Category: Articles

The lure of potential growth, scalability, enhanced profitability and market domination fuels the merger and acquisition (M&A) market. Over the last three years the value of global M&A deals has increased year-on-year to reach $3.8bn in 2018 (Statista). And in the UK alone, 9,000 deals took place (Statista). A successful M&A can combine a wealth of collateral, including: people, assets, ways of working, values, branding, technology, IT software, marketing assets and… social media channels.

Once the principles of an M&A have been carefully planned, developing a combined social media strategy might not be a top business priority, but it should be considered. Although social media might have started as a hipster trend, it’s now flourished to become an incredibly important tool in the marketing and business mix. It allows businesses to instantly connect with customers, partners, prospects and employees. We are more digitally savvy and spending more time on social media than ever before (wearesocial). And despite the rumours, we are willing to exchange our data on social media.

Where to start?

There is not a single rule on how to approach combining two social media strategies and infrastructures following an M&A because each business is different. Should the social media accounts remain, merge, rebrand, or completely close all together? Each M&A should be assessed on a case-by-case basis and should align to the wider business direction. But where do you start? Conduct a social media audit to identify which channels you might need to take ownership of and understand the positioning and performance of the channels. You should consider the following:

  • What social media channels exist? Who has access? What are the passwords?
  • How well established are the channels? What audience are they targeting? How engaged is the audience?
  • What is the channel and/or content strategy? Customer service? Brand awareness? Lead gen?
  • What third-party digital and social media tools are they using? What’s included in the contract? And when does it expire?
  • Do any employees have brand social media accounts, such as the senior management team or sales?
  • Do you have a PR and social media policy? Identify if the business owns the rights to the channels or whether they’re owned by the individuals.

Remember your customers

Before making any decisions, think about the short- and long-term outlook, and the customer. Minimise as much disruption as possible for customers and clearly communicate to them what they need to know. Retaining and migrating customers is essential. Don’t be surprised if a competitor runs a paid social media campaign targeting your followers following your M&A going public. This is a common tactic.

Once a new social media strategy has been agreed, consider how it should be communicated internally, to whom and what level of information they need to know and action. Prioritise teams that are directly connected with social media such as customer service, sales and marketing.

Understand the landscape

When considering social media best practice on how to approach M&A, it’s important to understand the limitations of each social media network. This varies considerably from platform to platform. For example, you can easily delete a Twitter channel, but you can’t delete a LinkedIn page. On Instagram you can easily change your name, if it’s not taken, but on Facebook you can’t, you must apply for a name change.

There’s a lot to consider and navigate following an M&A. But remember to keep it simple when it comes to communication, put the customer first, align your efforts with the wider business direction and make sure you know what you can and can’t do on each platform.

Ross Walker, Head of Digital & Social

 

Why create content? Do you ever stop to think about what the time and resource is for?

In the B2B technology sector, we believe content aimed at the right audiences can increase brand awareness and reputation, as well as play a critical role in helping generate leads for sales teams. It can be used and repurposed to demonstrate your brand’s leadership, skills and knowledge in a particular area. It’s also a way to show your customers and prospects that you understand their professional challenges – we call this ‘Content with Intent’ – and are committed to helping not only overcome them, but also helping them to reach their broader business objectives.

How to make your content work hard

Generating content is only one step in a much larger process. The campaign and the content within it needs direction, creativity, investment and a measurement plan. And more than that, each piece of content needs longevity and the ability to be used in different ways.  For example, it’s great to have fresh content on your website but how can you make that blog work harder for you? How does it tie into other campaigns? What about social media? What about a whitepaper or research project?

I’d like to share this five-step strategy to help you get the most out of planning your content, using a piece of proprietary research as an example at each stage:

1.   Define your ambitions
Each piece of content, be it an email, webinar, social media post, eBook, blog, video or article needs a purpose. Whether it’s to demonstrate knowledge, drive downloads or boost webinar registrations, this needs to fit into the broader campaign objective(s), which we, at Whiteoaks, define and deliver in a fixed, results-based way. The goals of the campaign ultimately influence your choice of assets, messaging, keywords, and the mix of channels you use.

If we take the example of a research project and working with an independent survey company, as we do, this will allow you to better understand an industry issue and speak to a sample of your target audience. This adds credibility to your narrative and helps position your business as a thought leader, allowing you to apply insight to the raw data.

