
- Media source: Submitting quotes about a certain topic as a subject-matter expert, to be published within a broader article.
- Press releases: Earning general news coverage from press releases, often submitted to PRWire.
- A Wikipedia page: Generating enough journalistic news coverage to merit a Wikipedia page.
- Winning awards: Being ranked in top lists, or winning awards for relevant services.
- Bylines: Being a guest contributor and writing an article for news outlets.
- Events: Attending, hosting, and sponsoring relevant industry events.
Measuring PR effectiveness on brand building
It can be difficult to measure PR success and quantify the impact brand has on acquisition and retention. However, here are a few ways I’ve evaluated our PR efforts in the past.
- Coverage: Simply put, did we get coverage where we wanted to? How many times? What was the quality of the coverage (quote, full featured article)? What is the quality of the publishing outlet (respected news source, independent blog)?
- Brand terms: I would check Google Search Console for the number of impressions and clicks we get for our brand terms. These are things like our company name and variations of it.
- Competition: If competitors started bidding on our brand terms in search ads, it was a good indicator that we were being noticed.
- Organic mentions: I’d track whenever we got any news coverage or mentions oranically in the news or on other blogs.
- LinkedIn: Growth and engagement on LinkedIn was a good indicator our B2B audience had heard of us and was starting to pay attention. This was always paired with a strong LinkedIn posting strategy on our brand page, and thought leadership from our C-suite.
How else do you measure brand recognition and awareness? I’m open to thoughts and comments!
PR and brand monitoring tools
Podchaser: Podcast evaluation tool
Find the best podcasts for your industry and get audience insights like monthly listeners, income tier, and even employers. You can also find the podcast hosts’ contact information, whether or not they accept guests, and a Podchaser “power score.”
CoverageBook: Coverage value tracker
Upload links of your coverage and this tool will collage your reach and other metrics from the media outlet. We also use this in partnerships to measure the reach of our guest post exchange program.
PR Newswire: Distribute press releases
This is a press release distribution network where you can upload your press release, set your audience, and then track when it gets picked up. Another similar tool is PRWire.
Talkwalker: Brand monitoring and social listening
This tool helps you monitor any discussions around your brand or the discussions you want to be part of. It’s also useful for catching journalists who mention your expertise and are looking for sources.
MuckRack: PR tools suite for pitching and monitoring
This is a rich suite of tools that PR professionals can use to browse media media databases, monitor their brand mentions, and pitch and monitor coverage. Similar suites include Onclusive and Meltwater.
Wrapping up — Building your brand with PR
Building a brand with PR takes time, but also lifts all of your other marketing efforts while in motion. We’ve seen more success reaching out for guest posts when we can mention recent awards, and we’ve gotten more responses from partners who have read about our companies in the news and are more open to building integrations.
I hope this brief overview of the PR processes I’ve seen work well helps you choose where to focus your PR and brand efforts.