Articles - Whiteoaks PR

By Ellie Nash, Senior Digital Account Executive

LinkedIn recently launched a new feature which allows users to reach their target followers organically, without spending a penny. So what does it mean and why is it a good thing?

Well, until now targeting was only available for paid campaigns. However, this latest feature empowers you to customise your organic posts according to your follower traits such as company size, industry, job function, and others. Now you can engage with the followers that are most valuable to your business and provide them with specific content that is suitable for their needs.

Benefits of LinkedIn organic targeting include:

Reach the right audience: By targeting posts to specific followers, you can ensure that content is seen by the people who are either the most likely to engage with it, or that you most want to engage with it.
Increase engagement: When content is seen by the right people, you’re more likely to see higher engagement rates such as likes, comments, and shares.
Improve conversion rates: Targeting posts to specific followers can increase the likelihood of conversions, whether that means website visits, form fills, or other desired actions.

To track the success of your targeted posts, we recommend using LinkedIn’s metric tools. These tools make keeping up with progress and engagement easier. Being able to track metrics such as views, impressions, clicks, and engagement helps refine target audiences and optimise content to achieve higher engagement levels for next time.

Interested in learning more about this new tool and how to implement it within your social media strategy? Contact our team of social media experts on 01252 727313 or Digitalpractice@whiteoaks.co.uk.

By Hayley Goff, CEO

Money doesn’t grow on trees…When I was growing up this was a favourite pearl of wisdom from my mum. Now, as an adult and more notably as a CEO, I can fully appreciate it. Every pound counts – and with budgets and economic conditions being what they are, those pounds are highly scrutinised. Even though you’re likely the one doing the scrutinising, as a business leader you’re answerable to your board and your shareholders. Part of your remit is to refine your focus areas, your goals, and forge the best path forward to make them happen – all within the constraints of budget. And with departments clamouring for more, how do you prioritise what needs to be done?

One of those departments is marketing, stating with absolute certainty they can help you drive the business growth you’re after. Sounds like a win-win – but again, you’re balancing keeping shareholders happy with achieving your organisational objectives. In theory, the two are inexorably linked. In practice, you’re still scrutinising that spend to make sure you’re getting the expected return.

So how do you ensure your business is getting the right return on investment from marketing? Is marketing even worth it?

Emphatically, yes. But where do you start?

Trust your marketing leader. As CEO, you can’t be expected to know everything about marketing and lead gen – whether you have an internal team or fully outsourced support – take advantage of those capabilities and trust their consultancy. It also goes without saying that you and the business need clarity in terms of what you’re trying to achieve and this will influence the brief for marketing. Importantly, based on that, agree KPIs with your marketing team to guide delivery and hold them to account.

If you don’t have internal marketing resource (or even if you do and it’s not quite as mature as it could be) evaluate whether you need external agency support. I appreciate you may have been burnt in the past with agencies and left wondering about the value that was delivered (you’re not alone) but they can be helpful in helping you reach those growth or awareness objectives. They can be mobilised quickly and offer the added benefit of having specialist skills in the right places, able to either take on your whole marketing function or become an extended part of your existing team.

Important to note here that if you do decide to use an agency partner (or partners), make sure they’re the right fit for your business – not just in terms of skills and specialisms, but also when it comes to culture and (of course) targets and ROI. Ensure your marketing team establishes KPIs against the plan that they and agency partners are delivering with regular performance updates – if you are exploring agencies only work with ones that can clearly define a scope of work, budget and performance commitments so you are clear on the ROI that any investment will deliver.

With established KPIs you and your marketing team (or external partners) can measure impact. You are making a significant investment (again, be it internally or with agencies) and it should be clear how marketing communications is performing and supporting the business achieve its goals. Understanding what is working so you can replicate success and where things haven’t worked to understand why and adjust accordingly.

Resist the urge to bow to economic pressure and apply the brakes if you don’t see immediate results – an agency should deliver tangible assets from very early on but this doesn’t necessarily mean in month one the MQLs will see a massive spike. PR and marketing needs a sustained effort to deliver maximum impact, and cutting marketing often means cutting the new business pipeline. In the same vein, avoid the temptation to do ‘a little bit of everything’. Instead, prioritise your marketing critical activities, establish success and then scale.