2.   Perform a content audit
In the process of developing your campaign you need to take the time to find out what content you already have and decide what you need to generate. Again, think about longevity; compelling marketing content can be repurposed for different campaigns, for different audiences and different channels. So thinking long term about how you can get the most out of your assets is key and will provide better ROI.

Building on the research example, while you could just create a report, press release and infographic from the results, but your content audit would first show you what you already have, and whether blogs, articles, podcasts or social media tiles could be used to augment the results.

3.   Get it out there
You’ve got your objective, audience defined and content drafted, now you need to get your message out there. Whether it’s a thought leadership or social media campaign, a media relations programme, or a combination, as we’d often recommend in an integrated marketing campaign, you need to plan it, publish it in various channels with UTM links, and keep a close eye on how it’s doing. It’s also important you keep track of where it is — in terms of where it’s hosted, like a dedicated landing page, and where it’s located internally so that sales teams can make use of the insight for nurturing prospects and so other colleagues are informed.

For instance, your research report could be gated content hosted on your website, while an infographic could be ungated and sections from it promoted as GIFs on social media to drive people to the report.

4.   Measure it
Measurement is crucial for determining ROI. It also helps you understand what approaches, assets and calls to action are performing best so you can adjust the current campaign. You might change something that’s not working or do more of something that’s working well — and this gives you a foundation on which to build future campaigns.

For a project like a research report, your KPIs could be focused around report downloads or if you host a webinar to discuss the results you could measure registrations for the event. Other typical metrics include unique website visits, time spent on a specific web page, subscriber / follower growth, downloads (for gated content, for example), shares, likes or retweets (for social media), sign-ups and attendee numbers (for webinars), and click throughs from emails. Measuring effectiveness will be easier using marketing automation software, Google Analytics, IP tracking and other tools.

5.   Look to tomorrow
Developing a content calendar is a must. This is critical to the planning process, as well as in the content creation stage, as you’ll understand exactly what assets are needed for which campaigns, with associated deadlines. A research report and its associated assets is a good example of populating the calendar with themed content that drives a campaign across a few months and gives you milestones to work around.

Creating a calendar also gives you an overview so that you can easily see where any gaps lie, if there is content that can be repurposed, and makes the whole process more structured. Finally, this makes your content assets work harder over the longer term, which is exactly what you want.

Susan Richter, Marketing Communications Manager

We are living in a time of innovation. The sheer volume and diversity of disruptive businesses being started, invested in or sold is testament to this.

At Whiteoaks we have had the fortune of meeting – and discussing growth strategies with – firms across the globe – from Russia and India, to the US and Australia. It makes tech PR and communications a hugely dynamic and exciting place to work in 2020. It’s true we’ve all been impacted by the pandemic, but moving forward, the focus on growth and success will remain.

With that in mind, it’s important for businesses of all sizes and stages to consider whether communications consultancy is the right strategic support service for their brand – but it’s a particularly important question for businesses undergoing some form of step change or transformation – be it corporate growth, a re-brand, entering new markets, or refocusing and looking at a future post-COVID-19.

The first question any such tech company should ask themselves is “what do I want PR to achieve?”. This may sound a fundamental question, but too often it is ignored by businesses that embark on a PR campaign because they feel they should, or they have been told to by people outside of the company to do so. Worse, it often results in sending out a press release every once in a while to journalists who, with the best will in the world, have never heard of said company, receive (honestly) hundreds of similar news releases, and are therefore are far less likely to report on the announcement.

This creates a vicious cycle.

With no coverage generated, leading to no inbound phone calls, PR can be viewed as a waste of spend, and effectively kill any debate around ramping up budget for some time. For any marketing professional joining these firms, it can be a frustrating experience.

We believe there is a better way, as our credentials explain.

The starting point for all our campaigns as a B2B Tech PR Agency is to define business objectives – and this is where it gets interesting for fast-growth businesses, as we believe PR should be fundamental to achieving that growth.

We have worked with clients looking for very specific outcomes; building towards a funding round, creating a pathway towards an IPO, entering the US market for the first time or increasing the number of channel partners on their books – and sometimes, all of these goals at once. Each of these objectives would require a very different set of tactical recommendations, using a number of different channels – not just PR. Importantly, by being far more targeted, the ability to measure outputs attributable to PR increases exponentially.

