One of the biggest misconceptions is that digital PR is solely for B2C or e-commerce businesses, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
While undertaking digital PR for consumer-focused brands certainly enables you to provide more granular reporting and immediate ROI information, such as sales data, digital PR can pay long-term dividends for B2B organisations who adopt this tactic.
Why should my B2B business do digital PR?
For many B2B businesses, getting regular news stories out to the media can be challenging. There might not be many changes happening within your business, and additionally, this type of news might only be relevant for a specific media vertical, such as local business.
Digital PR allows you to craft stories or be an industry spokesperson on topics relevant to your target audience and industry, enabling you to get into publications your target audience reads.
Digital PR works wonders for increasing your brand’s awareness, but more importantly, it supports your search engine optimisation, helping your business achieve its long-term growth objectives, and we have many examples showcasing that.
How do I undertake digital PR?
There are a few different approaches to undertaking digital PR, and we undertake a variety of tactics on behalf of our clients. Below, we outline some of these approaches.
Digital PR Campaigns
These are often planned PR activities involving gathering insights or undertaking research to back up your idea, for example, by undertaking surveys or freedom of information requests.
One of our biggest successes from this tactic has been for hostile vehicle manufacturer Heald.
We undertook a Freedom of Information request to police forces nationwide to understand which towns and cities were the worst for speeding, a relevant topic around vehicle accident prevention.
Initially launching the campaign in March 2022, the digital PR campaign aligned with an update to the Highway Code and an awareness-raising campaign, meaning road safety was a hot topic.
The initial activity achieved ten pieces of coverage across a range of regional publications. However, a reangle to the press release to align with trending topics, resulted in a further 11 pieces of press coverage across online and broadcast, including national publications such as the Daily Mail, MSN, This is Money, RAC and even a debate on GB News
This digital PR campaign enabled coverage across various media verticals that Heald would typically not feature, increasing the volume of backlinks from high domain authority (DA) websites and, in turn, keyword rankings, referrals, and organic traffic.
You can read more about the campaign and its results here.
PR Mailers
PR mailers are the perfect opportunity to tap into your thought leadership knowledge. Consider what is it that your target audience needs to know. For this you could utilise tools such as Answer the Public, or Also Asked to understand what your target audience is asking about queries related to your industry.
Alternatively, being on top of hot topics affecting your industry or your customers can provide you with fantastic opportunities to promote your expertise, increase your brand awareness through press coverage and improve your search engine optimisation.
Align this with understanding your keyword performance and you can drive those keyword rankings and website traffic up!
An example of where we did exactly this was by supporting lettings management specialist, Bramleys raise awareness of electrical safety regulation being brought in for rented properties, in order to position the firm in front of landlords.
We created a press release with the aim of pitching to relevant industry publications, such as Landlord Today along with regional publications to raise awareness amongst its target geographical areas. In total 35 pieces of coverage was achieved.
To find out more about the activity, and the results, click here
Reactive PR
Undertaking reactive PR, sometimes referred to as newsjacking, relies on you actively spotting trends or reacting to trending topics. To undertake this type of activity you may be able to pre-empt hot topics such as the Autumn Statement and weather events, through to monitoring the news daily or setting up topic notifications in Google Alerts to enable you to act quickly.
Alternatively, it can be as a result of being open to things you might participate in day to day, such as watching TV.
For example, we reacted to the Netflix series on behalf of our glass manufacturing client, Specialists Glass Products, following an episode showcasing a glass bridge the contestants had to cross safely.
Commenting on a Netflix series certainly isn’t a topic we anticipated being an option for this business. Yet, it presented the opportunity to Specialist Glass Products to rank for relevant industry keywords as a result of a spike in traffic for the search term “tempered glass” which SGP wasn’t ranking for at that stage.
To date, the on-site content supporting this reactive PR campaign continues to be one of the biggest drivers of traffic to its website long after the content was published
You can read more about the campaign and its success here. Wild PR also received a silver award at the CIPR PRide Awards for Best Use of Content for this campaign.
Is traditional PR still beneficial?
Traditional PR is absolutely still beneficial and is a tactic we continue to recommend to our B2B clients. It enhances trust in your industry, can support recruitment and retention strategies and positions you as a leader within your industry.
We’ve had many clients feature undertake more traditional PR activities such as interview features, start-up stories and awards which have captured wider attention leading to further PR opportunities.
Our belief is that one day, PR will be an all-encompassing activity which covers both traditional and digital PR activity to ensure an integrated approach across both to achieve maximum results.
How can you measure digital PR success for a B2B business?
First and foremost, ensuring you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up properly is important. If you work with an agency, they will likely have additional digital marketing reporting tools such as SEMRush or SERanking.
This allows you to benchmark results such as average monthly organic and referral traffic and current keyword rankings. If you have conversion tracking in place, you can also measure enquiries, downloads and, if your business does offer an e-commerce facility, sales.
In the long term, annual turnover and profit growth will be key, especially if your sales cycle is typically longer-term or relies on other procurement methods.
If you want to enhance your brand awareness and increase your sales for the year ahead, contact us for more information or book an exploratory call with me by clicking here.
To see more examples of our B2B case studies, click the link: https://wild-pr.co.uk/portfolio_category/professional-services/