Tag: B2B Tech

For B2B tech brands, standing out from competitors, gaining recognition as innovators and establishing trust as industry experts can often feel like a never-ending challenge. This is why thought leadership content is such a valuable tool for a business to have in its arsenal, offering a platform for B2B brands to demonstrate their knowledge, insights and future-focused thinking.

However, in a crowded marketplace, to really stand out among the crowd and reach the right audiences, thought leadership might need to be delivered in formats that extend beyond well-written articles and whitepapers. One medium that is gaining significant traction as a tool for establishing thought leadership is the podcast. Once purely consumer-focused, podcast formats are now permeating the business world.

The number of podcast listeners in the UK alone is expected to reach 28.1 million by 2026. For B2B tech brands, this presents an exciting opportunity to capture the attention of new audiences and position themselves as leaders in their field.

Why podcasts work for building industry expertise

One of the major advantages of podcasts is that they bring expertise to life in a way that few other formats can. Traditional blogs and whitepapers have their place, but podcasts literally give a voice to experts, allowing them to explore complex topics in an engaging, conversational manner. It’s an opportunity for the speaker to get their individuality across as they discuss interesting ideas or subjects. This combination of expertise and personality can humanise brands and deepen the connection with audiences.

Complex topics, such as cloud migration, cyber security or AI, can be explored through dynamic discussions Technical details can be distilled into more easily understood, digestible snippets for audiences. And these discussions don’t have to be confined to internal spokespeople. Guest speakers, such as customers or partners, can provide a different perspective.

The podcast format also allows for individual episodes to focus on specific verticals, customer pain points or emerging trends, with external experts able to share their insights on different topics.

There are also benefits for the listeners themselves. Busy decision-makers may sometimes struggle to find the time to read blogs and articles. A recorded 20-minute deep-dive into a particular topic could be the perfect listening material for the morning commute, lunchtime break or evening exercise session. By regularly listening to familiar voices, listeners can feel a closer connection with the hosts, thereby creating a stronger emotional bond with the brand.

From production to promotion

Podcasts are relatively low-cost to produce, but the production process itself requires time, resources and expertise. These are all elements that many B2B tech companies may not have readily available. It’s not just about hitting record and speaking into a microphone. A professional, well-produced podcast needs careful planning, expert editing and high-quality sound to engage and retain listeners.

This is where creative support comes in. Working with production experts can streamline the process, helping with everything from creating the concept of the podcast to recording, editing, and managing distribution. Collaboration with specialists also ensures that the podcast aligns with the company’s overall messaging and branding, contributing to a polished and consistent image.

But even the best-produced podcast will fall flat if it doesn’t reach the right audience. Once episodes are live, promoting them strategically across different channels, such as social media, can boost visibility. There are also opportunities to repurpose some of the valuable content into other assets, such as blog posts, social media posts and email newsletters, enhancing content distribution and engagement.

A new channel to enhance thought leadership efforts

Podcasts are a prime opportunity for B2B tech brands to enhance their thought leadership efforts. With a winning combination of in-depth expertise and engaging, conversational content, podcasts allow companies to humanise their brand, build stronger connections with audiences and explore complex topics in an accessible way.

While the production process requires time and expertise, partnering with creative professionals ensures a polished and impactful end product. With the right promotion, podcasts can reach and resonate with key decision-makers, helping brands to stand out as industry leaders in a crowded space.

Get in touch to learn more about how we can help you develop your own podcast to reach key audiences.

Generating high-quality leads is one of the biggest challenges facing emerging and growing B2B tech companies. Despite having innovative products or services, attracting and converting potential customers into leads often proves difficult. One approach that can play a part in helping to overcome this challenge is focusing on your company’s reputation.

A strong reputation, built on a foundation of credibility and trust, naturally attracts leads, making potential customers more likely to engage with your business and resulting in higher conversions and sustained growth. The solution lies in measuring and strengthening your reputation strategically.

In B2B tech, reputation is a critical factor. Potential customers are more inclined to engage with companies they perceive as credible and trustworthy. A strong reputation reassures them that your company can deliver on its promises.

However, reputation isn’t just about being well-known. It’s about being well-regarded in your industry for reliability, innovation and customer satisfaction. Companies that successfully build and maintain a positive reputation tend to see a significant impact on their lead generation efforts. But how do you measure and enhance something as intangible as reputation?

