Five tips for Building a Solid Content Marketing Plan

Time to read: 3 minutes

Lauren Bowden, who looks after FinTech Content Marketing here at The Crowd, draws on her in-house experience to outline the foundations of a solid content marketing plan.

I moved into a content marketing role around six years ago after a decade as a PR practitioner. While certain aspects of the two disciplines were similar – story crafting, messaging, creativity, etc. – my eyes were opened to the commercial side of the business. Moreover, how the various parts of an organisation fit together.

Earlier this year, I was asked to be one of 11 content marketing experts to participate in an eBook on ‘using the content lifecycle to maximise content ROI’. Below is a summary of my contribution, with some additional insight I have gathered recently.

     1. Pool your knowledge

The FinTech sales cycle can easily take around 18 months. It usually involves a plethora of decision-makers who marketeers need to understand to target their content marketing campaigns. It requires serious teamwork and buy-in from all key stakeholders, not just the sales team, who often are positioned as the only link to the client and, therefore, the primary go-to for marketing. Professional services team members have invaluable on-the-ground insight into the daily dealings at client sites. Meanwhile, product management has a macro view of the industry and can point to future trends. Tapping into their knowledge is crucial when devising a content marketing plan.

     2. Do your research

It is rare that only one product or solution will need to be pushed to the market throughout the year. Content marketing plans, therefore, should be drawn up for each area of focus. Some plans will be more detailed to reflect the organisation’s priorities. But, at the very least, they should cover information on:

• Market drivers
• Solution description
• Key messages
• Target market
• Buyers’ journey mapping
• Key competitors
• Challenges
• Localisation plans
• A content calendar

This will take time but always pays dividends when managing workloads and budgets effectively – ultimately measuring effectiveness over the year.

     3. Plan well – but leave some room to wiggle

Budgeting requires you to have a clear idea of the goals you must achieve in each campaign—goals communicated to and accepted by stakeholders. This does not mean planning and budgeting for every detail of every content piece with no wiggle room. Even the most robust plan and organised team will have unexpected opportunities that are too good to pass up. That’s why it’s always essential to have at least a 10 per cent contingency built into the budget.

Another benefit of a strong content plan is that it helps you manage supplier costs. With a well-thought-out plan, many items can be budgeted for upfront, suppliers notified beforehand about what work you have planned over the year, and packages negotiated accordingly. Collectively, it gives you more bang for your buck.

It is also crucial to keep up to date with your existing suppliers’ new offerings and to explore the marketplace for other suppliers who can help you execute new tactics. This kind of market scanning is particularly important for in-house marketing teams so they can keep abreast of the latest techniques and methods.

     4. Embrace the data

Ensuring you hit the right audiences with your content can be challenging, especially when targeting multiple stakeholders who make collective decisions. When you look back on this kind of win, it isn’t easy to pinpoint the influence that specific content pieces had on that sale. You’re not going to turn around to a salesperson after an 18-month-long sales process and tell her the real reason she got that deal was because of a video or white paper. Unless you want to be laughed out of the sales meeting.

Marketing Technology (aka MarTech) can be your best friend here. Whether it’s CRM, marketing automation or content management systems, it can be crucial to ensure content gets into key audiences’ hands. For example, you can build a picture of what happens during a sales cycle with CRM data. Retrospective analyses can reveal how many people in an organisation engaged with which content pieces. When it turns out that 12 different people from the same firm have all clicked on multiple pieces of content, or if the person clicked on multiple pieces of content, you have a much stronger case to prove your campaign’s effectiveness.

If the content is not hitting the mark, messages are not reaching their targets. Or they are simply not resonating. Thus, tweaks must be made on the fly. This shouldn’t happen too much with campaigns that are well thought out at the planning stage. However, sometimes you must adjust, try different things and then stay in constant communication with campaign stakeholders to ensure you remain on the right path.

     5. Stay curious

Another useful tool to help you dive deeper into campaign effectiveness was shared by Raconteur Media recently. They applied the well-known BCG Matrix to the business of content creation:

Figure 1 Content Creation Matrix from Raconteur Media

The general guidance is that you milk the cows to feed the stars. That is, dedicate around 70 per cent of your resources to creating more of your best-performing content types, positioning them prominently in the customer journey, and optimising the process as much as possible.

Set aside the remaining 30 per cent of the resource budget for experimentation. Depending on your risk appetite, you might split this allocation further between moderate‐ and high‐risk activities.

