RISE PR IN ACTION – B2B NEWS GENERATION

Posted by on 20th April 2016 / 0 comments

Every PR professional, whether a freelance tech PR consultant like me or a big brand consumer agency, understands the importance of news generation. It keeps brands front of mind with their audience, drives web traffic and provides content for social media and wider marketing programmes.

Yet we all have had clients that for reason or another, don’t have too much to say. It’s our job to get them talking and to unearth the platforms that will enable them to share those stories with the media and wider world. But it can be seriously tough:

That’s when experienced PR consultants can really come into their own, and it’s the basis of a recent Rise PR campaign that we are really proud of.

Finding the right platform

We work with customer experience consultancy, PeopleTECH and while other areas of the communications programme were keeping us busy, the first quarter of 2016 was a fallow one in terms of news.

Our overarching goal was to position PeopleTECH as an expert in all elements of the customer journey / experience, and to highlight the fact that while many companies spoke about wanting to provide a good customer experience, few were actually taking this seriously.

So we conducted some desk research to generate some newsworthy findings around how seriously organisations were taking customer experience. We audited every FTSE 100 and FTSE AIM 100 companies, checking whether they had a chief customer officer on either the board or senior management team (SMT). The results were just as we wanted – only 1% of FTSE companies had a CCO listed on their board, and none of the FTSE AIM 100 companies did.

Sharing the results

The nature of using something like the FTSE means that you can break down your findings vertically too. So in addition to our main press release – highlighting the lack of true focus on the customer experience by FTSE firms – we were able to use the findings to target specific sectors too, with retail a priority for PeopleTECH.

The results were highly impressive. The findings were used to inform social content that month, and also used in features and bylined articles for months afterwards. But the name of the game was news generation, and we delivered some impactful coverage in target media including Growth Business, Talk Retail, MyCustomer.com, Engage Customer and The Daily Telegraph.

This kind of research can work really well and is incredibly cost-effective, as the only outlay is the usual retainer or project fee. Drop us a line if you’d be interested in hearing how it might work for your business.

Tagged: B2B news generation experience marketing

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