Trade PR Punches
Mix it up in marketing
PUNCHING UP
How to compete and win in B2B PR and digital marketing against your industry’s heavyweights
Every industry has its heavyweights, and battling them for attention is tough. They earn the kind of money that naturally gets them awareness, and they can spend enough to make sure their message is the loudest in the room. But tough to beat’s not impossible, right? Not if you know how to fight and win. Take our quiz and find out if you do. We’ll give you a set of scenarios. Pick the right answer and land a punch. Pick wrong, and, well, you get punched.
QUIZ:
Pick your weight class:
ROUND 1:
A
B
C
Fire your PR team because that should be you on the cover.
Have your PR team contact the publication and let them know you are available for comment.
Work with your team to figure out the unique story that only you can tell, then start telling it.
The press doesn’t want to talk to a mimic, so develop a story with fresh points of view that marry with your expertise and experience. Your expertise ties to the clients you work with and the problems you solve for them. If your clients are concentrated in a specific industry then you have demonstrable expertise there. What problems are you solving for those clients? You’re an expert there, as well. Your experience ties to the resumes of your subject matter experts. The press wants to know they are talking to someone who can speak intelligently about a subject. Your people want to be comfortable in front of the press too, so keep them in a lane where they have experience.
CORRECT!
Taking Down a Heavyweight Requires You to Be Original
NExt
Can this hurt? Probably not. Will is be effective. That’s probably a no too. Obviously, it can’t hurt. The reality is that no PR team can promise you coverage. But what they should be able to show you is the plan for getting you to the point that the Tier 1 press knows you and wants to talk with you.
NoPE, Sorry.
There they are again, your industry’s biggest company and your biggest rival featured on the cover of a national business publication. You can tell the same story they are, so why are they getting all the attention? The first thing you need to do is:
No, don’t panic and fire your PR team. Asking them to get you coverage in Tier 1 media is a big ask. It’s something that they best PR companies can’t promise. But do ask your team what their plan is to get you to that point. And that plan should be more than hopes and prayers and shotgunning press releases. It should involve real strategy. If it doesn’t, then maybe it is time to part ways.
ROUND 2:
You’re a privately owned widget maker. Over the last three quarters, sales for the big players in the widget industry have stalled, but not for you. Your sales are actually up. Your PR team tells you there’s a story here worth pitching to the media. You tell your team to create a press release that:
Includes vague financial numbers and offers up your CFO as a potential interview
Includes specific financial numbers and offers the CEO as an interview subject
Includes no specifics and offers a director-level employee as a source
Many large companies have policies that limit what information they share with the press. They also limit the level of executive they’ll put in front of the media. Don’t copy those policies. Offer up your CEO to speak to the press. Offer financials. Offer customer stories. You may be smaller, but being able to offer what the larger company can’t or won’t can make you appealing.
Taking Down a Heavyweight Requires You to Be Bold
You may have very good reasons for keeping your financials close to the vest. Just recognize that it’s going to hold you back from getting attention from the press. Journalists want specifics. They also want to talk to someone with some authority. Making someone who is three and four levels from the C Suite available for comment isn’t going to get anyone’s attention.
Ever talk to someone and feel like you’re only getting part of the story, that there was more there, if they’d just open up? You leave that conversation feeling unfulfilled. Do that with a journalist, and you probably won’t get invited to talk with them again. The more specific you can get the better, especially if the heavyweight in your industry won’t.
ROUND 3:
You’re the maker of a somewhat commoditized SaaS business platform. The stock market has fallen, led by a precipitous drop in the value of business software manufacturers. You instruct your PR team to:
Let the press know you’re available to talk about the stock market drop, no question off limits
Craft a carefully worded press release that acknowledges the drop in the market but offers little insight from you as an expert on business software companies
Sit this one out
This is the easy way out. And maybe there is a good reason not to comment this time. But if this is your default response any time an opportunity to get in front of the press presents itself, don’t blame your PR team for a lack of coverage.
News cycles move fast. If you’re ready to respond to press inquiries and ready to pivot your story if that’s what’s needed, then you can find some quick wins against your industry’s leader. Enough quick wins and you start building momentum. You find yourself on a reporter’s contact list, and you’re becoming a regular fixture in the press.
Taking Down a Heavyweight Requires You to Be Nimble.
There are no participation ribbons in PR. Do you get internal points for at least being willing to put out some kind of response? Sure. But if you aren’t offering any kind of unique perspective or insight then don’t expect anyone to pick up your press release or call you up for an interview.
play Again
0 / 3 points!
You got...
1 / 3 points!
2 / 3 points!
3 / 3 points!
You gave a knockout punch!