Measuring your reputation

The first step in improving your reputation is understanding where you currently stand. This requires a comprehensive assessment using a variety of metrics and tools. For instance, monitoring media coverage can provide insights into how often and in what context your company is being mentioned. Positive media coverage can boost your reputation, while negative press can damage it, which is why sentiment analysis of these mentions is crucial to understanding their impact.

Customer reviews and social media sentiment also offer valuable clues about your reputation. What are people saying about your brand? Are there recurring themes in the feedback you receive? By paying attention to these channels, you can better understand how your company is perceived by current and potential customers.

Another powerful tool is brand perception studies. These can be particularly useful for understanding both prompted and unprompted awareness of your brand. By surveying a representative sample of your target audience, you can gauge how well-known your brand is and what qualities are associated with it.

Strengthening your reputation

Once you’ve gathered data on your current reputation, the next step is to use these insights to enhance it. This is where a performance-driven PR approach becomes crucial. Rather than relying on generic strategies, you can develop targeted campaigns that directly address the areas where your reputation needs improvement.

For instance, if your media coverage has been lacking, you might focus on securing more positive press through thought leadership articles, product announcements or industry commentary. If customer reviews reveal dissatisfaction with a particular aspect of your service, you can address those concerns and communicate the changes to your audience.

Storytelling is another powerful way to strengthen your reputation. By highlighting your company’s strengths and successes, through carefully crafted compelling narratives, you can shift public perception in a more positive direction. Whether through blog posts, social media updates or press releases, consistently communicating your value proposition will help build a more robust reputation.

As you strengthen your reputation, you’ll likely notice a positive feedback loop forming. A stronger reputation attracts more leads, which in turn provides more opportunities to demonstrate your company’s value and further enhance your reputation.

This loop is particularly important in the B2B tech sector, where decision-makers are often cautious and methodical in their purchasing decisions. They want to be sure that they’re choosing a partner who is competent and trustworthy. By consistently improving your reputation, you’re giving them the confidence they need to take the next step and engage with your business.

For B2B tech companies, generating leads is not just about having a great product or service – it’s about being perceived as a leader in your field. By focusing on measuring and strengthening your reputation, you can create a solid foundation that attracts high-quality leads and drives long-term growth.

Discover our PR and media relations services and the role they play in strengthening business reputation.

By Vicki Curtis, Senior Client Consultant

Change has arrived in the PR industry. Synapse, a new platform devised by former Dow Jones and Gorkana executive, Charles Russell, and PR legend Mark Borkowski, aims to transform the way that journalists and PR professionals communicate. The idea is that journalists can access a custom-filtered inbox of PR pitches that are relevant to them, and PRs can discover new media and influencer contacts and pitch interesting angles and fresh perspectives.

I can see why the idea has materialised. There’s been an industry-wide friction between journalists and PRs for many years. Cision’s Global State of the Media Report 2023 discovered that only 7% of journalists say the majority of pitches they get are relevant to their audience. It’s a shockingly low statistic. But why has it come to this? If PR professionals across the board were tailoring pitches, understanding media and only sending relevant emails to the right journalists, would there be a need for these new types of services?

Time for a rethink

It’s time for PR professionals to rethink the way they approach their work so that they don’t have to solely rely on these emerging platforms. However, it must be said that technology can deliver some helpful tools. For example, Synapse allows journalists to filter the pitches they receive from PRs by topic and format. They are also able to flag pitches that aren’t relevant to them. Similarly, PRs will be able to see who has viewed or accepted their pitches.

But it’s also our responsibility, as PR people, to consider the perspective of journalists and know what is going to resonate with them in the first place and not simply rely on the tech. This is incredibly important as the Cision research also revealed that as many as three in four journalists will block a media relations professional who spams them with irrelevant pitches.

Many PR agencies are structuring their internal teams to feature dedicated media specialists. These employees are focused solely on media activity and building relationships with journalists, which feeds into the second requirement of the modern day PR professional. Now that we’re fully clear of the pandemic, it’s time for PRs to step out from behind the screens and set up relationship building meetings with key media figures.

The trend for intermediaries

More than 1000 journalists from across more than 140 titles, including The Mirror, The Express, The Scotsman and OK! Magazine have signed up to Synapse. As the platform gathers pace, more look likely to join, but it remains to be seen as to what extent it will help to alleviate the issues between PRs and journalists.