At The Comms Crowd, we can not only help you create winning content but also work with you to plot those pieces along your customer journeys and find the best way to resonate with the right decision-makers at the right time. Email us to find out more.

Influencer Marketing in B2B – Covering all your bases

Time to read: 2 minutes

Marc Duke explains the science of influencer marketing: 

I am a sports fan, so any sporting metaphor works for me. When I thought about Influencer Marketing this classic baseball reference sums it up and here’s why:

Influencer marketing is about making sure the people who influence your target customer know about your offering. The idea of covering all your bases means you have ‘influenced’ all those stakeholders who influence the purchasing decision, and can endorse or advise in favour of your company over the competition. When you communicate directly with your customer or prospect, you are then pushing on an open door as they have already been positively influenced and are already open to dialogue.

Which bases do we cover?

1) Identifying your influencers

So that’s the theory, but who are the people influencing your customers? Much will depend on whether your business sells direct to the customer or through the channel. Either way, the first job is to map out a set of discrete groups that influence the purchasing decision. Let’s take the example of a company that produces environmentally-friendly and energy-efficient office lighting.

Influencers that make the cut will include:

•  Journalists – who write about office environments.
•  Industry analysts/consultants – who write about the market and provide ‘behind closed doors’ advice to decision makers
•  Academics – who teach about ergonomics and design and need to be aware of   the latest trends
•  Industry associations – who represent the trade and bring together people who work in in the industry
•  Industry gurus – who blog, write and speak about the latest trends
•  Existing customers – who use the product/service and can endorse its use
•  Competition – who’d rather your target customer used their solution!
•  Partners – who you work with to your mutual benefit
•  Investors – who have invested in your business
•  Charities – supporting greener initiatives

I could go on but by now you should have noticed a couple of things. Firstly, this is a long list (one client I worked with identified SIXTEEN separate influencer groups) and secondly, other parts of your marketing activity already address some of these groups e.g. journalists will be handled by PR and industry analysts will be looked after by the Analyst Relations team.

2) Scoring your influencers

For this example let’s just focus our influencer efforts on the industry gurus. How do we identify them and how do we work out the weight of their influence? Not as simple as you might think, and there is a need for some smart metrics that can evaluate the following:

• Reach – how big a following does this guru have on twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc? Does this person have blogs or articles in local publications or globally?
• Relevance – how engaged is this influencer socially e.g. how popular is the content that this person has shared?
• Expertise – from their public activity how is this influencer perceived? For example, have you noticed that they are giving keynotes at major industry events?

Each influencer will need a numeric score from 1 – 10 for each category. Ultimately, we will come up with a final influence score. The idea here is that there must be some measure of influence, even if arbitrary, that enables us to track and decide who indeed is an influencer of our target customer base.

3) Engaging your influencers

Assuming we have done our homework, we will probably have anything between 20 to 50 gurus that we have scored and ranked. But how will we work with them? This is where you need to be totally clear that working with an influencer is about education – NOT selling. It’s about informing – NOT persuading and it’s also about recognising that this influencer is rightly lauded because they might have a better understanding of the market than you, they have more experience than you or they just might be really, really smart!

The sorts of questions you need to think about:

• Is there information you can share that they will value and find of interest such as a white paper on an issue they care about?
• Are there things they can actually help with e.g. taking part in a podcast, speaking at one of your events?
• Do you have people in your company credible enough to establish and maintain proper relationships with your halloed influencers rather than just sell at them?

If you have big ticks to all the above then you are ready to go out there and influence those influencers.

The Power of the Podcast

Time to read: 2 minutes

We look at how podcasts are becoming the star pupil in the B2B marketing class of 2019.

Podcasts are thriving in the UK. Nearly 6 million people now tune in each week, according to a survey from Ofcom (September 2018) – with the number of weekly podcast listeners having almost doubled in five years – from 3.2 million in 2013 to 5.9 million in 2018.

While podcasts were traditionally created with consumers in mind, thanks to the tech evolution, brands large and small are getting in on the action.

The soaring popularity of podcasts has led many B2B publications to introduce them to their websites. Be it paid-for ops, interview placements or the opportunity to submit pre-recorded material, the rise of the podcast is opening new avenues to B2B PR professionals looking to get clients heard as well as seen.

So, should your client be hopping on the podcasting bandwagon?