Each business is different – but we all face some of the same pressures and the same scrutiny when it comes to spend, whether that is on marketing efforts, product development or digital transformation. The key to success, is establishing objectives and having the right facts and figures to prove ROI. Of course the bits in the middle are also important, but will be guided largely by your goals.

If you’d like to start a discussion about any of the above, please get in touch. Or subscribe to receive more of our content.

By Bekki Bushnell, Associate Director

We’re all having to do it – justify that spend in marketing & PR. Especially in tougher times. Unsurprisingly, we’re in the same boat; it’s not just a challenge for our prospects and clients. We also have to prove to our Board or senior management team that our efforts are worth the investment, and as budgets are tightened, this becomes more of a focus.

Speaking from experience, it helps to start off on the right foot by making sure your marketing objectives are aligned to organisational goals with a clear strategy in place to realise them. Sounds simple enough. But often, when the company adjusts its goals in response to market conditions or internal changes, those same adjustments aren’t carried through to the marketing plan.

The next step is building trust with your board or senior management team using the results you’ve achieved for the business and ROI to garner goodwill, which ultimately equates to more budget or fewer cuts.

When budget cuts are decided, PR & marketing are nearly always first on the chopping block. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – don’t do it. According to a recent PRWeek article, brands that don’t cut spending on PR & marketing during a recession experience far greater sales than their competitors when coming out of it – 256% in fact. This alone won’t necessarily sway your board or SMT, so you’ve got to keep them in the loop.

Now I’m not suggesting they need to know the minutia of what you’re doing and every tactic that your strategy entails – rather keep it to high-level updates looking at performance against KPIs to meet the business objectives supported with data-driven insights that can help the organisation improve or take action on.

In the same vein, when developing your strategy in the first place, involve the stakeholders, be it board, management team etc., as early as possible. It’s a lot easier to get buy-in if people feel like they’ve been involved from the beginning. Again, it’s not about getting them involved in the finer details, rather including them in critical meetings and getting in face time with your partners. All of which helps build that confidence and support internally.

To recap:

Set objectives: Start at the beginning by ensuring your marketing strategy is aligned to the wider business goals

Manage expectations: Be clear on your short- and long-term objectives. Identify where the quick wins will come from and what will take a more sustained effort.

Set measurable KPIs: With KPIs that are aligned with the broader business objectives you should report back regularly on progress (at least quarterly) on the plan. If you’re working with suppliers, apply the same logic. Ensure you’re clear on what the investment is and expected results.

Proactively communicate: Update the board or senior team on your progress, being clear about results against your KPIs. This will help build the profile of the marketing department.

Replicate success: Understanding what works (and what doesn’t) is key to replicating that success across other marketing campaigns and likewise discontinuing or tweaking what isn’t working. Don’t keep doing the same things if the results aren’t as expected; show you’re listening to the data and taking action.

Don’t roll over: Don’t let your board or senior team cut your budgets without defending them! People want to do business with brands that they know will deliver in the way they need. If you stop spending on PR & marketing you’ll lack the ammo to help the wider business deliver on that – so be sure to point out the implications and impact of cut budgets.

If you’d like to start a discussion about any of the above, please get in touch. Or subscribe to receive more of our content.

By Vicki Curtis, Head of Media

Your quarterly meeting with the board is coming up. You’ve launched a great campaign this quarter with incredible media results that you and your PR agency are proud of – you could say it’s career defining! However, you know the million-dollar question they are going to ask at the meeting – this is great, but how will all this impact our sales?

With budgets tightening due to the economic issues, boards, and those that hold the purse strings, are certainly placing more focus on measurement and return on investment than ever before. Especially when it comes to PR and marketing.

As you know, PR is something that has come under fire for decades and calculating a return on investment and comparing it to other marketing disciplines is one of the biggest challenges in the industry. But how do we overcome this challenge? What methods and metrics are at our disposal to enable us to demonstrate the impact PR is having?

Starting off on the right foot

Before you start work on a campaign, there needs to be agreement and collaboration from the outset with your PR agency. The first step is defining your objectives – what do you want the campaign to do? Who do you want to reach? From there, align those objectives with the wider business goals. The rest flows from here; a strategically aligned scope of work, KPIs and the commitments an agency will make based on your investment. It is the latter that is perhaps most important. What guarantees will your PR agency make in terms of business impact? For example, many agencies won’t go as far as guaranteeing coverage but we see this as a vital step in putting our money where our mouth is. My colleague Bekki Bushell covers this very topic in her blog.