What’s more, the robust, reader-centred content needed to generate results in traditional PR, including media relations, should drive the content chosen across the marketing mix, including web content, social media and sales materials. This adds value to the business and increases overall return on investment in PR and marketing communications.

Businesses undergoing a step change need PR to actually deliver for them, but the perceived lack of transparency around what they are getting for their investment can be a huge stumbling block. How does a set number of hours every month help them achieve their strategic goals? Frankly, it doesn’t.

This is why our deliberately different approach of set fees for set deliverables, linked to clear performance commitments underpinned by a formal service level agreement, continues to resonate so well with tech firms.

Working on the business development side of our business, organisations we speak to tend to have had one of two experiences regarding PR:

  • They have never invested before – and therefore like the certainty that we can offer in terms of transparency and commitment to results. Oh, and if we fail to deliver what we said we would, they get their money back;
  • Or they have invested in PR before and had a negative experience with the retainer-based approach, for all the reasons outlined above.

I would encourage any company considering PR investment to first ask themselves how it can aid their growth plans, not accepting any set of recommendations until the agency can directly prove a link between what they are doing and the company’s goals. It sounds simple, but PR justified through filling out a timesheet simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

To hear more about the fast-growth tech firms Whiteoaks represents and discuss how we could help your organisation, click this button tell me a bit more about you.

Let us elevate your PR

Bekki Bushnell, Head of Business Development

Measurement. It’s the topic that public relations and communications professionals regularly debate and want to improve – but doing so is a continual challenge.

The softer arguments for investing in marketing of any kind, for a combination or all of the goals of brand awareness, brand development and relationship-building with new and existing customers, are generally accepted.

However, demonstrating return on investment is something that in-house and agency-side communications practitioners still need to justify to their Directors.

First of all, it is almost impossible to set firm KPIs from a PR campaign built around a monthly retainer. If your main scope of work is filling in a timesheet, then deliverables and activity can be mere sideshows. This traditional way of working is one of the reasons PR has developed a bad name.

Fortunately, the tide is changing. As awareness of the need to measure PR output grows, supported by the recent AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework, the adoption of systems and processes to manage marketing communications measurement have increased accordingly.

Platform Adoption: The Marketing Automation Stack (MAS)

Take CRM systems as a first example. They should never be purely the domain of the sales team to log and prioritise leads.  They should provide marketers with significant data, which can be analysed to demonstrate the value of and better PR and communications – and ideally, that data should come from both potential and current clients.

In our recent research report, ‘A Perfect Match: ABM and ABS’, 59% of 200 senior B2B Sales and Marketing decision-makers said they use a CRM system to gather, retain and take action on information about both groups. As more and more marketing teams understand the possibilities of automation, the needle is beginning to shift around measurement.

At the centre of any good PR campaign is strong content creation. Content is fundamental to securing opportunities with the media, analysts and other influencers.

So it’s natural, we would argue, that a strategy must demonstrate how this content is delivered in a tailored, relevant and timely way to each audience segment, through as many channels as possible. Integrated marketing is proven to be more effective in terms of awareness, recall and consideration, than single-channel marketing. Not only does this approach increase return on investment, but it retains the consistency of messaging to the audiences, regardless of how they consume information.

Which brings us onto marketing automation software, sometimes combined with a CRM system, or integrated with it. By connecting social media channels, blogs, forms, email marketing and more to a platform such as Hubspot, savvy marketing teams can track leads directly from content created by the PR and communications agency.

Delivering Marketing Leads to Sales Teams

Take our client, Omnico, for whom we launched the first, and now established, Retail Gap Barometer – created to chart the gap between consumer expectations in an omni-channel world, and the reality of retailers to deliver upon them – at the start of our engagement.

Rather than taking the survey data, creating a press release and simply delivering a quality volume of media coverage, our partnership with the client has led to a vast variety of asset creation, including reports, eDMs, sales brochures, eBooks and more. With this approach, Omnico was able to attribute more than £12million in qualified sales leads to our work alone by tracking the campaign through their marketing automation platform.

It’s results from projects like these which prove multi-channel marketing can have a demonstrable benefit in generating sales opportunities for B2B brands. Encouragingly, our research found that 89% of both professional groups agreed with the statement that their company’s marketing efforts have a positive impact on sales efforts and lead generation.

