Writing the American Marketing and PR Playbook: Part II

17/12/2018

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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