While podcasts are relatively easy to make, producing and managing a regular branded podcast is a big commitment. It is not something I would recommend to any client taking their first steps into podcasting. Clients need to think realistically about how much time they can dedicate to recording and the frequency with which they can publish content. The key to podcasts is consistency. If you want to be effective, you should offer something that listeners can tune into regularly.

Our advice

We recommend making podcasts part of your existing PR and marketing strategy that complements other activities.

As PRs, we should familiarise ourselves with existing podcasts in our client’s sector. In our case, that’s technology. We should be engaging with these podcasts and the editors producing them to identify available opportunities. This might include guest speaker slots or themes of the month that clients can get involved in. You should invest time in pitching for slots, establishing if there are opportunities to submit client speakers, or even submitting pre-recorded material regularly.

Beyond ease of production, the great thing about podcasts is that you don’t need to duplicate content. You can utilise written articles as topics for discussion and kill two birds with one stone. In addition, there is the advantage of longevity, as content can be listened to repeatedly.

As PR consultants, we should look for opportunities for clients to contribute to podcast conversations (as with all other media forms). It allows the speaker to convey information more interactively and engagingly than words on a page. We should encourage clients to augment their PR strategies with podcasts and start honing their broadcast skills in preparation.

10 tips for effectively announcing a funding round

Time to read: 3 minutes

Yes, you can be in TechCrunch! Read our top tips for ensuring your funding announcement gets the attention it deserves…

For any start-up, attracting investment is a significant milestone. It’s not just about knowing that you’re on to something special; it’s also about signalling to the rest of your industry that your business is a serious player with a prosperous future.

At this stage of early growth and investment, being able to PR the news is key. You want to get the best out of any opportunity to share the exciting news and spread the word far and wide. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate who you are, what your business does, and why it’s different from everyone else.

Announcing your new funding increases your visibility and can support recruitment drives, attract top talent, invite new investors and drive new business. But with the start-up scene moving at pace, how do you cut through the noise and ensure your voice gets listened to?

Here are our top tips for securing coverage in top-tier publications:

1) Numbers talk – journalists want the news and facts

Getting coverage for a funding announcement that doesn’t include the amount raised is nearly impossible. If you can, use the numbers in the press release to illustrate the growth behind your start-up and how you plan to use the funds. After all, this is the ‘news’ you’re promoting.

2) Include as much information as possible

Who are the investors? Are they private, institutional, or private equity? If funding was secured in earlier rounds, be sure to mention this, too. It shows continued confidence in your business and tells the story so far.

3) Company background

Clearly articulate what your company does and how your solution addresses a problem. Who are the founders, what is their background, and how big is the company? Explain what the money will be used for – it could be new hires, further technology developments or product development.

4) Validation

There is no greater endorsement than being able to quote one of your investors. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the lead investor, but an investor voice will add enormous credibility to your press release. They should talk about the reasons behind their investments. It might be the management team’s capabilities or a desire to be part of a growing market. You should also include a quote from your company founder or CEO.

5) Get all your ducks in a row

Once the press release has been written and signed off by all necessary parties, developing a game plan for announcing the news to the market is important. It is more effective to spend time getting all the materials and content in a good place than to rush to get the news out too quickly. Slow and steady really does win this race.

6) Where do you want to be?

Vertical trade press will likely be most interested, but you might find that technology press, investor magazines, or start-up publications are where you need to be. Ask your PR agency to list the titles they think you should target to ensure you’re on the same page. Between you, agree on which titles should be prioritised and which ones can follow. It’s important to use the announcement as an opportunity to build existing relationships with the press and establish new ones.

7) Consider your outreach strategy

Would reaching out to one key publication with an ‘exclusive’ be more effective, or should it be sent to many different publications? Pitching the story exclusively to one key publication risks alienating others who might have otherwise covered the story, reducing the likelihood of widespread coverage. But it normally means that you will get a more thoughtful and comprehensive article in return.

A recent funding announcement from our client Urban Jungle resulted in us securing an exclusive article in TechCrunch. As a top-tier title for InsurTech, Urban Jungle was thrilled to be covered so extensively in such a key title. We also generated 24 other pieces of coverage on the same day by sending the release far and wide once TechCrunch had published their story.

8) Timing is key

Will your key spokespeople be around when the announcement is made? If not, consider holding off until they are available, as any interviews must be done that day. Does your company have any other news likely to come out around the same time? A drip feed effect is far more effective than an avalanche of news in a short timeframe. Space the news out where possible and go with the most time-sensitive ones first. Finally, keep your ear to the ground. If you catch word of a competitor announcing news around the same time, consider jumping in before them or waiting until their time has passed.