Evolution not Revolution

Armed with the impact and measurement of our work for Omnico and other clients, we have been able to put metrics against our work which grab the attention not just of the sales and marketing teams, but the boardroom too.

And it is a key starting point for us with prospects and clients.  The question “Do you use a CRM and marketing automation system?” has become one of the first we ask senior marketers and PRs at our first point of engagement. It can fundamentally alter the capabilities of and deliverables in our campaigns and moves the conversation from one of coverage volume to sales leads – right from the start.

By Susan Richter, Head of Marketing Communications

Deliver Integrated Campaigns

We all know content plays a critical role in your PR and marketing strategies – forming the foundation for audience engagement and ensuring the right messages resonate with the right audiences. But what about when it comes to events? Your events calendar is most likely full of exhibitions, seminars, roadshows and conferences. Do you consider a content strategy to be vital here? Does it influence your tactics?

The answer to both questions should be yes.

These events are not isolated instances. They should be tied together by an overarching strategy that supports the marketing and PR goals of your business. In the same vein you need to ensure your content strategy does the same thing; joining all events together with a unified theme across the visual representation, presentations, collateral and event communications.

Whatever that may look like, by developing content in advance, you can use it to feed into activities, guiding sales teams on the ground, providing insights for spokespeople to deliver during presentations, and supplying valuable information to customers and prospects pre, during and post-event.

Strategy: setting the tone with theme and narrative

A good starting point is to review the objectives for the business and the marketing strategy for the year – and develop a theme aligned to these goals and the audiences you need to engage and influence. The theme then helps you develop your narrative, what you want to say and how you want to say it. In its simplest form, this all about storytelling; taking the audience on a journey, by capturing and keeping their attention with a valuable message that resonates.

The narrative will inform the tactical selection and determine what types of assets are needed and what they need to accomplish. Importantly, it’s not just about setting the scene at the event with the right messages, your narrative needs to stretch across the lifecycle of the event.

Relevance: the heart of your assets

The permutations of content are endless, from social tiles, infographics, blogs and emails, to eBooks, whitepapers, guides, top tips and video snippets. But what remains the same is the value they bring to your end audience; the content needs to be relevant, demonstrate that you understand their industry, their challenges and have the solutions to address those issues. More than that, your storytelling needs to engage readers and be less about selling to them and more about helping them solve their business problems. This in turn will build trust with your brand and keep it front of mind when an opportunity arises.

Tactics: delivering the content

Your content assets will vary from event to event, dependent on the aims of each. To illustrate an example, for the launch of a piece of propriety research, you could use a news release to generate industry coverage supported by interactive social tiles to create awareness across digital channels and use select statistics for a direct mail campaign to prospects, to tease the upcoming launch and drive registration to the upcoming event. The research report could then be exclusively launched at the seminar during speaker presentations and interest captured (a lead generation opportunity) to receive a full copy.    Finally, post event you could stage a webinar based on the key findings and supported with a series of blogs to continue to recycle the asset.

If the aim of your event is to further amplify your messaging, increase awareness and win share of voice at a busy show, you could use your narrative to create hype based on what you’re doing on stand and use interactive pieces of content like live demos and video, supported with social promotion live tweeting and blog content. Post event, you could release an exclusive eBook based on solving an industry challenge that’s linked to the key concerns for prospects.

Related: Event Series – Turning an event into a prime media relations opportunity

Related: Event Series – Getting the most out of your social media strategy at events

Related: Event Series Webinar – Redefining event marketing: Plan for success

Follow-on: moving beyond the event

The great thing about the assets you create as part of your content strategy is that they can be used before, during and after the event. They can be repackaged and re-purposed, and used for related (or follow-on) marketing and social media campaigns. Whether that’s giving prospects access to a hero piece of content, such as an eBook or whitepaper, or inviting them to a webinar or podcast and carrying on with a blog programme, your event content strategy can help you achieve the results you’re after, reinforce your messaging and guide prospects through the sales funnel.

Susan Richter, Head of Content

Tell Us Your B2B Tech Story

Read our eBook, ‘Making the Most of Industry Events’, and click here to download.

Events are an excellent way of reaching your customers and your prospects — that’s a given. But they also represent a prime opportunity to engage with journalists and play a crucial role in the media relations mix, enabling you to build relationships and generate positive coverage.

