Gone are the days of the ‘unmeasurable’ PR campaign. Whether it’s proving industry recognition, attracting investment or sale, or generating marketing-qualified leads, measurement in B2B tech PR is in rude health – especially if you have the insight required to plan programmes effectively.
First, you need to know your industry very well indeed. You also need to understand what the motivations are within the minds of your buying audiences. Then you need to find ways to compel them to act –either through effective scaremongering (by reminding them of the dangers of not working with a client, or using its technology), or making them feel like they’re trailing the industry and need to catch up, or both.
Thankfully we have the deep industry knowledge bit licked. We have four specialisms and know each of these markets inside out. Then we invest in our own research so we have up to date views on how our key buying audiences within each of our specialisms (telecoms operators, broadcasters, banks and enterprises) think and behave. Our sister company, Aperture, enables us to go deeper into the hidden wants and needs of specific B2B buying audiences.
We recently promoted a new service offering for our client eBuilder to the European telecoms operator community. Its device insights capability delivers valuable customer data that helps operators drive customer engagement and ultimately, retention – two significant objectives operators simply must achieve. By putting the challenge into the appropriate context, providing access to a key customer, showcasing the clear benefits they have achieved by working with eBuilder and delivering a powerful call to action, we were able to deliver positive, thought provoking articles in all the major telecoms trade titles including Light Reading, Telecoms.com, Total Telecom, Mobile World Live and Global Telecoms Business.
By working closely with eBuilder’s sales and marketing function, we’ve seen how the ‘first read’ (prospects reading the articles organically) and the ‘second read’ (prospects being ‘nudged’ towards reading articles via shared and owned channels) has had a strong impact on lead generation. Within four weeks of the programme going live, eBuilder has established nine new marketing qualified leads, and used the earned content to drive forwards sales conversations with an additional four sales qualified leads. That’s the kind of PR measurement we can get behind!
Click here for a more in depth read of the challenge eBuilder faced, how we helped them tackle it and the results achieved.
Communications Management