Why Hire a PR Agency for Your B2B Business in 2022
No matter the size, every company depends upon its reputation for success. PR is an essential management tool for businesses to help achieve their goals and improve their brand image. Many companies are unsure how to integrate PR into their marketing mix and may have never grasped its full benefits. Here are some reasons why you should hire a PR agency and how it can benefit your business.
PR, storytelling, and credibility
Companies with great products go out of business every day because they fail to reach the people who need their solutions. The key to being great is to always be on the mind of your potential customers. Once upon a time, advertising was crucial to staying in front of your customers, but today people are tired of being sold to, pitched at, and spammed.
The best way to reach your target audience in 2022 is to create informative, educational, and even disruptive content. Then you need to get that content in front of as many potential customers as possible, as often as you can. This is where a good B2B PR agency can help by getting the right messages in front of the right people at the right time.
Now, let’s be clear – a good PR agency should not try and win your business by promising to just send out a few press releases on the wire. No one is interested in stories that focus on your new company’s new hires or awards. Your ideal customer wants to see content that benefits them.
This is why in 2022, the B2B public relations agency you hire has to be about utilizing storytelling to explain how you’re solving your customer’s problems. Taking that one step further, have your customers do the talking for you.
PR is by far the single greatest approach to building credibility
Your B2B PR agency can take a story and get it published in the trade publications that your ideal customers are already reading (print and online).
In fact, according to MediaGrowth research, about 93% of business-to-business decision makers report reading trade publications regularly, with 97% of those people reporting that their buying decisions are directly affected by the content they read.
One of the best parts about this approach is that you not only get seen by millions of ideal prospects each year, but you can now leverage that content on your social media accounts, your website, in email campaigns, or if you want, even in advertising.
When the articles are published online, they have huge residual value as well. For example, articles in trade publications typically stay up forever. They are also very likely to show up on the front page of a Google search for your primary keywords. This means more people will find you when they’re searching for solutions that will fix their current problems.
Furthermore, when these articles appear on a Google search for prospects doing research, they are seen as a more trusted source. In fact, according to a report from engineering.com, a company’s website ranks third when it comes to where a prospect searches for trusted information. Trade publications, on the other hand, rank number one.
Then there’s also enormous SEO value from your public relations articles. A good B2B PR agency will be able to include “do-follow” backlinks within the stories they create for you. When these backlinks are published online in trade publications, they deliver high domain authority (DA) rankings typically in the 70-80 range. As a side note, companies today are charging thousands of dollars for DA scores in the 40-50 range. So, this alone can deliver an ROI.
PR is great at building brand awareness
While PR is great at building awareness of you and your products, it goes way beyond just lead generation, sales and a boost to revenue. If we take a ‘big picture’ approach to what PR delivers you see that it is actually building something much larger. PR is the infrastructure your business needs to grow exponentially. PR works to establish your company as a trusted brand.
For example, we worked with a company that, in their own words, was invisible within their industry before working with us. In two years, this company was able to double their sales, which is great, but they are far more impressed by something that is tougher to measure. In literature from an independent research group, the company was singled out as the “leader in the industry” for their area of expertise. The COO said that they were shocked when they found out because they are not the biggest company nor do they deliver the largest volume.
Since they rely on Rankin PR for all their marketing needs, it was obvious that the PR articles – which featured their customers giving a factual account of how well their products work – branded them with a perception of being the best.
This is all possible because they hired a PR agency that understands how business-to-business operations function, who their target audiences are, and how to communicate to the people in that field. It also does not hurt that your B2B PR agency should already have established industry relationships with editors, journalists, and producers who determine what gets passed on to readers and what does not.
B2Bs need B2B PR
Another benefit of working with a B2B PR agency is that you get to control the content that gets published. Our editors are eager to work with us because they know we provide them with high-quality articles that their readers actually care about and more importantly will learn from. While everyone has different goals, it would be hard to find a company that would not benefit greatly from working with a B2B PR agency. If you would like to find out if your company would be eligible to work with Rankin PR, set up a free intro call today.