B2BPR Ltd

There’s an awful lot more to media relations than firing out press releases.

We specialise in getting messages to audiences through their specialist media in editorial. We achieve this by establishing close contacts with key journalists, briefing them and then supplying them with a regular feed of high quality press releases and features that we tailor to make relevant to their readers and your audiences.

Media is a lot more diverse than it once was. In years gone by B2B media consisted almost entirely of printed trade magazines. Now it can include websites and blogs and the boundary is being ever further blurred by social media, which essentially makes everybody a journalist. Despite all the changes that have taken place, media relations coverage still establishes a very high degree of credibility. An endorsement from a journalist or an informed commentator still carries a lot more weight than an advertisement.

In order to be successful you can’t just bash out a press release, fire it off and hope it will get used. It’s vital to build a relationship with each journalist, contact them before sending a story to them, talk through what you are sending them, establish their interest in the story and see if you can give a special tweak that might make it more relevant to their readers. Press releases always get better coverage if they are pre-briefed and then sent out with good quality images. It’s always vital then to contact the journalist after sending them the story to make sure they have received it, understand it and to offer them interviews, opportunities to view the product or service and try it out for themselves.

A press release is a news story. Typically announcing a new product or service, a new contract, a technological breakthrough or an impending event. It could also give details of a corporate development, investment, hiring new staff or reaching out to new markets.

We are always looking for the opportunity to secure more detailed coverage with a feature story. This could be a company focus or an in-depth look at a new product or service. Features come in two forms – pre-published forward features, which publications plan in advance and invite companies to contribute to, or specific features, which focus entirely on your business, product or service, and which we persuade Editors to run.

A media relations campaign should always start with identifying a top level of journalists, who we know we should prioritise because they directly reach your key audiences and are influential in opinion forming.

The first task is to create a press briefing pack – essentially a kit of information that gives the journalist everything they need to be able to write comprehensively about your company, products and services. This is likely to include background information, facts and figures, product and service overviews and high quality images.

We will typically then set out to brief top level journalists with the pack and invite them to meet a client and experience the business, products and services for themselves. This ensures that, right from the start, the key journalists have a thorough understanding and appreciation of the client’s business.

Having briefed the media we can then start identifying stories to create and send to them. We will work with you to put together a calendar of activity, highlighting product or service releases, important events, such as exhibitions or seminars and anything else that we might judge presents a positive opportunity to generate media coverage that consistently reinforces your key messages.

The key objective of content marketing is to create high quality content that audiences value and to deliver this to them consistently over digital media, building audiences and driving traffic to your website.

We create content for you that consistently expresses all the key messages that we identify in our strategic development. We then use this content on your website and re-purpose it so that it is delivered to your audiences through as many relevant channels as possible. This can include blogs, e-zines and other online media. The content can also then be re-used in other ways, such as e-blasts, sales letters, brochures, white papers, speeches at industry events, case studies, newsletters, exhibition materials and printed direct mailshots, consistently reinforcing your messages to your audiences and bringing your marketing and sales communications together.

The end result is that your audience receives consistent messaging via a range of marketing and sales channels and will then start to recognise these messages and be positively influenced by them.

Many companies fail to make adequate preparation for the damage that can be done to their business by an unplanned negative event. This is particularly relevant in the sectors in which we specialise, aerospace, automotive, construction and industrial engineering, where a disaster could take the form of a small, containable industrial accident or a significant event with potential for widescale damage and injury. Inadequate preparation could lead to irreparable damage to the reputation of your brands or of your entire business.

We take this very seriously indeed and we work with you to ensure that if a negative unplanned event ever occurs you will not be taken by surprise, you will be able to respond quickly, decisively and professionally, potentially enhancing the perception of your business and brands rather than destroying them.

History is littered with examples of businesses who have been ruined by a crisis. The common theme among many of these is not that the company was ruined by the crisis itself, but that it was ruined by the damage done to its reputation as a direct result of how they managed the situation.

When things go wrong the instinct of many people is to bury their heads in the sand. Not face the media out of fear that they will be targeted or may say the wrong thing. The truth is that if you create an information vacuum by failing to communicate, the media will almost certainly fill this vacuum with speculation and cobbled together stories which are very likely to be significantly harmful. It is better to engage positively with the media and actively feed them the information that you are able to release than to leave them to create their own news without you.

The lesson from this is very simple. Be prepared. The more seriously you take planning, the more committed you are to making certain that your business is ready to react positively if the unthinkable should occur, the more likely you are to emerge not just in one piece but actually with your reputation positively enhanced.

In among the modern-day clamour for content, there remains a clearly defined need for the traditional copywriter. The true skill of the copywriter is to come up with words that encapsulate the key selling points of a product or service and communicate them clearly, concisely and in language that is relevant to the audience and which influences them to invest accordingly. In advertising terms this demands a subtly different approach to writing PR copy or content.

Copywriting is always done in partnership with a designer, so that the words and visual theme are consistent and complementary. Invariably a copywriter will work with a designer to identify a creative concept and then build the visual and the words around it.

We have considerable experience of copywriting, from the smallest of print advertisements right up to television ads for major international blue chip brands. We have well established partnerships with brilliant designers with whom we have consistently created advertising of the highest standard, but we are equally happy to work with a client’s in house team or preferred partner.

Social media marketing has become a vital component of many business to business campaigns. It is a vital tool for building audiences – Twitter and LinkedIn, in particular, can enable you to establish direct contacts with individuals in target businesses and deliver messages directly to them.

A vital element of social media marketing is to drive traffic to your website, where they can receive comprehensively detailed information about your business, products and services, and where you can data mine information about them, encourage them to sign up for information updates and then add them to a database for outbound marketing and sales contact.

Social media content should be updated regularly with relevant information to keep the audience engaged, build the relationship with them and greatly enhance your credibility with them.

We work with very high quality strategic partners so that we can provide a comprehensive service, professionally project managed, so that other components such as branding, graphic design, website design and engineering, photography, video production, event management and print production are seamlessly integrated, consistent in messaging and presented to you with a single point of contact.

All of our strategic partners are companies who we have worked with for several years, whose quality in assured and who we have no qualms about introducing to you.