Sometimes called B2B PR is 100 per cent different to the sort of PR you hear about with celebrities, paparazzi and champagne. It?s even legal, decent and truthful! There?s a total culture difference and thankfully, editors of trade magazines are not out to sell copies based on sensationalism ? they?re in the business of providing high quality, relevant information to their readers about their market sector. Your market sector.
In fact, because most trade journals actually have a staff of only one and bit (the editor and a part time advertising sales rep), they are almost totally dependent on material submitted by companies. So if you?re providing a flow of high quality press releases and feature articles, or case studies, they?ll use it. If you don?t, they?ll use your competitors? material instead.
Running, as I do, a PR division, you?d probably expect me to tell you at this point that PR is a really difficult black art. But it?s not. Granted, we have learned a trick or two over the years which help, but the core skill is simple hard work and gentle sales technique.
The B2B PR game plan is:
Analyse the journals in the sector (remember that many are online magazines these days) and understand what the editors want.
Brainstorm the subjects on which your company has something to say and then speak to the relevant editors.
Write and distribute press releases on any real news stories you have ? but don?t send rubbish. This way, editors will come to know that your releases will be worth reading and they won?t get binned along with the hundreds of dreadful non-stories they receive every week.
Keep a steady flow of material heading towards the editors. Properly done, you should be able to feature in the key titles 10 months out of 12 ? maybe even 12/12!
Use a cutting service to make sure you pick up on all the coverage you obtain. And don?t just file it; you can reprint into a direct mail, put it on your website or hand out items, which makes excellent and authoritative ammunition for the sales force.
If you don?t want to do all of this yourself, then consider using a PR agency but only one that specialises in your sector. Ask one of the Editors for his/her recommendation.
Cost Effective B2B advertising is far from cheap with a typical colour page costing from ?1700 to ?2500 plus the cost of producing the advert. To be effective, it needs to be regular and in several magazines. Budgets need to be in the hundreds of thousands to be effective. B2B PR on the other hand can start from ?zero if you do it yourself and as little as ?15k a year using an agency. You can achieve editorial coverage valued at many times what you spend.
We regularly calculate the Advertising Equivalent Value for our own clients and frequently achieve Return On Investment from 1000 per cent and upwards.
Of course, there are also good reasons to advertise ? particularly when you need to get over a message which is not ?news?. And of course if no-one advertises there won?t be any magazines left for PR to work in. So it is a responsibility to support sector magazines with advertising too.
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