A key requirement in this process is having the right messaging and content to ensure we can meet targets and get the right message in front of the right audiences. This isn’t a one-off; rather, it requires proactivity and evaluation throughout the relationship. Which ties into my next point…

It’s all about the audience

It’s not all about coverage…once a campaign starts, you can’t just measure results by counting the pieces of coverage. PR and the way we measure impact has moved on significantly over the last few years. As has the way we present it; becoming more sophisticated to demonstrate that PR is making a valuable contribution to the business – and ultimately the bottom line. And this is where an audience-centric approach to measurement comes in.

By demonstrating how your campaign activity reached the desired target audience (audience visibility), the response and reactions of the target audience to the activity (audience engagement) and the effect of the campaign on the company’s goals and objectives (audience impact) you are on your way to really validating the impact your work is having and showing a true ROI.

How can we help you?

When it comes to measuring that impact, we work with you, give you the tools and insight to be able to show how that career defining campaign has reached the right audience and ultimately had an impact on their perception of your brand. But most importantly, we can help you to use this insight to improve and amend campaigns in the future!

If you’d like to hear more about our approach to measuring impact, and how you can incorporate measurement into your campaigns from the outset, feel free to get in touch or subscribe to receive more content.

By Bekki Bushnell, Associate Director

Marketing is in a constant state of flux. Always a trend that promises improvement, advances in automation, encroachment of AI… The list goes on. There is, however, one thing that stays the same, and that’s the pressure to deliver – more often than not tied with doing more with less. More leads, more content, more support to sales. Delivered with more speed and agility. That’s just the nature of the beast.

In our experience, conversations with our clients and prospects, budget (or the lack thereof) plays a major role here. Not just in terms of campaigning, but resourcing too. Tightened budgets likely mean a more junior team tasked with delivery and a lack of support at a more senior level.

Looking at the bigger picture, you have to make sure you’ve got the right strategy in place to deliver an integrated and connected experience – in line with what your prospects and customers are looking for. And with more marketing channels to think about, you need a constant and consistent stream of high quality content to keep all areas of the marketing machine fed, from content marketing, to sales enablement and social media. This often ends up less integrated and more siloed, making the argument for a specialist approach to campaigning, which brings it full circle back to budget.

On a tactical level, keeping up with the latest trends across comms, marketing, social, creative is a full-time job in itself. And yet… it has to be done and has a massive influence on the strategy you deliver on.

But this isn’t a one-way vitriol aimed at the challenges of marketing. It’s a blog about solutions. Like I said, we have open and honest conversations with our clients and prospects and there are a few things we suggest to help them overcome the resourcing barrier.

Here they are:

Siloes are bad – say it with me! Stay away from siloed approaches across different channels. Not only is it a recipe for disaster, but it’s a waste of precious resource (time, effort, money) creating specific campaigns for each channel. In today’s communication ecosystem, you need to talking to your customers with consistent themes and messaging across the channels. Which leads to the next tip…

Smarter integration. Optimising your resource begins with making them work smarter – through integration. The more integrated your approach to comms, the better. Establish your brand positioning, create your messaging, develop the narratives and create hero campaigns from there, delivering them across channels to maximise your reach and resources.

Compelling content. Your integrated campaigns only work with compelling content. You don’t need masses of content to keep your campaigns on track, you just need a few quality pieces (be that eBooks, articles, audiograms, podcasts, social posts) that are aligned to your audience needs and campaign objectives.

Recycle. Make the best use of your few pieces of quality content. Recycle and repurpose. As comms professionals we do get a bit of content fatigue, but our audiences don’t have that same exposure. So using and reusing assets – tailored for your different channels – is the ideal way to get longevity from your content and make smarter use of your resources.

Don’t stop measuring. Success is largely based on knowing what has worked – understanding which content performs (or doesn’t) for which audiences, on which channels. Don’t just measure at the end of a campaign; keep your eyes on performance so that you can not only replicate success for future efforts, but tweak assets across the lifetime of the campaign to make sure you’re always in the strongest position.

