From Contacts to Connections: Mastering Media Relations in Tech
Building and nurturing relationships with tech media is more than just a strategy; it’s an art. The dynamic digital landscape demands not only understanding the nuances of tech PR but
Austin Tech Marketing PR Firm
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We utilize strategies and tactics from earned and paid media to influencer management to experiential marketing and nobody can equal our results per dollar spent. If you’re not getting a perfectly balanced and fully integrated approach from a firm, you’re not getting 1+1=3.
It’s difficult to offer services at this level. Most firms don’t have the depth of knowledge (especially in tech) nor the experience to offer C-level strategy. Most opt to be experts in one or two areas, but that approach (while easier) always means lower results and lower economies of scale.
Keep in mind, everything we do starts with research, the foundation for our R3SM Methodology. Understanding your audience is critical to building the right message and narrative that gets your target to act.
Fully Integrated Services Is A Must
Strategic Messaging
Before a company can tell the right story to the right people, strategic messaging must be completed to ensure we are working with the right story from the start. We find that in most companies, especially start-ups, there are as many disparate messages as there are executives.
There are times when messaging needs to be done at the corporate level, other times just at the product level, and at other times for a particular vertical or target audience. PRIME|PR works with a variety of messaging hierarchies and structures designed to ensure messaging consistency across different units, while still allowing for the messaging flexibility of being able to target different audiences with the opening statement that will appeal most to them.
After the messaging is completed, the only way to ensure your story is retold to your customers correctly, is to make sure your entire company speaks with one voice that reiterates the important key messages over and over again.
One PR rule is that having no coverage is better than getting covered by multiple publications with differing messages in every article. You’ll confuse your target market and spend precious budget helping your competition by building the market and not focusing on your unique differentiators.
Media Relations
Media relations used to simply mean having several people sit in front of phones and “smile and dial” – and that was enough to get your story out. Not anymore. Now you must be an expert in the material you’re pitching – even able to answer the first three questions from a member of the media before they’ll take you and your story seriously. VERY FEW media pros today can do that for advanced technologies.
At PRIME|PR we live and breathe technology, so we are always on top of the latest tech trends – enabling us to blend your unique story into a greater national tech trend with ease. This really helps those that do not have a solid customer reference base. We can create stories and conversations around your company, instead of relying on you to provide customer case studies or product releases to gain media attention.
- Ongoing media relations consist of targeted opportunities that can include any of the following:
- Pitching the relevant media and analysts – they know us so they answer our calls
- Researching and pitching editorial calendars
- “Bouncing back” to relevant coverage
- Writing contributed articles
- Pitching trend stories
- Monitoring coverage and tracking competitors
- Producing press releases surrounding company events, news and product announcements
- Drafting customer case studies and pitching to relevant media
- Researching and pitching speaking opportunities at target trade shows
- Support for trade shows – on-site, logistics, etc…
- Blog research and executive level op eds
Analyst Relations
Founder of PRIME|PR, Nicolia L. Wiles, is an ex-Gartner analyst and knows well the power that analysts relations can play in the overall marketing mix. Analysts are the extreme experts in their specific field and your customers typically spend $45,000+ each year just to get access to their unique insights. These are a group of influencers at the top of the sales influence value chain and every company should be engaging with them.
Maintaining strong relationships with industry analysts is crucial for your success in both the near term and long term. Analysts have the power to shape market perceptions and influence buying decisions, making analyst relations a vital component of any company’s public relations strategy.
By engaging with analysts, technology companies can gain valuable insights into industry trends, customer needs, and competitive landscapes. Analysts can also provide valuable feedback on products and services, helping companies improve their offerings and stay ahead of the curve. In addition, analyst reports and evaluations can serve as powerful third-party endorsements, providing credibility and validation to a company’s offerings.
Building strong relationships with analysts requires a strategic approach, including regular briefings, demos, and interactions that keep them informed about the company’s latest developments. By investing in analyst relations, technology companies can gain a competitive edge, establish themselves as thought leaders in their field, and ultimately drive business growth.