That’s not to say you need to move away from the traditional tactic of setting up interviews for key spokespeople — but there are a number of alternative creative approaches you can use to interact with the media, introduce them to your spokespeople and brief them to ensure your business is getting the right messages in the right publications read by the audiences you need to influence.

Make it compelling

Much like how a content strategy guides your narrative and approach to events, your media strategy should dictate what you do at an event. Engaging with the media can be a powerful tool for your business, but the key thing to remember is that you need a reason to get them there. Journalists are news driven and looking for strong opinions and compelling content they can use to shape the news agenda.

If you have major news with significant industry impact such as an M&A announcement, for example, then going down the route of setting up exclusive pre-briefings with top tier press is absolutely the way to go.  Briefing key contacts in advance ensures the journalist is well prepared and they can develop their story to publish as the news is launched at the event. The coverage will quickly amplify the story and adds additional credibility to the announcement.

But you could take that even further and host a press conference live from the event to officially announce the acquisition, with an interactive media Q&A facilitated by a leading industry commentator, to provide real-time comment and reaction to generate immediate hype and coverage.

You could also look to broaden your horizons by hosting a roundtable event structured around a key industry topic or the release of a piece of research, bringing in not just your own spokespeople but independent influencers and customer advocates and using this event within the event to own the agenda.  Providing media with access to independent speakers gives an additional hook to attend and a greater pool of opinion for the journalist to access. This type of event could easily be tagged to an existing forum to save costs, including venue hire and travel for spokespeople.

Related: Event Series – Content comes first: reviving the lost art of event storytelling

Related: Event Series Webinar Summary –  Redefining event marketing: Plan for success

Make it creative

A company’s own flagship event can sometimes be ruled out from a media perspective, with clients concerned about mixing customers and prospects with media attendees.  However, creating a dedicated press track gives the opportunity to give journalists access to the most compelling content, for example, keynotes, customers and future looking technology updates.  Arranging an exclusive lunch with the CEO or a site visit to a nearby customer for a chance to see a real-world implementation in action adds a different element to the agenda.

Of course, if you’re not going to have strong news for every event, you need to find creative ways to get that engagement and ensure you’re getting the best mileage out of your PR budget. The question is, how?

Consider hosting a breakfast briefing, taking place before the event, close to the venue. The two main elements here are making it easy for journalists to attend and giving them something of value once they are there. This could include views on upcoming trends, strong opinions on the industry or commentary on the future of the business.

Then of course there’s hosting casual drinks on stand or inviting journalists around for a swing by.

The value from these sorts of engagements is two-fold; first, while you may not have news to share, you’re still getting your spokespeople in front of journalists for an informal chat about the show, the industry in general and upcoming trends. Second, the conversation goes both ways. Just as journalists are discovering more about your company and your take on things, even on an informal level, your spokespeople gain an understanding of the journalist’s view of the industry, the future and what topics they are currently writing about or interested in.

These types of meetings are likely not to yield immediate media coverage, but they can help shape future engagements and provide ideas for future content and thought leadership opportunities.

Related: Event Series – Getting the most out of your social media strategy at events

Related: Event Series Webinar Summary –  Redefining event marketing: Plan for success

Make it count

The success of your event is a culmination of months of hard work, but it doesn’t end there. Regardless of the engagement, whether a formal interview, a meet and greet, casual drinks or a press conference, it’s important to follow up with journalists, thanking them for their time, checking if they have all the information need – and you’ll be investing in that relationship for the future.

Charlotte Causley, Account Director

Deliver Integrated Campaigns

Read our eBook, ‘Making the Most of Industry Events’, and click here to download.

Whether it’s your annual flagship event where you own the event agenda, a leading industry expo where you will be exhibiting alongside competitors, or you’re attending a small local seminar, planning your social media strategy from the start will help give you a greater chance for success.

Engage, engage, engage

The first guiding principle when developing your social media strategy for events is focusing on how to engage with your target audience and not just broadcasting what you’re doing. While the latter certainly does play a role, overall it’s about using content that will resonate with customers and prospects to drive engagement, much like you would in your content strategy or in the material that you pitch to the media.

The second guiding principle is understanding the digital lifetime value of the event — this will always be greater than the duration of the event itself. Consider the size of what’s being announced and who’s attending. You also need to look at which platforms you own, when they should be introduced to your content, and what features you can take advantage of.

