Category: Blogs

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.