PR Vibes®: Getting the Most out of Marketing and PR during a slow economy: B2B Success Secrets

The B2B market has struggled recently, with workforce reductions and general cost-cutting becoming the status quo as customers of all sizes re-evaluate their technology spends. But there’s one place that cutting too much budget and resources might not make sense, and that’s marketing and PR.

When you decide to put your marketing and PR efforts on hold, you lose valuable visibility to media, analysts, prospects and customers, and it puts you in the backseat while giving other companies in your market a chance to take a thought leadership role.

And, if you want to reach your business goals and secure new customers, you have to maintain brand awareness in front of potential clients, telegraph your messaging regularly, establish and keep your company in the spotlight as a leader in the field, and more—all of which is impossible to do without marketing and PR.

So, it’s important to be strategic when it comes to tightening your belt in this critical area. Consider focused, surgical cuts—not complete pauses—in your programs. Here are five key pieces of your marketing and PR strategy that you should prioritize if you find yourself balancing business development and austerity measures:

1. 1. Focus on thought leadership: Getting your subject matter experts out there as go-to sources for media articles, thought leadership articles, Q&As, live or virtual speaking opportunities and more is one of the most effective ways to burnish your brand and stay in front of potential customers. It can lead to increased credibility and trust as well as engagement from your existing customers, too. So, if you have to go to a smaller scale on this, work with your team to focus in on the topics and the outlets that will give you the most bang for your buck with media, analysts AND customers.
   2. Be deliberate on PR outreach. Consider the cadence of your outreach efforts, and plan to put resources where they can have the most impact. Examples include providing potential sources to media around top relevant news events, for instance; or, having a strategic calendar and plan in place for promoting a new white paper. Your PR team also could be prepping for a launch that’s a few months away, building media lists focused on a new audience, or preparing ideas for end-of-year “predictions” articles, awards entries or speaking opportunities. Focus on the content assets you want to promote, and what avenues are likely going to get you the impacts you’re looking for, and plan your resource allocation accordingly.
   3. Stay current. Tech spending might be in a lull at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that potential and existing customers and partners aren’t paying attention to what’s happening in the market. Look to develop and pitch new storylines and ideas; spend time talking to subject matter experts inside the company to get ideas on how things are changing and growing and talk to the sales team about recent customer questions and topics that could be addressed. That kind of research doesn’t have to be resource-intensive, and it can help you differentiate the marketing and PR efforts that you’ve continued.
   4. Create more evergreen content. Evergreen content, which includes things like customer case studies, white papers, 101-articles, how-to guides and original research, can shoulder a lot of weight when it comes to content marketing. Excerpts can be used to easily create a series of articles aimed at converting readers into download leads; and these pieces can provide an ongoing resource for analysts, journalists and marketers looking for context and information about a particular topic or niche. Consider amplifying executive quotes on social media too: Calysto has had clients for which an executive quote was so insightful that a publication used it frequently to describe their particular market. Be sure to engage with the sales team to deliver content that can help them move the needle with both top of funnel and bottom of funnel prospects.
   5. Reduce, reuse, recycle. One of the best ways to do effective marketing and PR on a budget is to repurpose your content. You can make it work harder for you by using it in different ways to communicate your key messages to a variety of audiences. Repurposing can help you build a content library quickly by, say, breaking down a white paper or refreshing an older research report with a handful of new insights. You can present research data in different ways, such as a “Top 10 Takeaways” article that could be a companion for the full report. Or, you can take an executive Q&A that you did to create a byline, and format it to be a piece of content in its own right.

   If you want to buck the curve of slower tech spending, you need marketing and PR programs more than ever to snag the interest of potential buyers and build a brand they trust. Working with your marketing and PR team to identify the most effective use of their time will help you avoid a hit to your brand awareness, stave off competitors, and make you more strategic overall in terms of how you engage with the market longer term. Embracing marketing and PR should be an imperative so you don’t lose any hard-fought momentum against your competitors, and to keep you positioned for future success.

   Want to know more about strategic outreach program? Contact Calysto.