Today’s B2B marketing reality: Marketing budgets are under scrutiny from executive leadership. Marketing departments face increased pressure to drive business growth, quickly. There is very little patience for action and results.
How did we get here? The recession of 2009-2010 wasn’t the only factor, but it was a significant one. First, it exacerbated any dysfunction that existed within marketing departments. Second, it left a permanent dent in the form of reduced budgets and fewer employees with higher goals and increased pressure to drive business growth. Many marketing leaders responded by examining performance of all marketing activities, cutting back and focusing in where the greatest impact is demonstrated. Progress. Or so we thought…
Eight years later, things haven’t really changed. Yes, we’ve adjusted to the new norm of doing more with less. Generally speaking, we’ve increasingly shifted spend from offline channels to online channels that are more measurable. We’ve gotten savvier about leveraging marketing technology to work smarter. And, we’ve embraced the notion that customer experience is everything. Yet, the same problems persist. Every year, marketing remains under the microscope for not delivering business results. Our B2B healthcare and manufacturing clients are asking us:
- How can we efficiently and cost-effectively create more brand awareness with the right audiences?
- Where can we find the right audiences?
- Our PR and marketing efforts need to deliver more tangible results, how can you help?
- How do we better gauge the quality and effectiveness of our PR and thought leadership efforts?
PR is one area that continues to lag behind the new reality. Impressions and clip counts just don’t cut it when the C-suite is asking for concrete ROI data. But we’ve learned that, if done right, PR can become part of the solution to marketing driving more business growth. The only way to derive more meaningful PR metrics is to get PR out of its silo in earned media and integrate it with paid and owned media. And, it must be held accountable to the same metrics as digital marketing channels.
We tackle this challenge in our new E-Book, geared toward marketers who understand that thought leadership, storytelling and educational content are at the heart of customer-centric communications and the future of B2B marketing. To save you time in determining if it’s for you, here’s the table contents:
- 7 limitations B2B brands face in deriving real business value from PR
- How to maximize the impact of PR
- How to measure and refine the new approach to PR
- B2B brands mastering the art of earned, owned and paid integration
Are you ready to take PR to the next level? Download The B2B marketer’s guide to driving more business impact to learn how to integrate earned media with owned and paid to build enduring brand trust.
