Seattle, which is one of the home bases for our PR firm, is a hugely crowded technology market. Between the excitement of the startup community in the city and the marketplace domination from the tech behemoths like Microsoft and Amazon, it can be really tough for mid-sized B2B enterprise technology companies to get attention from media.
Fortunately, that’s where our team comes in. The entire RH team is anchored in tech media expertise, and enterprise tech public relations and marketing is one of the firm’s market specializations.
But how exactly do we help our B2B tech clients steal the spotlight in a media landscape teeming with innovation and compelling stories? We have a few tricks up our sleeves.
- Elevate your employee expertise. Aside from the executive team, we often look for charismatic, intelligent and well-spoken subject matter experts to serve as spokespeople. These hidden gems help diversify the spokesperson bench and can handle some of the more techie questions about products or solutions. They give another human face to a company’s brand and can help the company appear really smart.
- Monitor the news landscape. We don’t just hear about the big news that pops now and then – our team scours the interwebs for growing trends or topics that could use a unique point of view. We can’t always predict what news will happen, but we’re pretty good at getting a feel for rising stories that haven’t been published yet or acting quickly when there is relevant breaking news for our clients.
- Build a reviews program. Not all B2B tech companies have the bandwidth to search for review opportunities in key publications and pursue them, but we do. We’ve helped clients get their products submitted to top reviewers in their category and achieve five-star results. Not only does it make the product teams feel good, a five-star rating looks pretty nice on product packaging, the company website and marketing materials.
- Focus on your target audiences. Sometimes clients have dreams of showing up in Forbes or The New York Times. While those are exciting moments indeed, is that really where IT staff, CTOs or CIOs are looking for technology information? When it comes to purchasing decisions, we work with our clients to identify where those buyers are reading stories. It could be industry vertical magazines, developer blogs or some of the tech trade standbys – we want your insights and expertise to reach the people who need to know your story.
- Create excellent content. Let’s be honest, B2B tech isn’t always a story a majority of people can understand. Not everyone knows what HTML5 does or what 4G really means or how to explain what a server is. Our team can help take complex technology and talk about it in a way your parents could follow, making it interesting, creative and compelling.
These are just a few of the items in our PR toolbelt that we keep handy for our enterprise tech clients. And these tools, layered with the healthcare and public sector tech practices in the firm, create an environment where we are able to meet – and exceed – our clients’ expectations.