In this blog, Richard Peters, Senior Content Creator at Whiteoaks, discusses:
- How Performance PR powers inbound lead generation by building visibility and trust
- Tactics for earning influence through media coverage, peer advocacy and search-optimised content
- Practical steps to turn thought leadership, case studies and employee-generated social posts into qualified leads
Outbound methods of driving leads are under the spotlight. Smarter spam filters and the influx of AI-generated sales emails are pushing cold email strategies to become irrelevant, and even encouraging organisations to go back to cold calling in some cases.
The ongoing expansion of privacy regulations means that buying lists now carries genuine legal and reputational risk, while with today’s tougher email authentication rules, just a few spam complaints can cause every message from a domain to land in recipients’ junk folders.
As outbound strategies face an uncertain future, inbound strategies are coming to the fore. It is an approach that makes perfect sense when you consider that potential future customers often encounter a brand or visit its website before that business proactively contacts them.
In fact, according to 6sense, 69% of the purchase process happens before B2B buyers engage with sellers. So, it is imperative that businesses can draw these prospects in by ensuring that when they get in touch they get a good impression of the organisation and what it does.
The inbound methodology focuses partly on attracting potential customers with relevant content, but it is also, more broadly, about building reputation and influence. Performance PR plays a crucial role across all these areas by building trust with target audiences.
The inbound advantage
Part of this is via secured media engagements. Dedicated teams of B2B media relations specialists leverage their relationships with key journalists, analysts and influencers to secure content placements and opportunities.
Experienced and expert content creators profile executives within an organisation and elevate brands in industry leading publications, through in-depth thought leadership articles, client case studies and whitepapers.
However, inbound lead generation extends beyond media relations and the formal press environment. It’s about finding ways to shape a business’s reputation. At its root, reputation is a collective perception that is made up from a combination of image and reality.
Businesses that want to create a positive impression need to score highly on several key criteria: being seen and understood, establishing points of differentiation, and perhaps most important of all, being well trusted.
Over the past few years, trust has migrated away from institutions and towards a wide range of other audience groups: customers, colleagues, analysts, niche influencers and user communities.
These peer groups play an increasingly important role in inbound lead generation.
Trust-building tactics that work
There are a wide range of PR tactics that could be deployed to harness these groups to help businesses improve their reputation and begin to exert more influence over prospects.
They include everything from encouraging staff to generate their own content on product launches or industry trends on platforms like LinkedIn and Stack; to building video or written case studies for social right through to encouraging users to deliver positive feedback on review platforms.
Performance PR campaigns also focus on enhancing content for search engines with keyword optimised content and relevant backlinks to boost domain authority.
This makes it more likely for target audiences to see expert articles, bold commentary and informative case studies from the brand when searching for a topic or solution online.
Woven together, these elements create a cycle of visibility and trust that guides potential customers from first glance to genuine interest, often before the sales team is aware of them, or even before they first reach the company website.
Ready to let your expertise do the talking? Speak to the Whiteoaks team today.