9) Shout from the rooftops

Use your social media platforms and networks to spread the news and share links to articles through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Encourage your teams to do the same. They should be proud of their company and want to share the exciting news.

10) Keep the momentum going

Securing funding is a huge accomplishment, and once it’s been announced, everyone will be keen to get on with the job at hand. But don’t forget to keep the market updated on your progress.

Announce any new senior or significant hires that have come on board. Tell people if you’ve enhanced your technology platform or are offering new products! Use the captured interest in your company as a platform to keep going. Once you have established a voice, don’t be afraid to use it.

Ultimately, you want to position your company’s senior leaders as leading authorities in the market, so you need to optimise every opportunity to do this.

Our Top 10 Tips for live tweeting

Time to read: 3 minutes

Sandra Vogel, editor-in-residence, issues her survival guide for live tweeting.

For context:

• 500 million tweets are sent every day
• 5,787 tweets are sent every second
• 326 million people use Twitter every month

There are some more mind-blowing stats here.

Now, of course, we’re not all exposed to every tweet. But sometimes, it is necessary to tweet on behalf of a client, and these are useful stats to bear in mind.

Here are two more:

• The half-life of a tweet is approximately 24 minutes. If people haven’t read your tweet within half an hour, then the averages suggest they are not likely to get to it. A tweet gets half of all its interactions within half an hour of posting.
•  Tweets with an image get 55% more engagement. So, the image can matter even more than the words.

Nowhere is tweeting for a client quite so important and quite as stressful as when you are live tweeting an event. A lot will be riding on your work because live-tweeted events can deliver great profiles and original and interesting content. Events can be fast and furious, and staying on top of everything is difficult.  You only have one opportunity to get things right.

10 things to do before you go live

Get the detailed insider version of the event programme

Include any special announcements or launches that the public won’t be privy to till they happen. You can pre-prepare a tweet or two with appropriate images so you are not caught on the hop.

Know exactly who is speaking on stage at every moment

Prepare a file that includes their name – spelt correctly – their job title in full, and their various social media handles. Include any nuggets of info that might be useful for a tweet. Make this file easily accessible at the event so you can flick in and out of it when you need to.

Get the lowdown on any special announcements during scheduled sessions

If awards are given, get the list of winners, nominees and runners-up – whatever will be announced live. Get photos of the people in case it’s not possible to obtain live shots at the time. Pre-write your posts so they are ready to check through and fire off as announcements are made.

Get as many graphics as you can

Are there slides from presentations that will be useful in a tweet? Get them. You don’t need to have a post prepared and ready for every image, but the images may prove useful when you are live tweeting. Especially if it is tricky getting live photos.

Prepare at least one tweet for every session you are covering

You might not use it on the day, but then again, it might just be what you need to get you out of a problem moment.

Sort out your hashtags

Several hashtags will likely be used throughout the event. Agree on the list with your client and anyone you expect to be tweeting the event live from the client side. If some hashtags must be used in particular sessions, note that beforehand in the document you use to store the speaker details. Keep it structured so it’s easy to find what you need when you need it at speed.

Set some standards for language and tone

The client may already have established words or phrases. Make sure you are aware of them, and if you think you might lose touch with them in the heat of the moment during the event, put them in your handy reference document. Agree on the use of punctuation (exclamation marks are the domain of 13-year-olds, not professionals), any acceptable or non-acceptable abbreviations, any words that are never to be used and so on.

Have an open discussion with the client about logistics

Who is tweeting, what are they tweeting, and how will you divide and conquer? When are you going to get your breaks? Sometimes, a client is looking for back-to-back live session coverage. Is that practical? Plan your schedule carefully. You can’t be in two places simultaneously, so where will you be? If two or more sessions running at the same time need to be live-tweeted, how is that going to happen? Get full sign off on the schedule.

Do you need access to a backup person?

Or even two? Maybe back at the office, who you know will be on hand to do whatever you need, from double-checking facts to doing on-the-spot research or taking over from you if there is an emergency?

Set things in place to head problems off before they happen

Preparation will help you deal with on-the-day problems either because you’ve already thought of them, so they’re not problems at all, or because the process of all that preparation has given you added confidence that you can handle anything. 