Bridge the gap. Consider where there are gaps in your skills and knowledge, and find a partner that can help. Not necessarily using different agencies for different specialisms, but rather using one partner with the skills under one umbrella who can help you in bringing your campaigns together – whether that’s best practice when it comes to social media, getting creative cut-through or developing compelling content that appeals to your audiences.

This list isn’t exhaustive – and we’re always ready to chat.

Get in touch if you’d like to find out more, or subscribe to receive more of our content.

By Bekki Bushnell, Associate Director, Whiteoaks International

Building a successful B2B tech business isn’t easy. Just ask any CEO or board of directors. This is especially true when it comes to start-ups and smaller companies where traditional roles of sales, marketing, operations overlap and are carried out by one or two people. Not all new businesses have the budget to hire a powerful marketing team from the get-go. In our experience, when businesses like these secure funding, PR & marketing is always on the wish list. However, its sometimes seen as a nice to have instead of an absolutely must-have.

We’re of the opinion (naturally) that PR & marketing is absolutely essential for growth. It fulfils many functions; elevates brand awareness amongst target markets, investors and the media, positions against competitors, nurtures your profile as an attractive employer helping to attract the right staff, and plays a role in supporting sales with lead generation.

We are also of the opinion that employing an agency to do the heavy lifting when it comes to the PR & marketing ecosystem is a must.

Yes, there are objections, as there always will be when it comes to spending money. But here’s why you should do it:

You’re the client. That’s the most important thing to remember. So you can choose the right agency with the right team to meet your needs. Just like you’re not like your competitors, you need to find an agency that does things a little differently – whether that’s having the right expertise in and understanding of your industry, or their approach to delivering integrated campaigns. That synergy in view points will only help develop a strong relationship.

You’re focused on building your business. Therefore, while you recognise the value that PR and marketing activities will deliver, you don’t necessarily have the time to dedicate to making it happen. Neither does the rest of your team; focused on what you hired them for.

In much the same way, your agency is there to help you. You’ll have access to a team dedicated to help you achieve your objectives. Depending on agency structure, you’ll have media and PR specialists working with you. Our approach is a little different; we have specialists across media, PR, creative, social and content, so you always have the best people deployed in the right places.

Set your boundaries (targets) and get your agency to commit to them. Whether that’s based on coverage achieved, assets delivered, or media interviews secured, work with them to figure out what your objectives should be, map those to your wider business objectives and then get them to commit to them. We think is absolutely essential and another thing we’re passionate about (you can read more about it here).

We also hear from prospects – especially those in the start-up space – that they are concerned about the retainer model. Yes, it’s great that they have that resource, but it’s often unclear what you actually get as part of that retainer. Especially when every pound is under the microscope. Again, we do things a little differently; we’ve left the retainer model behind and prefer to work on a fixed fees for fixed deliverables basis. Putting it plainly, you get what you pay for and you know exactly what that is from the beginning of the relationship. It’s also flexible, so we can easily adapt those deliverables to align to changing needs.

At the end of the day, you need an agency that’s working hard for you, delivering results and impact, and enabling you to do what you do best. Do we think we’re the right fit? Absolutely.

Get in touch to find our more or subscribe to receive more great content.

By Bekki Bushnell, Associate Director

Everyone is after more. More leads, more value, more return on investment. That’s business. Especially companies with a mission to grow and drive sales. Enter the marketing department tasked with being the business’ strategic partner in all things, from awareness and customer retention to the ever-important lead generation. And therein lies the rub. For companies with ambitious growth journeys more marketing should mean more resource. But often it doesn’t because (and here comes the cliché) marketing departments are required to do more with less. Budgets have tightened significantly with a potential recession on the way which means marketing departments are under even more pressure. So if they do have the spend to recruit, it won’t necessarily be for senior people who can support and / own the lead generation process and content marketing.

Consider that the going rate for a marketing exec in the UK (according to Glassdoor) is £33,720 per year. Cost to company is higher with recruitment fees, the cost of training and embedding the exec, pension contributions, NI… You get the idea.

What if that budget was better spent? Yes, I’m talking about an agency to handle the heavy lifting. I can hear your objections already – It takes time to onboard an agency! Agencies don’t get our business! They don’t deliver! I can’t measure their impact!