Strategy, narrative and your audience

Your social strategy should be designed to help you meet key objectives; sign up to an event, drive footfall to a stand, generate interest, create hype, or a combination. The key is to define the objective upfront, create a narrative and key messages that need to be incorporated in all your efforts throughout the lifecycle of the event.

Knowing who you’re targeting plays a crucial role when considering your social media strategy, so take a look at your existing social media following and determine whether you’ve built up the right followers for your event. If not, it’s not a problem, just be prepared to put extra effort and spend behind your social media tactics potentially with a hyper-targeted paid social media campaign to reach your desired audience(s).

Different support layers, different objectives

Of course, there are different levels of social support depending on the objectives for the event. For an intimate roundtable of invited clients at your own offices discussing industry challenges, for example, a pre- and post-event campaign isn’t necessary. You could tweet selected anecdotes or quotes from the evening as an awareness building exercise with some supporting images to bring the conversation to life.

Whereas for a major exhibition or tradeshow you’d need a comprehensive strategy that covers before, during and after the event. Again, there are various levels of support that can be included here; from building momentum and interest in the event as part of a larger content market campaign, to live tweeting with key takeaways to engage with any of your target audience who aren’t in attendance, to promoting assets after the event that visitors to the stand (customers and prospects) would gain value from to amplify your message and continue the dialogue.

Related: Event Series – Content comes first: reviving the lost art of event storytelling

Related: Event Series Webinar Summary – Redefining event marketing: Plan for success

Use your best ambassadors

There are always opportunities beyond your company’s own social media channels. For example, do you have any employees attending the event whose social media channels you can tap into? If you do, it’s a good idea to clearly brief your employees with how they can contribute to the social story, include key messages, event hashtags and a few gentle social media reminders on best practices. Do you have any customers or guest speakers with a good social media following that you can leverage as part of your PR, digital and social media strategy to further amplify your message?

So what does a typical event social support programme look like?

Before the event

  • Formulate the objectives, narrative and key messages in collaboration in your PR and marketing team
  • Drive awareness and build a buzz about the event through teasers about the speakers and content
  • Start to drip-feed your key messages for the event with the creation of an event landing page, video snippets or blogs which can be actively promoted across social channels
  • Create a suite of branded and interactive social media tiles will help to promote pre-event content and raise awareness to drive sign-ups.
  • Brief your team and external speakers, providing social media guidelines to help them amplify the event content

During the event

  • Engage with people attending the event by using the show hashtag
  • Blend your offline activities with online to create an integrated approach, run Twitter polls alongside speaker sessions for on-demand engagement
  • Share the event with those who couldn’t make it by telling them what’s happening on the stand, key announcements and presentation slots
  • If you’re at an industry event, include key insight from other presentations and what’s trending at the show balanced with your key messages.
  • Create content live from the show (e.g. demos in action or interview with key spokesperson) to generate interest from prospects and drive footfall
  • If you’ve got a big announcement planned, look to highlight it with live social media coverage or a video Q&A.

After the event

  • Promote content from the show and after thoughts for follow-up event activity. For example, uploading a presentation to SlideShare is great for your website SEO
  • Create content assets linked to the interests of the attending audience to use for post-event promotion and continue the dialogue
  • Report back to the business on key social metrics aligned to business objectives and new lead opportunities that have derived from social media

Related: Event Series – Turning an event into a prime media relations opportunity

Related: Event Series Webinar Summary –  Redefining event marketing: Plan for success

Final thoughts

When it comes to events, large or small, never underestimate how many minutes there are in a day. The majority of your event’s social media success will be down to how much planning you’ve done upfront for each of the three stages I’ve outlined, but also be prepared for the unexpected and be ready to jump on that next social opportunity as it arises

Emma Walker, Digital Account Lead

Tell Us Your B2B Tech Story

Read our eBook, ‘Making the Most of Industry Events’, and click here to download.

We recently released the findings of a landmark piece of independent research which investigated the use of Account-Based Marketing and Account-Based Sales approaches. Entitled, ‘A Perfect Match: ABM and ABS’, in the first of this two-part blog series, we revealed:

  • The close alignment that exists between Sales professionals and Marketers;
  • Which communications options they each think are most effective;
  • How CRM systems are being used;
  • Whether those people we researched are working to an account-based framework, and;
  • The ways that both teams measure the effectiveness of marketing on lead generation.