Writing the American Marketing and PR Playbook: Part II

Time to read: 3 minutes

Jo Detavernier, vice president  of Swyft, our US partner and the founding firm of our global network, First PR Alliance,  provides this two part guide. It’s for UK tech companies on how not to get lost in translation when venturing across the pond:

Part Two: UK marketing to US: getting it right

Any modern marketing and PR campaign must be integrated. Integration implies that you will try to have the following channels working together to reinforce one another:

• Your ‘owned’ (your website, blog, etc.) channels
• Your earned (media coverage) channels
• Your paid (advertising) channels

In many cases, ‘shared’ (online shares) is added to the mix, equating to PESO (paid, earned, shared & owned). We stick to the first three tracks and count shared with earned.

Here is a list of tools available for a marketing and PR campaign in the US. For each campaign, you will make a unique selection of building blocks. As you’ve been fairly warned about selecting the right market segment, speaking the right language, funding your effort sufficiently, and employing the right channels, your marketing activities can yield the highest possible return.

Owned media

• Website content tuned to an American audience (either a U.S. site or American pages on your global site) and plenty of call-to-actions help conversions through the sales funnel.
• Blog with articles that are relevant to American buyer personas.
• Send newsletters that are geared towards different buyer personas.
• Tailor video content to provide valuable information to prospective buyers.

Earned media

• When warranted, distribute press releases to American news outlets that serve your target audience and wire services (e.g., Business Wire).
• Offer interviews to journalists who attend a trade show at which you have a booth.
• Pitch exclusive stories to journalists when practical.
• Do a press tour and visit journalists’ offices for one-on-one talks. This assumes you are a sizable player in your respective industry or are first-to-market with disruptive technology.
• Contribute articles to trade magazines.

Paid media

• Advertise in print or online media.
• Promote content and/or ads on social media.
• SEA on Google and/or Bing.
• Sponsor posts (native advertising) / advertorials in print or online media.
• Sponsor podcasts.

Integrating owned, earned and paid

Marketing and PR campaigns that yield the best results are fully integrated. Pitching interviews on a story in October, promoting posts on Facebook in January and paying for a sponsored article in March can and will have some impact. However, they are not nearly as powerful as a fully integrated campaign, where you bring everything together in mutually reinforcing ways.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. Say you have just surveyed a hot issue in your industry. How can you maximize the impact of that survey to increase brand awareness and stimulate lead generation?

• Owned: Make the survey report available on your site for people who leave their email addresses. Make sure you respect American CAN-SPAM regulations while you are at it). If possible, write a series of blog posts on the results, illustrated by an infographic. Dedicate a status update to the survey on your Facebook page, and publish a slide deck on your SlideShare account.
• Earned: Send a release about the survey to a major tech news outlet or a trade publication if it has enough news value. Pitch interviews with your CEO about the results and use the survey to feed your proof points for a contributed article in a key trade magazine.
• Paid: Companies will typically not pay to promote a survey. However, the buzz created by the survey will allow your now ‘primed’ audiences to be extra receptive to any advertising campaign you run in the months following the campaign.

The US and UK markets are different

In these two blogs, we have discussed some common mistakes that European companies will typically make when looking to expand in the US. And what advice these companies should heed if they want to succeed across the pond.

The American market is, in many regards, very different from the UK. Those entrepreneurs and marketing managers who stick to their UK playbook when arriving in the US will do themselves a huge disservice.

This white paper is based on the Swyft whitepaper: How Should European Companies Write Their American Marketing and PR Playbook? Swyft is the founding member and organizer of First PR Alliance. For more information on Swyft, visit growswyft.com

First PR Alliance is a network of independent PR and marketing agencies that offers highly coordinated support spanning borders, time zones, languages and cultures. For more information, visit firstpralliance.com.

Writing the American Marketing & PR Playbook: Part I

Time to read: 3 minutes

Jo Detavernier, vice president of Swyft, our US partner and founding firm of our global network, First PR Alliance,  provides this two-part guide. It’s for UK tech companies on how not to get lost in translation when venturing across the pond:

Part One: UK marketing to US: Common pitfalls

At first sight, promoting services and products in the American market looks similar to how it is done in the UK. Are American B2B buyers not comparable to their counterparts across the pond? And are the best means to reach them the same as in the UK?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer to both questions is a resounding ‘NO.’ UK companies need a dedicated American marketing and PR playbook to succeed in the American market.

So, in the next two posts, we look at what not to do and what to do to crack the US market.

