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 helpful two part guide 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 your ‘owned’ (your website, blog, etc.), earned (media coverage) and paid (advertising) channels working together to reinforce one another as much as possible. In many cases ‘shared’ (online shares) is added to the mix, which when added equates to PESO (paid, earned, shared & owned). In what follows we stick to the first three tracks and count shared with earned.
Here is a list oof tools that are available for a marketing and PR campaign in the US. For each campaign you will be making a very unique selection of building blocks. And since you have now been fairly warned about selecting the right market segment, speaking the right language, funding your effort sufficiently and employing the right channels, all of your marketing activities will now be poised to yield the highest possible return.
Owned media
- Website with content and style tuned to an American audience (either a U.S. site or American pages on your global site) and plenty of call-to-actions to help people convert through the sales funnel.
- Blog with articles that depart from the benefits of your products or services as they are relevant to American buyer personas.
- Newsletter to send out content that is geared towards different buyer personas.
- Video content aimed at providing valuable information to prospective buyers.
Earned media
- Distribution of press releases to American news outlets that serve your target audience and to wire services (e.g., Business Wire) when warranted.
- Offering interviews to journalists that attend a trade show at which you have a booth.
- Pitching of stories, on an exclusive basis where practical, to journalists.
- Press tour whereby you visit the offices of journalists for one-on-one talks (this assumes you are a sizable player in your respective industry or are first-to-market with disruptive technology).
- Contributed articles to trade magazines.
Paid media
- Advertising in print or online media.
- Promoted content and/or ads on social media.
- SEA on Google and/or Bing.
- Sponsored posts (native advertising) / advertorials in print or online media.
- Sponsoring of podcasts.
Integrating owned, earned and paid
As mentioned earlier, marketing and PR campaigns that yield the best results are ones that 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, but they are not nearly as powerful as a fully integrated campaign where you bring everything together in ways that are mutually reinforcing.
Let’s illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you have just conducted a survey about a hot issue in your industry. How can you maximize the impact of that survey to increase brand awareness and stimulate lead generation?
- Owned: You can make the survey report available on your site for people who leave their email address (make sure you respect American CAN-SPAM regulations while you are at it); 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: You can send out a release about the survey (after negotiating a scoop with a major tech news outlet or a trade publication if it’s got strong 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, but the buzz that is created by the survey will allow your now ‘primed’ audiences to be extra receptive to any advertising campaign that you would want to run in the months following the campaign.
In these two blogs we have discussed what some common mistakes are that European companies that are looking to expand in the US will typically make 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 aThe UK and 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 white paper 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 helpful two part guide 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
Promoting services and products on the American market looks at first sight very close to how it is done in the UK. Are Americans 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 if they want to be successful on 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)
- Trying to ‘boil the ocean’
Trying to ‘boil the ocean’ is an American expression referring to the trying to accomplish an insurmountable task, or making a project unnecessarily difficult.
Here’s the thing, the American market is simply way too large for any European company to attack all at once, at least not with the kind of budget one normally allocates to attack a single European country (or even Western Europe for that matter).
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 instance, say you developed a SaaS accounting solution perfect for small and mid-sized professional services organizations in the US. You might choose to first target only American law offices in a handful of major metro areas 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, possibly one specific 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. Both your organic growth and the extra funding will help make the next chapter in your American expansion story become reality.
- Underfunding the effort
This second mistake is closely related to the first one. Not picking a segment that is small enough for you to thrive in will cause you to underfund your marketing and PR effort. But even the ones that do manage to pick a realistic segment will unfortunately often commit critical budgeting mistakes. For instance, marketing and PR agency costs run higher in the United States than they do 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 potentially larger scale
The per unit cost of acquiring leads may vary in the US as well, if only because the degree of competition in the tech space is incredibly intense. Even the cost of sponsored posts in national trade websites will cost much more than counterparts in Europe. Google Adwords campaigns are tricky given the competitive nature of many U.S. tech businesses; it’s not uncommon for bidding amounts run so high as to make the ROI on leads untenable. Talking about Google AdWords, is about 13% more in the US than the UK.
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. Don’t be shy about reaching out to local agencies for advice. What you learn from them could be the difference between success and failure.
- Not speaking the language
Well we do share a language but speaking the right language doesn’t only pertain to how things are said. It also has to do with the core messages of your marketing campaigns and the manner in which you articulate them. Clearly American culture is very different from UK culture. A simple edit of a brochure or website into American English will not suffice. You have to ‘think’ like an American to attract their attention in an authentic way. Otherwise, you risk alienating your target audience within seconds.
- Picking the wrong channels
You have selected a segment that you want to target, but now the work begins. You will need to select the best mix of channels to achieve your marketing and PR objectives given your budget and target audience. If you are new to the market you will have to spend a majority 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 a reasonably good job at lead attribution. That said, 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 in terms of search volumes and ad spend, you can’t afford to ignore it in the long run if you hope to pick up market share against your competitors.
Now we know the mistakes to avoid, the next post will look at how UK companies should write their American marketing and PR playbook.