Today we can share the concluding part of our research project and some further insights provided by the 200 senior B2B Marketing and Sales decision-makers.

Setting off on the right foot

As we reach the time of year where budgets start to be reviewed, refined and allocated and annual business plans and implementation strategies are signed off, it is the perfect time to ensure you have clearly articulated the goals and expectations you have for your marketing strategy. With three-quarters (76%) of the Marketers we researched working within an ABM foundation, it would be recommended that your next annual marketing strategy incorporates at least the beginnings of the journey to this approach.

Perhaps surprisingly for me, only 45% of those surveyed said that a persona-based approach to Marketing or Sales is a goal. For us, this is the ordinarily the foundation of an effective marketing strategy. By truly understanding your personas, you are able to visualise and put yourself in the shoes of your buyers and clients. Find out more in my recent article.

Related: Unleashing the power of buyer personas and account-based marketing

Our findings also suggested that while close rates and times mattered as a goal of their overall strategy to 57% of the group, both Marketers and Sales leaders were most focused on the slightly more qualitative measures of improving the quality and applicability of marketing plans to the overall business plan (71%) —rather than just quantity of leads. Understanding more about prospects also featured highly as a goal. This further underlines the importance of a sales and marketing strategy which both builds and develops a brand and also goes after leads and sales with short-term tactics.

Achieving impact from an ABM or ABS structure

With a strategy defined, the attention turns to how to achieve impact in day-to-day execution. While 76% of Marketers and 85% of Sales leaders said they are already working to an ABM or ABS structure respectively, dissatisfaction was higher than expected in terms of the impact it was having on their business. In fact, 60% of Marketing decision-makers wanted to realise a bigger impact, as did 79% of Sales professionals.

So, what’s behind the numbers? The top three challenges preventing both groups from seeing true performance improvements were:

  • A lack of knowledge (46%)
  • Less budget or time than ideal (45%), and;
  • Lacking the required technical infrastructure (41%).

To take the final bullet point a little further, almost half of Marketing professionals said that they didn’t have the right technology in place. And from our experience, this likely reflects the difficulties which arise in evaluating the number of tools available and needed for an integrated Martech stack.

Surprisingly, only 31% of the combined audience said that they didn’t feel they had enough support from senior management, suggesting to me that these decision-makers have effectively educated upwards as to the need for an account-based approach.

There’s little doubt that implementing and working to an account-based framework can be hard work and may feel initially unrewarding – but just like improving a Martech stack, it will be rewarding and helpful in the long term.

Suzanne Griffiths, Managing Director, Whiteoaks International

Tell Us Your B2B Tech Story

Download our free report, ‘A Perfect Match: ABM and ABS’ today, by filling in our contact form below. In the report you’ll discover:

  • How senior Sales and Marketing decision-makers are currently embedding ABM and ABS into their business;
  • Which marketing communications both leaders say supports the business most effectively;
  • The best ways for marketing tactics to demonstrate their direct impact on sales; and
  • An in-depth look at the goals and challenges that Marketers and Sales professionals have when implementing an account-based structure.

Oops! We could not locate your form.

Content is still king. We keep hearing it, we keep saying it. It forms the basis for almost all PR and marketing campaigns and is one of the most important ingredients to set a brand up for success in terms of building awareness, saliency and generating leads. But there’s a big caveat. To get your business messages across, impress your customers and prospects, and reach your communications objectives, it needs to be the right content.

Getting the basics right isn’t enough

Of course, it needs to start with good content — well written or spoken, cogent, relevant and smart — but that’s no longer enough. With so much content out there, being well scripted isn’t much of a differentiator. Yes, it’s important, and yes there’s a certain skill in doing it, but creating engaging content encapsulates so much more.

In the context of planning for a campaign, the variety of content must reach the right audiences with the right messages through the right channels. It’s about understanding their pain points, the industry they operate in and what they’re trying to achieve as a business.

Not all of this insight comes from desk research; in fact, your communication strategy is doomed to fail if this is your sole method. Instead, a critical part of campaign planning comes from talking to the people who know the audiences best. And that’s the Sales and Marketing professionals.