What UK companies do wrong (most of the time)

1. Trying to ‘boil the ocean’

Trying to ‘boil the ocean’ is an American expression for trying to accomplish an insurmountable task or making a project unnecessarily difficult.

Here’s the thing: the American market is simply too large for any European company to attack all at once. At least not with the budget one normally allocates to attack a single European country.

Omar Mohout, a prominent Belgian professor in Enterprise who teaches at the Solvay Brussels School of Business and Economics, recommends that European companies first target one specific American socio-demographic or geographic segment.

For example, say you developed a perfect SaaS accounting solution for small and mid-sized professional services organizations in the US. You might choose to target American law offices in a handful of major metro areas first rather than attempt to sell the solution across multiple industries and geographic markets.

In other words, figure out how to thrive and be successful in one specific niche, or one geographic market (for example, the state of Texas). Then, you will have something to show when it’s time to convince investors to participate in your next big push to grow market share. Your organic growth and the extra funding will help make the next chapter in your American expansion story a reality.

2. Underfunding the effort

This second mistake is closely related to the first. Not picking a small segment to thrive in will cause you to underfund your marketing and PR efforts. However, even the ones that manage to pick a realistic segment will often commit critical budgeting mistakes.

For instance, marketing and PR agency costs run higher in the United States than in the UK. Especially if you are contracting agencies on the West and East Coast. It stands to reason that the cost of any effort aimed at brand awareness and lead generation in one European country is much smaller than attacking the EU as a whole. The same rationale applies to the US, only on a larger scale.

The per unit cost of acquiring leads may also vary in the US, if only because the degree of competition in the tech space is incredibly intense. Even sponsored posts on national trade websites will cost much more than their European counterparts. Google Adwords campaigns are tricky, given the competitive nature of many U.S. tech businesses. It’s not uncommon for bidding amounts to run so high as to make the ROI on leads untenable.

What can you do to avoid underfunding your marketing efforts? Aim for what you can reasonably afford. Don’t attempt to overreach on market size and, in the process, underfund the effort. Do plenty of research into your target market and what works and doesn’t work when it comes to marketing and PR. Also, don’t be shy about contacting local agencies for advice. What you learn from them could be the difference between success and failure.

3. Not speaking the language

We share a language, but speaking the right language doesn’t only relate to how things are said. It also concerns the core messages of your marketing campaigns and how you articulate them. American culture is different from UK culture. A simple edit of a brochure or website into American English will not suffice. You must ‘think’ like an American to authentically attract their attention. Otherwise, you risk alienating your target audience within seconds.

4. Picking the wrong channels

You have selected a segment you want to target, but now the work begins. Given your budget and target audience, you must select the best channel mix to achieve your marketing and PR objectives. If you are new to the market, you must spend most of your time creating awareness. Don’t forget to track your inbound leads and properly attribute their source (e.g., Twitter ad, Google AdWords campaign, trade show, etc.) in some kind of spreadsheet. Fortunately, many marketing automation platforms (HubSpot, Pardot, etc.) do reasonably well at lead attribution. Lead attribution will only partially help inform your marcom spending decisions. Take SEA (Search Engine Advertising), for example: For European marketers, SEA equals Google AdWords. But Bing had in January 2018 a 23.7 % share of the American search engine market (source: Statista).

While it’s not the largest search engine regarding search volumes and ad spending, you can’t afford to ignore it in the long run if you hope to pick up market share against your competitors.

Now that we know the mistakes to avoid, the next post will examine how UK companies should write their American marketing and PR playbook.

Proof points: So what makes you the expert?

Time to read: 2 minutes

How can you prove your clients are the zen masters they say they are? We go in search of those elusive proof points.

We know journalists get hundreds of pitches every day. Their mailboxes and Twitter feeds are full of companies competing for airtime, all offering informed, relevant comments. But why should a journalist listen to what they have to say?

Your client may be a world expert in their field, whether that’s digital widgets, cloud computing, or new legislation.

But if you can’t make them instantly credible in the eyes of the journalist, they’ll go straight to the deleted folder.

Once, a client wanted to remove a statistic from our pitch because a) he thought it wasn’t that strong, and b) he wasn’t sure it was accurate. We pointed out that, while we understood his concerns, we needed something concrete to show that they were well-established, had delivered a lot of great work, and were worth listening to. We thought the number was convincing, but if it couldn’t be used, it was vital to have an alternative.