You’re not wrong. There are a lot of agencies out there that are like that and don’t deliver on what they promise. But there are benefits of working with the right agency, using what you’d typically pay for one person to get an entire specialist team (account managers, media specialists, designers, writers, social media stars) whose business it is to know your business.

So here’s my pitch:

It takes time to onboard an agency. It really shouldn’t. This is what they do. Even as part of the pitching process, they should have taken the time to get under the skin of your brand, your objectives, your pain points, and prepare to (warning: another cliché) hit the ground running once the contracts are signed.

Agencies just don’t ‘get’ our business. If you’re talking to the right agencies, they will do more than ‘get’ your business. They’ll fulfil the dual roles of trusted advisor and industry expert. They will know your industry like their own and know exactly what to deliver and how to deliver it. At the very least during the pitching process you can ask to see case studies or content developed for other clients in similar industries to get a feel for their expertise and capabilities.

Agencies don’t deliver. Sadly this can often be the case and it gives the PR industry a bad reputation – paying exorbitant fees for time and no tangible outputs. At the very least agencies should commit to deliverables and results (it’s something we feel strongly about and you can read more about it here) because as the client you need to know exactly what you are paying for and what impact it will make on your business.

I can’t measure their impact. Why not? See above. If they are committed to deliverables and results, measuring the outputs and impact across channel and tactic is doable. Provided of course that you’ve provided a good brief, have shared your business objectives, the agency should formulate the best strategy that will deliver against that – all while making outcomes clear and making it easy for you to measure that impact.

If this article resonated – I’m happy to chat about it over a coffee – virtual or face-to-face. Get in touch today or subscribe to receive more great content.

By Nick Wheywell, Head of Social

When I started in pr and social media, the thought was a brand should only rely on its organic content and social activity to create credibility, and that it shouldn’t have to pay to elevate its status amongst its target audience or its competitors. Paying for that amplification was almost seen as cheating, building a brand should be achieved on the merit of its organic content. Stat!

That’s still the case to some degree today, as a brand needs to see that its organic content is resonating with the audience and that they are creating ‘social currency’ – content the audience deems as valuable and therefore shares with their networks. But a brand can’t rely on organic activity alone. Even if you are a heavyweight in your line of business, other heavyweights are also vying for customers. If a brand wants to stand out in its undoubtedly ever-increasingly noisy market space, paid social needs to be part of its communication strategy. Putting a budget behind your content for paid and organic social media is now seen as standard practice.

You need to spend a lot, don’t you?

The good thing is you don’t have to spend thousands or even hundreds to achieve considerable success on social media. A carefully crafted paid social campaign with a clear and focused strategy can reap many rewards, and help a brand surpass the goals they set. It’s important to note that a paid social campaign is never set in stone, it needs to be flexible, and nimble. By monitoring its progress live, you can manipulate it, including the budget, to ensure it’s performing at the highest level.

Strategising and recommending paid social activity for clients is something our social team does daily. Be it standalone social activity, or as part of an integrated campaign with one or a combination of our other practices (PR, Media, Content, and Creative), it’s a tactic we are increasingly recommending our clients do to help create cut-through. It’s the ideal opportunity to get a product, service, or offering in front of a key audience, in the knowledge that through a targeted approach with a clear call to action, the right eyes are seeing the ad and that you are creating every opportunity for that potential customer to engage the way you want them to (website visit, book a meeting, product information, downloading a whitepaper, etc.).

What happens next?

By analysing the results of a paid social ad campaign, you can glean a lot of beneficial data that must be fed back into their social activity, both organic and paid. Reviewing what worked and what didn’t, what generated the most engagement, and how it has impacted the business, allows a brand to capitalise on the effective optimisation of all assets used, and refine upcoming activity based on these results.

If you’re thinking paid social activity could be an option for you, and are interested in hearing how it could positively impact your business, why not get in touch. Our social team would be very happy to jump on a call with you.

By Bekki Bushnell, Associate Director

There are a few age old debates in PR – demonstrating impact is one of them. From this, there’s been a lot of discussion around whether PR agencies really should be guaranteeing results, i.e. coverage. As you might expect, a lot of B2B PR agency professionals tend to believe they shouldn’t be, whereas those more likely to be on the client side usually say the opposite.

