PR is an essential part of your marketing mix
PR has never been as important – Google has turned everyone into a researcher. Booking a holiday used to involve a 20 minute conversation with a travel agent. Not any more. People are now prepared to invest days of their own time building their own summer holiday through cheap airline sites in combination with Tripadvisor and other similar sites.
Whatever industry you’re in, whatever you’re selling, you can guarantee that at some point during the buying cycle your customer will spend a significant amount of time researching both on and offline. A well developed and executed PR strategy will help you maximise the opportunity that this offers.
Developing and executing a successful PR strategy requires substantial time and effort. Time and effort that I know from experience that marketing departments just don’t have enough of. Putting the content plan together at the start of the year is the easy bit – but how many of your releases either don’t get written at all or get cobbled together in a panic as a result of a last minute notice of an editorial deadline?
There are many reasons why outsourcing your PR makes sense and I have outlined some of these below:
1 – Maximise your return on investment
It will allow you to maximise the potential that the medium offers for getting your message out there by receiving free coverage in your target publications. Any investment you make in PR must take into account the equivalent cost of buying this space in trade magazines. The fact that an external PR partner will be focusing on this and this alone ensures a far better return on your investment than if you try and manage the process yourself.
2 – Creating targeted content with an increased potential for placement
Relationship building with editors and journalists is key to success – and once again I know from experience that while this is a great idea, most marketing departments just don’t have the time to do this properly. The result is a lot of guesswork about what material you should send to your target publications. By outsourcing your PR you can remove this guesswork from the equation – we understand what different editors are looking for in a story, what the editorial priorities are for specific magazines, what issues they struggle to gather regular content for. We can then use these insights to inform your editorial plan – maximising the potential for free coverage in your target publications.
3 – Better, deeper, more insightful content
We can get insights from within your organisation that you may struggle to uncover. Once we’ve identified the thought leaders within your organisation we can spend time with them to gather their thoughts on the relevant industry topics that are going to get us the most coverage. I know – from experience – that when you try and do this internally the regular meeting just gets pushed further and further back until you eventually just delete it from your outlook calendar. Not only is the meeting much more likely to happen when it’s being facilitated externally but with proper preparation and structure we can get much more valuable information from the meeting. Information which will provide content for several new items for your editorial calendar.
4 – Content Marketing in action
It’s your content marketing strategy in action. Producing all the content that your content marketing strategy requires is something that I bet you and your team just don’t have time to do. So leave it to us. We can work closely with you to make sure that it delivers all that you require in terms of coverage, increased web traffic, increased enquiry levels, increased downloads – whatever your specific goals are.
5 – Quality & quantity: the best of both worlds
The only way to be a really good writer is to write a lot – we do. Everyday. It’s not rocket science. The more you practice something the better you get at it. When you’re working within a marketing team you have so much going on that you just don’t have the time to write as much as we do. By outsourcing your PR you are investing in the quality of your press releases, news stories, white papers, case studies. This will lead to more coverage for your material – in an environment where layers of editorial oversight have been stripped away from the vast majority of publications they are crying out for copy that is sent to them ready for publication. By employing a professional copywriter to produce your content you will get better results from your PR activity.
If project case studies are important for you then we can help you make these have maximum impact. The key to good project case studies is understanding the key reasons why your customer bought from you in the first place and what benefits they have enjoyed since.
This is where it goes wrong for most companies producing their own material. All too often the case study turns into a description of the features and benefits of what you sell rather than a true project case study. We can get in front of your customers – because we have the time to do so. This results in is getting the insights necessary to allow us to produce a case study that your potential customers can relate to. And who knows – it may just uncover some additional sales opportunities with your existing customer that you just weren’t aware of.
It’s about your return on investment:
There’s a recurring theme here – the reason you should outsource your
PR is quite simply to get a better return on your investment.
If you would like some help developing your PR strategy or content plan and then executing a campaign that delivers for your business then get in touch:
Petrac Marketing 