Gain credibility by naming high-profile customers

This isn’t easy. Unless you can persuade your client to include ‘permission to be named in marketing materials’ in their standard contract (yes, this can happen). However, there are creative alternatives. For example, when one customer mentioned they worked with one-third of the London Boroughs, we didn’t need names – the statistic was enough. Similarly, the phrase ‘working with law enforcement agencies’, as was the case with one Comms Crowd client, speaks for itself.

Demonstrating credibility can be even more difficult in the finance sector, where every ‘expert’ has professional qualifications and offers similar services. Here, you will have to dig a little deeper. Links to topical issues can help, as can the ability to understand both sides of an issue. We obtained much coverage for one client on the topic of angel investment. Not only does he advise clients on obtaining investment, but two of those clients have appeared on Dragons’ Den, and he invests as a business angel himself. So, he is extremely credible.

Work with experts whose credibility is a given

Such as academics. Hitching your wagon to a star, to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, can be an effective way of enhancing your own credibility. Particularly if your opinions complement those of the expert.

If you’re still struggling to get hard facts, the solution may be your clients themselves. One of our favourite clients really ‘gets it’ where journalists are concerned. No matter how busy he is, he’ll quickly give us a short, snappy, often controversial comment to pitch, demonstrating that he knows his topic inside out. He then makes himself available at short notice if the journalist wants to speak to him. As a result, he punches well above his weight in terms of influence and coverage.

It’s not easy finding proof points, and it can be even harder to persuade your client to let you make them public. However, it will be time well spent if the goal is to establish them as credible sources.

Journalists working with PRs – how to avoid conflicts of interest

Time to read: 1 minute

Can a journalist comfortably hang out with PRs? 

Our in-house writer and working tech journalist Sandra Vogel explains how it works for her…

Some say journalists and PRs are chalk and cheese. They want different things. They see the world in different ways, and it is impossible to work in both camps.

But that’s not true. It is possible to be a freelance journalist who also works with PRs. There can be significant benefits to working in both camps.

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On K.I.S.S.ING – Keeping it simple, stupid!

Time to read: 2 minutes

We keep it brief.

We saw this tweet from Tom Knowles a few weeks ago, and it stayed with us. This type of thing, we see all the time. Paragraphs beyond paragraphs of long, clunky words with no clear explanation as to what they are trying to say. You can spend an age reading a company description that goes around the various powers that be of a company. We know this as we’ve worked in-house, too. Everyone wants to add own perspective to feel like they played a part in creating the copy. But in doing so, adding a long word here and a bit of jargon there, we can lose all sense of what we’re trying to say.

When you work for a company, you can get so immersed in it and its technicalities that coming up with a simple sentence to describe exactly what it does can be hard. We see this a lot in PR, too. When we ask a company for an 800-1000 word article on a chosen subject, it’s easy. It seems to take all day when we ask for a two-sentence reactive comment. And it’s the same for us. For some reason, writing less always takes more.

The Tom Knowles example

Tom is a property reporter at The Times, so we can assume that this is a property company (if the PR has got the pitch right!). But what they actually do is anyone’s guess.

Tom’s a busy man. He needs to sift through hundreds if not thousands of emails daily, looking for the best news stories. All while writing insightful copy under tight deadlines for tomorrow’s paper. He doesn’t have time to read 800-word emails. Tom needs to understand clearly from the outset why this company is great and unique and why he should speak to them.

Think about how you read a news article or blog. If you read the first 100 words and you’re either not interested or can’t see where it’s going, you will switch off and move on to something else. It’s the same with PR pitches. You’ve got to be succinct from the start and clarify why your client is so interesting.

We’ve often questioned if our pitches to journalists can sometimes be too simplistic. So, we go back through them, trying to add fancy adjectives and make things sound more revolutionary than they are. Our clients are paying us to ensure the journalist understands why they are so great and why we think it will make a good story. Translating this 800-word description into two or three easily digestible sentences interests the journalist and makes them want to learn more.

Next time you think about your ‘story’, find the three things that make it unique and interesting and put these points high in your pitch. If you can capture the journalist’s attention in the first two sentences, that’s half the battle won. But, if you’re not entirely sure what these key messages are, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and start the process again.

You don’t need to give the journalist a life story

Even if it’s about the company or the 30-year career of the chairman.

Should the journalist be interested in the story you’re pitching, they will respond with questions. Keep it clear and to the point, and highlight why it’s interesting in a couple of short sentences. Keep it brief, keep it simple.