PR-Supported Direct Marketing: A Powerful Duo for B2B Success

For businesses in the B2B sector, PR and media relations need to sit alongside direct marketing communications. Getting the two to work together effectively can have a major impact on the success of your communications strategy.

For B2B businesses the number of relevant decision makers and decision influencers the organisation needs to reach is often quite small. Prioritisation can whittle the numbers down further still. 

This lends itself to what you might call narrowcasting. If you have a target list of 500 companies and are aiming your marketing at the heads and their deputies of a particular department, say IT or supply chain, your direct marketing can become highly targeted to the point of being tailored to each individual approach.

In contrast PR is best thought of as broadcasting. Even placing pieces in credible trade publications, of which there are rarely more than a couple per sector, is likely have a far wider reach than the people for whom your products or services are of interest. A profile in a leading business publication, let alone a national newspaper or broadcaster, could reap a million views but only half a dozen of those might be view by people in a position to decide to buy what you’re selling.

So what then should be the aim of your media relations? Good coverage can certainly generate direct enquiries however, in many cases, its main role is to create the ideal environment in which your direct marketing lands. To dismiss this as mere mood music would be to undervalue the importance of good media coverage. 

In a less imperfect world decisions about what service to use or product to buy would be taken purely on the grounds of ‘what would be best for the business?’ In the real world they’re often made with a view to ‘what happens to me if this all goes pear shaped?’

One of my favourite advertising lines of all time is ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’. It captures perfectly the dilemma faced by many business-decision makers when assessing a challenger proposition; there’s often less personal downside risk for making the safe choice than for making the right choice. Being able to say ‘how was I to know? They’re the market leader,’ is a defence often deployed. It’s essentially piggybacking on other organisations’ presumed due-diligence and/or experience.

For challenger providers seeking to take on incumbents media coverage can help counter the sense that the challenger brand represents risk. It can provide a sense of substance and security – especially in a world that increasingly exists online and where a business’s longevity and physical assets are less important than they once were. Online presence, especially on high-value media channels, lends the credibility of the outlet to your brand’s own. Above all, good PR can change the conversation from ‘can you afford to take a chance on x?’ to ‘can you afford not to?’

So good media relations helps create a favourable backdrop against which you launch your marketing communications. When you send that carefully crafted mail; ‘Dear Bob, we know you want Dynamo Systems to stay ahead of the competition…’, Bob is already familiar with Nifty Solutions from Nifty’s nifty PR.

So what are the key things to remember when running media relations alongside marketing communications?

• Firstly PR and marketing communications should share the same clearly defined overarching objectives tied directly to the organisations goals. This may seem obvious but all too often they become untethered from one another.

• Secondly, following on from this, messaging has to be consistent across all marketing and media communications. This doesn’t mean that that there can’t be strong variations in emphasis. After all you would almost certainly want to pitch a different message to a CTO than a CFO and vice versa. The critical things is that what you say to one audience shouldn’t clash with or contradict what you say to another.

• And lastly be aware of when to sell and when to give something away. Most of us react quite differently to someone being helpful than we do to someone trying to sell us something. People who know their stuff are typically generous with their knowledge and expertise and that builds trust – and trust is the bedrock on which most transactions are built.