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The reality is, trying to beat a heavyweight with just marketing or just PR is foolish. You aren’t going to win focusing on one or the other. But by integrating your marketing and PR you can. PR should be used to drive awareness of your business and put you front of mind with potential clients, ultimately driving visitors to your web site. From there, your digital marketing should nurture those visitors into MQLs and SQLs. Retargeting those people who’ve visited your site to bring them back. Coaxing them into your funnel with irresistible content. Nurturing them with strategic emails that take them from slightly interested to hot lead. Then continuing to delight them once they become a client. That’s how you take down an industry heavyweight: By being smarter. By telling an original story. By sharing things that others won’t. By being focused with who you tell your story to, but also making sure you’re telling it everywhere they are. And, ultimately, by making sure that everything you do in both PR and marketing is pointing to the same goal—victory.
INTEGRATING PR AND MARKETING
THE REAL KNOCKOUT PUNCH:
Take the Marketing Quiz
Bonus
Scenario 1:
You’re targeting all the keywords that make sense for the SaaS platform you’re trying to market. Despite your best efforts, you’re still not ranking on the first page, you:
Ask your marketing team to develop content centered around your buyers’ using long-tail keywords.
Rely on paid search, rationalizing that you have to spend money to make money.
Stop expending efforts on organic search; it’s clearly demonstrated that it can’t work.
Digital marketing is great, but it also requires patience. It’s not a faucet that you turn on and flood the room with leads. Increasing search visibility takes time to get right, but the efforts are well worth the wait.
While investing in paid search ads can be a good way to complement organic search efforts, just throwing money at a campaign that doesn’t support a larger strategy won’t generate long-term success.
You’ll never win by launching broad marketing campaigns and targeting broad keywords. But, by focusing on your ideal customer and making them the target of your marketing efforts you can find wins, even against industry heavyweights. The process of identifying your target customer starts by asking four questions. • How many employees does the company have? • What is their annual revenue? • What industry is this company in? • Who in these companies makes the buying decisions?
Taking Down a Heavyweight Requires You to Be Focused
Scenario 2:
You’ve run the budget numbers for the year, and you have a few thousand dollars left at the end of each month. You decide to spend it on digital marketing, so you:
Spread your dollars out, putting a little bit in all the places your target customer might be.
Invest in a marketing automation platform, like HubSpot, that allows you to develop robust nurture campaigns and spend your limited dollars wisely.
Go all-in on paid search because, after all, that’s where most buyer journeys start.
The reality is that marketing requires spending. But where do you spend? Probably not on search. Larger competition is always going to be able to outspend you on keywords. For smaller players, marketing automation can be a life-saver. From automatic email nurturing, to smart content, to progressive forms, tools like HubSpot can give smaller teams a fighting chance against the heavyweights.
Taking Down a Heavyweight Requires Smart Spending.
Honestly, this isn’t an awful idea. At least you are recognizing that your target customer could be found in multiple places. This, however, isn’t the most efficient way of getting in front of them. It requires a lot of accounts with a lot of different services, making it hard to manage and not as effective as it could be.
It’s true that many buyers’ journeys start in a search engine. That’s why the heavyweights in almost every industry have already sunk a ton of money into owning almost every conceivable keyword that could draw relevant traffic. You aren’t going to be able to outspend them. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put some dollars here, but there are ways to spend that money that will get you a better bang for your limited bucks.
Scenario 3:
You have approval to go spend some real money on redesigning your website. You want to make sure that you are hitting the right buyers with your message. To do that, you instruct your digital marketing team to:
Take design “inspiration” from your largest competitor. If it works for them, it’ll work for you.
Hire the largest, most expensive agency to work for the next 18 months adding every bell and whistle to your new site.
Work with an agency that uses a Growth-Driven Design methodology to develop a website in data-driven sprints ensuring that time, effort, and money isn’t wasted.
Not a horrible strategy, but not an ideal one either. When going up against heavyweights, do you really have 18 months to wait? If you’re serious about growth, you’ll need to move quickly. Using a method like Growth-Driven Design to make iterative changes based on data will make sure that you’re not spending money, or time, waiting around.
You don’t have time to wait for a full site redesign, and you don’t have resources to waste on making changes to your website that aren’t backed up by real user data. Investing in making changes and then analyzing the results before moving on to the next phase will not only let you make the most important changes quicker but will also allow for the flexibility that a speedy underdog needs to deliver a KO.
Taking Down a Heavyweight Requires Brains as well as Brawn.
Don’t limit yourself to what your competitors are doing. You want to stand out from your competition, not blend into their shadow. Using data to uncover unique insights about your audience will give you the edge you need to land a solid blow.
The reality is, trying to beat a heavyweight with just marketing or just PR is foolish. You aren’t going to win focusing on one or the other. But by integrating your marketing and PR you can. PR should be used to drive awareness of your business and put you front of mind with potential clients, ultimately driving visitors to your website. From there, your digital marketing should nurture those visitors into MQLs and SQLs. Coaxing them into your funnel with irresistible content. Nurturing them with strategic emails that take them from slightly interested to hot lead. Then continuing to delight them once they become a customer. That’s how you take down an industry heavyweight: by being smarter. By telling an original story. By sharing things that others won’t. By being focused on who you tell your story to, but also making sure you’re telling it in a way that speaks to them. And, ultimately, by making sure that everything you do in both PR and marketing is pointing to the same goal—victory.
Take the PR Quiz