The Comms Crowd goes global!
Time to read: 1 minute
Sam Howard On how we are growing (albeit vicariously).
When you go freelance, you quickly realise the limitations of what you can competently do and therefore the nature of the projects you can take on. So then, if you’re smart, you collaborate playing to your strengths working with others similarly smart but with complementary skills. Here at the Comms Crowd we have been sublimely happy in that phase for the last few years – steadily adding interesting clients that appreciate the hands on approach and building up the merits of the crew in a wholly organic stylee, even getting nominated for an award along the way. But what does our next iteration look like?
When I founded Comms Crowd it was not to become the next Edelman or even to get into the PR Top 100. In my experience bigger does not correlate to better – not for the clients, where more can buy you less; not for the staff, unless your job satisfaction depends on the length of your job title; nor even the bottom line, impressive offices and charismatic receptionist do not come cheap.
For me, small is truly beautiful and that’s the way we are going to stay. But that said who can deny the global nature of comms and the tech start-ups we work with, have global appeal and we need to secure them global attention without busting the budget…
So we have joined as a founding partner, globla network, The First PR Alliance courtesy of Swyft Communications in the US – a great fit for us and our clients as all the agencies focus on tech and start-ups so little will get lost in translatio. All the partner agencies are boutique independents like ourselves so we know all the work will be done by senior, accountable and personable teams and the buck stops with the founder,
Between us we can provide PR support from Peru to Poland, Singapore to Sweden, United Kingdom to the United States and stopping off in Belgium, Columbia, France, Germany, Italy,The Netherlands, Morrocco, Portugal, Spain along the way.
In tech comms at least, you don’t need to be big to be clever… just clever.
Why is US B2B PR so difficult?
Time to read: 2 minutes
Just so happy to be doing transatlantic PR again, here’s a post from our US PR partner on why it’s not easy securing the US column inches.
It doesn’t matter where in the world you want PR coverage, you will find the journalists you need are a busy lot. Their publications are under competitive attack, staff have been cut, acquisitions and closures are commonplace, everyone is doing more with less and covering more areas and, well, it all sounds rather familiar doesn’t it?
Journalists and their organizations face many of the same issues you do in your business. And just like any busy company expert, journalists want only the most insightful and relevant information and sources to ensure they do the best job possible. That makes getting their attention, building a relationship and winning their trust all the more challenging and important.
The U.S. journalistic landscape is similar to the UK although larger. According to Pew Research’s “State of the News Media 2014” report there are 38,000 full time journalists employed within the traditional U.S. newspaper industry alone (not to mention TV, magazines, etc.). Comparatively, the European Journalism Centre reports similar full time newspaper journalists in the UK. Digital native sites are growing on both sides of the pond, yet still employ only a small numbers with about 5,000 full-time U.S.-based editorial jobs at nearly 500 digital news outlets.
Whether traditional or digital, one big difference is ownership. Certainly there are U.S. conglomerate owners, however the UK newspaper market is generally far more nationalistic with fewer owners.
What does all this mean to you? Obviously you aren’t after every US journalist. You want only a logical niche of decision makers to notice your new product/service or entry into the market. As you should. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easier.
Here’s why. Think about your competition. How many companies will you compete with in the U.S.? 10? 20? 50? More? How many of your European competitors are also entering or active in the U.S.? How many non-industry companies are nipping at your heels trying to steal the same potential customers?
Each of those and all the ones not yet identified are engaging PR to contact the same journalist you want. Whilst there are about 50,000 PR professionals in the UK, there are nearly 230,000 PR professionals in the U.S. Talk about competition!
Now think back to that busy journalist looking for someone to validate or negate the premise of an article (yes that has a lot to do with it). The journalist must be accurate. And the editor and the publisher need them to have a differentiated story than the other media outlets in their niche. After all, eyes on their story and their publication translate into revenue for survival.
So, who does the journo turn to? Someone they know will deliver. And yes, despite journalistic outcry, the line is blurring between editorial coverage and those who do or could buy advertising or sponsorships. Remember how different the ownership of US media outlets is compared to the UK? That can increase in importance when those paid and earned media lines blur.
So the number 1 reason it is trickier to get your story told by a U.S. journalist is pure and simple -competition.
And #2? Your story absolutely must be relevant to the U.S. reader/viewer. It is not enough to believe your product/service is right for them. It means understanding U.S. centric issues and trends – not just of your potential customers, but of the journalist as well.
Your chances will significantly improve if you can produce a U.S. customer. Some journos won’t talk to “vendors” without one. If you don’t have a U.S.-specific example, the challenge for coverage is even greater. Not impossible, but challenging. It is very likely you will share the story with one of those U.S. competitors you identified.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Truly, it’s not. You just need the experienced insight of localized PR. That’s the same in any country. A world view is quite important strategically but localized insight is invaluable.
As for the U.S., remember those growing digital outlets? Turns out, whilst mainstream U.S. media are sharply decreasing their global coverage, digital is on a quest to include more global coverage. And that spells opportunity! Plan your strategy wisely. This is the perfect time to think global and act local.