One aspect that is clear is the growing trend towards ‘matchmaking platforms’ across industries. Whether it’s matching pitches to journalists, brands to agencies or even investors to entrepreneurs, there’s a big focus now on employees looking to save time with supporting platforms. In this sense, the technology could help employees to streamline their day-to-day tasks.

However, while tools such as Synapse offer promising solutions to bridge the gap between journalists and PR professionals, these innovations shouldn’t overshadow the fundamental principles of PR, including relationship-building and understanding the media landscape. Professionals must ensure that they get these basics right, and the unique value that only they can provide is building those human connections that technology can’t replicate. Only by merging these capabilities can the PR industry be truly revolutionised for the better.

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By Hayley Goff, Chief Executive Officer

For a business with genuine artificial intelligence capabilities, the world should be one of significant new opportunities and strong growth.

Automation, AI, analytics and low-code platforms have been converging for several years and the appetite for advanced, data-driven technology has increased rapidly. Research by analysts Deloitte found more than 50 per cent of organisations plan to use or implement AI and automation this year (2023) and almost all (94 per cent) see AI as critical to success.

This is a huge opportunity for AI companies, especially in mature markets such as the US and UK. Surprising as it may seem, however, companies with AI capabilities often underperform when it comes to explaining themselves.

Tech businesses that have immense talent in applying machine learning, computer vision, or natural language processing to significant business problems, are frequently lost for words when it comes to telling their own stories. Once they seek to get their message out, they may feel they are adrift in a very unfamiliar landscape of media organisations and marketing events where it is difficult to determine who or what matters and how long or how much it takes to achieve any impact.

The problem is that if a business fails to explain itself well, the B2B tech media may simply ignore it. A business with AI capabilities will achieve little if it is unable to talk interestingly and succinctly about what makes it stand out or why it is relevant to what is happening now. We can all send emails to publications, but are they the people with any real clout or connections? Getting this wrong can cause a significant loss of momentum, even in a hot area such as AI, where competition is intense and potential customers are very careful about how they spend their budgets.

This is especially true when a B2B tech business enters a new territory. It’s a little too easy, for instance, for US-based firms to assume they speak a common language with all their potential prospects in the UK, Europe and Scandinavia, even though the entire tech world is so heavily influenced by US innovators. Failing to address the specific circumstances and challenges of companies in the UK and Europe or to use idiomatic British English in the UK undermines any growth strategy. Audiences quickly feel they are being considered as an add-on or after-thought.

Crafting the message out for AI companies and getting it out there takes skill

Achieving any benefit from B2B tech PR can take time, hard work and requires insight and skill. A company with an AI solution or function should work with B2B tech PR specialists with local knowledge and connections. It is important to develop the true story about a company’s AI – which is not always easy to explain in simple terms. How does your AI make you stand out? What does it do that matters to the distinct audiences in the UK or France or Germany? Can this be developed in a way that makes relevant media take notice and increases credibility?

Many companies offering AI capabilities may also struggle because they have a purely anecdotal understanding of how rivals are perceived in these markets and the kind of language and terminology used. A B2B tech PR specialist like Whiteoaks International can conduct marketing, content and share-of-voice audits and craft strategies and tactics that make an AI business stand out. This will be informed by an understanding of the challenges and opportunities in each market and how other businesses currently address them. A business can, for example, see how perceptions of it are shifting over the course of a PR campaign, gauged by quarterly monitoring of the terminology the market uses when considering its offering and capabilities. This is a measurable outcome. A campaign can be divided up into specific topics or business challenges to achieve tighter focus.

Strategies to increase awareness and influence opinion will target the media and people that matter most with articles, eBooks, blogs, tips and best practice guides that relate the benefits of a distinctive AI capability to the challenges prospects face right now, or pressures and opportunities from economic, political or social events and trends. Integrated content marketing, as part of an over-arching PR campaign, enables AI companies to work on development of a full array of marketing and content assets, mapping on to agreed and carefully thought-through objectives.

An integrated campaign respects the distinctive characteristics of each market, and for Whiteoaks, involves the WIN PR Group of tech PR agencies who understand one another and work in similar ways. For a company in the AI sector, this is important. The messages in a PR campaign need to be tailored to each market, but maintain overall consistency – otherwise, credibility is quickly lost and coordination breaks down. With the WIN Group, companies gain the right balance between local knowledge and consistency in methodology, messaging and reporting.

AI may be the hottest topic in town, but it still takes skill and expertise for an AI company to get its message out clearly to the right people, with outcomes it can measure.

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.

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