Comments from K2 Global Communications

Whether your story is truly newsworthy and worthy of press coverage isn’t just your call.

The past decade has seen a clear trend toward attenuated press releases. Gone are the days of public relations people writing long screeds, with endless quotes and reams of data. This was partially an outgrowth of the use of email, social media, and chat as the preferred forms of communication between the public relations community and the press (which, for our purposes, includes bloggers and analysts). Furthermore, as fewer and fewer journalists are covering ever-increasing news volumes, their email boxes, texts chains, and chat messages are exploding. 

Press releases, though, are still important, perhaps even more important than ever; as AI is perpetually hungry, and your press releases can feed the beast. Tailoring press releases to make AI happy has added in some new requirements.  

This basically comes down to an exercise in empathy.

Put yourselves in a journalist’s place. Your email box is flooded. You’ve got the pressures of staying abreast of key players in your markets while having to absorb the importance of new products and companies.

Most importantly, you’ve got deadlines.

These days, you can DIY a lot of things, but PR isn’t necessarily one of them.

You want to get your message out there and generate buzz around your brand or product, but you DON’T want to deal with the costs associated with hiring a PR professional. These days when social media and AI are king, you figure you might as well do it yourself. After all, it just seems faster, cheaper, and more effective to put out the word via LinkedIn. 

So, you are getting ready to hire your PR team. (We're hoping it's us, of course.) No matter what, here are some tips that will help maximize the relationship.

Know the pros and cons before you dive in

Like any endeavor, B2B collaborative marketing has its up and downsides. It’s up to the partner-brand companies to strike a good balance. Before we dive too deeply into B2B collaborative marketing pros and cons, definitions are in order because a few related terms, such as co-branding, co-marketing, and brand partnership are often bandied about and may cause confusion.

Collaborative marketing is a must-add to your overall B2B marketing strategy. It means building connections, networking, and establishing formal partnerships among related, non-competitive businesses to increase brand awareness, gain new customers, and boost sales.

Your company sits on a treasure trove of data. Every click, login, support ticket, and feature usage tells a story that can help you understand customers, optimize operations, and accelerate growth. When analyzed collectively, this data reveals profound insights about industry trends, challenges, and business needs.

Practically all B2B marketers agree that content marketing works, but not everyone is clear on how exactly to calculate the ROI and business value of a company’s content marketing investment.

Assessing the quality of content - Is the content original and audience-appropriate? Does it tell a story or add value to the site? Is the tone, spelling, and grammar pitch-perfect? - is one thing.

Determining the bottom- line impact or business benefit of each blog post, article, email, e-book, case study, podcast, infographic, or social campaign is quite another - and one of the trickier challenges facing marketers today.

You can use a number of metrics to measure content performance, depending on your business goals and what you intended for your content marketing program to achieve. Was your content written to acquire customers or increase revenue and profit? Position your brand or tell your product story? Enhance customer engagement? Acquire better-quality leads?

Among the most obvious measurements of content marketing success would be ROI (the revenue gained from content marketing compared to the amount spent on creating and distributing content), number of qualified leads, and percentage of lead conversions to closed sales generated by the content. Other important indicators of content effectiveness include:

Standing out as an industry leader is not easy. Make it easier by positioning your company as the go-to expert in your field with the right approach to data: delivering concrete data that demonstrates deep industry understanding. Benchmarking reports, derived from your platform's wealth of user data, positions your company as an authoritative voice while providing invaluable insights to your market.