Different sides, same coin

The rivalry and discontent between the two teams has been well documented in the past — with much of it anecdotal. After all, it’s a better story to write about two groups at loggerheads.  Yet, our own independent research into the collaboration and understanding between Sales and Marketing leaders, ‘A Perfect Match: ABM and ABS’, yielded some contradictory results; 87% of the Sales and Marketing decision-makers we spoke to said they believed they were aligned with their counterparts. Catch the main findings from the research here and download the full report in the link above.

And that’s critical when putting together your content plan as part of an account-based approach to Sales and/or Marketing. Marketing adds value when it comes to the company messaging and the wider industry outlook; Sales on the other hand has the deep insights into customers and prospects in terms of their challenges and requirements. Both outlooks influence your content strategy and help you understand the audiences and personas that are being targeted in the overall campaign.

Down to tactical business

From strategy to tactics, the right content and understanding of personas helps shape the assets you’re creating; articles for thought leadership to educate and demonstrate knowledge; customer success stories for reinforcing proof points; blogs and vlogs to show both thought leadership and personality.

Related: Unleashing the power of buyer personas and account-based marketing

It also helps in determining which assets are better suited to the different stages (and aims) of the campaign journey. Long copy, like whitepapers and eBooks, is great for education and awareness, while shorter copy, such as blogs and social media posts, is ideal for reinforcement and attracting interest.

Don’t settle

Ultimately, having the right content (in terms of messaging, type and length) in place means you can start off your campaign on the right footing. And it’s worth remembering that good (ahem, really great) content doesn’t have to have a short lifecycle. It can be repurposed into other assets, used in different campaigns and can seed complementary social media plans. So while good content is… good, having the right content is even better.

In our recent webinar, ‘Partnering with Sales: A Marketer’s Guide’, I discuss much of this guidance as part of the broader content for marketers designing integrated marketing plans. You can watch the webinar anytime to suit you, here. I hope you find it useful.

Susan Richter, Head of Marketing Communications

Tell Us Your B2B Tech Story

As we stop to catch our breath and get ready to look back at 2018 and the developments in our industry, one debate that shows little sign of slowing is the ongoing challenge between PR and SEO and how the two disciplines should work together.

The reality is, is that there is no easy answer. However, it’s vital that we consider how to make the most of the synergies and benefits in coordinating PR and SEO as part of integrated marketing campaigns. Likewise, I think there is a need to provide a better understanding to our clients on what is achievable in helping brands be more visible and salient online, and how PR can truly support and deliver against this objective.

At a PR Moment conference in the autumn, a debate on this subject found some common ground but there are some key challenges that PR agencies must not be afraid to tackle head on and be prepared to have bold conversations about with their clients.

As part of the discussions, one of the clear advantages that PRs have over their SEO counterparts is that SEO professionals naturally think about how to please search engines, while PR and Marketing practitioners think about creating content that is interesting and exciting to audiences through multiple channels, including the likes of Google. Top tips articles, for example, is short, punchy content that can be used as a way to promote and drive traffic to your website, relevant for both prospective and existing clients. Relevant and updated content is still king, so the advantage for PRs who know how to tell a good story means that SEO will work better.

It’s essential that SEO and PR experts work closely and not in a combative manner. SEO is a way of providing an online legacy to every campaign – continually building upon and increasing campaign ROI at the beginning and over time. And to thrive, working with a content calendar where PR and SEO comes together can be invaluable.

Alongside this, there was one clear takeaway when trying to bring PR and SEO together to benefit working with the media. For example, clients may ask for back links in their content, but we have to remember that there is a clear differentiation between earned and paid media and we cannot treat both the same.

However, there are some ways to encourage journalists and media editors to include links in coverage, but before these are outlined it’s important to point out what is unacceptable. Do not waste your time asking a journalist if they will include a link without good a reason. It’s up there with calling a journalist to ask if they have ‘received your press release’.

So, how do you persuade a journalist to provide a link? Follow these simple tips and it will increase your chances greatly:

  • Provide links to a worthy report – for example, more information than a journalist can include in an article
  • Create a useful tool for clients or customers and tell your media contact about it – e.g. a budget calculator – something that people will want to use experiment with, etc.
  • Select terminology carefully – use words like source/credit to data to ensure your content has the gravitas it deserves.

There’s no doubt the debate about how to get the most from PR and SEO investment will continue for some time yet. However, the key thing to remember is that, done properly, integrated marketing is more important than ever. Together PR and SEO are more than the sum of their parts.