What do I think? Should PRs guarantee coverage? Absolutely. Here’s why…

Transparency is key

As consultants, we have a duty to be transparent and give our honest advice on what is going to deliver the outcome for our clients. That absolutely must work both ways. For example, if we have a client that wants to make a big splash about a non-newsworthy story, then we need to acknowledge that objective, understand the motives underlying that and then propose a strategy moving forward that will deliver impact but in a way that we know will work.

Clients look to us for our PR & Media expertise, so if we are proposing the right strategies and working with businesses that trust us to execute them, then why should we not be confident enough to guarantee the result?

Trust your strategy

The point around trust is interesting. We talk a lot about trust in our industry. How can we expect businesses to trust us if we don’t trust ourselves enough to be able to guarantee a result from a strategy that we ourselves have put forward?

If you don’t believe it’s going to work then it shouldn’t be on the table, and if you’re going to ask a client to believe in it enough to put their cash on the line then you ought to do the same.

Define success

In practice, understanding what success looks like needs to start with a conversation and agreement between both parties on what the desired outcome will be and how that will be measured. On one hand it’s impractical to agree things you have no control over, e.g. saying that a specific publication will run your story, but it’s also detrimental agreeing to metrics that are devoid of any meaning, e.g. talking about reach if your client is being mentioned in a story that is entirely irrelevant to the campaign objectives.

Being upfront, transparent and looking at the bigger picture of what you are doing within a much broader ecosystem driving growth are all important things to do.

Don’t stand still

But let’s be clear. PR and communications is not an exact science, and unfortunately things don’t always go exactly to plan. Sometimes the story just doesn’t land the way you think it will or the news gets dominated by something out of your control, among many other possibilities. That shouldn’t be an excuse to not commit to guaranteed outcomes. If you’re quick to adapt and skilled in spotting opportunities that others may miss then you will be able to tweak the strategy, deliver results and apply your learnings from that experience to do even better next time around.

Ultimately, whether you are agency or client side we all want the same thing – for our campaigns to be successful, our teams, clients and stakeholders to be happy and our bottom lines to be healthy. It’s only by being as equally committed to the process as each other that we will achieve that.

By Bekki Bushnell, Associate Director

In 1899, Charles H. Duell supposedly claimed that “everything that can be invented has been invented”. Whether he really did or not is a debate for another day, but supposing he did, I started to wonder what he would make of Uber. Or Monzo. Or HubSpot. Or any of the wonderful tech inventions that have transformed the way we do things across both our personal and professional lives.

Just take a look at fintech – it’s one industry that continues to impress on the innovation front, with the UK boasting countless examples of startups and scale-ups that truly embody forward-thinking, setting an example for other industries of what bold, unashamed disruption can achieve.

It’s therefore well received news that following proposals from the Kalifa review in 2021, the government is going to roll out a number of fintech innovation hubs across major UK cities, managed by a new Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT). The overall ambition is to build upon the UK’s position as a global fintech leader, bring in international investment (that has waned over the last few years) and attract the right talent that we need to be able to deliver on those first two points.

But a ‘one-size-CFITs-all’ approach in fintech won’t wash. Companies with fast growth ambitions have several economic, political and regulatory hurdles to overcome and a bold, innovative comms strategy (much like their solutions) must play an integral role in overcoming those. The three core objectives of CFIT (establishing leadership, securing investment and attracting talent) are actually the very same objectives we often hear from across our spectrum of B2B tech clients.

So what has this got to with PR and comms?

Put simply, decision making is driven by our perceptions and the values that we hold and therefore attribute to others. These will be shaped by a number of things, including covert and overt influences, lived experiences, shared and individual environments, cultural norms, etc. That is why when we want to arrive at a certain outcome (let’s say an investor giving funding to a fintech startup), we need to shape those perceptions around our brand by tapping into the values held by our target audiences (this fintech company is led by smart, trustworthy people that are building a unique solution that there is a demand for and will generate ROI). This is something we can only do when we understand the fundamentals of how that group of people operates (under pressure, data driven, risk aware, analytical etc). That then informs what you should be saying about your business in order to shape those perceptions.

Getting the right messages in front of the right people is what a good PR and communications plan will achieve and with so many game-changing products and solutions being developed every day, why wouldn’t you want to shout about it to the world?