That said, even more so than with the media, gaining success with analysts necessitates an ongoing relationship with top analysts to even get past their gatekeepers and at PRIME|PR, they know our name well.
Thought Leadership (CEO as Brand)
Where everyone has access to information at their fingertips, it is easy to get lost in the noise. However, as a thought leader, you can establish yourself as a trusted authority on a particular topic or industry. By sharing your knowledge and expertise, you can build credibility with your target audience, and they will start to see you as a go-to resource for information. This can help you stand out from your competitors, establish your brand as a leader in your industry, and ultimately, drive sales and revenue.
With the right campaign, you can leverage various online platforms, including social media, blogs, podcasts, and webinars, to showcase your expertise and build your brand. By creating high-quality content that addresses your target audience’s pain points, you can attract and engage your target audience, establish yourself as a thought leader, and ultimately, drive traffic and leads to your website.
To be effective with this strategy, there are a few key elements that you must have in place:
- Create High-Quality Content - high-quality content is one of the most effective ways to build thought leadership. As a CEO, you can share your insights and experiences through blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and social media. When creating content, focus on providing value to your target audience. Share your unique perspective and insights on industry trends, challenges, and solutions.
- Leverage Social Media - social media is a powerful tool for building thought leadership. As a CEO, you can use social media to share your content, engage with your followers, and establish yourself as an authority in your industry. Identify the social media platforms that your target audience uses most frequently and create a strategy to engage with them. Use hashtags to increase your visibility and participate in industry-related conversations.
- Speak at Industry Events - speaking at industry events is an effective way to build thought leadership and increase your visibility. Identify the conferences, webinars, and other events that your target audience attends and submit proposals to speak. Focus on providing valuable insights and actionable takeaways for your audience. Use your speaking engagements to showcase your expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader.
Digital Services
Working with social media channels for paid media engagement is one of the most impactful tactics for pushing customers to the top of the marketing funnel. It’s more than the number of likes or followers, it’s about understanding strategy and how we get people to act and become customers, brand advocates and full champions. This scope of work includes the following:
- Consulting: This not only includes establishing ideal tactics but also changes as a result of testing. This consulting includes the development of a project timeline built for success. Some of the recommended tactics will require the expertise of seasoned specialists on the PRIME|PR staff.
- Creation: We will create one social video and multiple social photos per month.
- Execution: Going beyond strategy development, we implement the recommended tactics for a successful digital services/revenue generation campaign.
Our work will likely cover a broad spectrum of online marketing opportunities; however, the principal areas of focus we cover are:
- Key Audience Creation: we identify your ideal customers as they post their needs and wants on social media and then displays timely advertisements to them giving you the best chance at gaining their business. A prospective customer of a speaker manufacturer may say on Facebook - "I'm looking for the best Texas whiskey out there. Help!" Our system will advertise directly to that prospective customer and anyone with similar interests and demographics.
- Automatic Optimization & Retargeting: we only get better with age, which means your advertising budget goes further and performs better as time goes on.
- Advanced Reporting: we show you what matters. The stats you need to know in a format you can understand.
- Influencer Management: we work with top influencers to help spread your new corporate narrative.
- SEO Implementation: we develop the SEO strategy and optimize two separate key word implementations and guarantee top Google placement within six months.
Event Management
Both PRIME|PR and our strategic partner, Method Three, have more than 20 years in event production and brand activations. We are also the only marketing group that has our own venues for high-quality activations made easy. Organizing events can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to creating a successful public relations campaign.
Event management involves planning, executing, and evaluating events, which can be anything from product launches, conferences, trade shows, and charity events. Event management is important for several reasons, including:
- Creating brand awareness: Events provide an opportunity for businesses to showcase their products and services to a wider audience. By organizing a well-executed event, businesses can create a buzz around their brand, leading to increased brand awareness and loyalty.
- Building relationships: Events provide an excellent platform for businesses to build relationships with customers, clients, and stakeholders. By interacting with attendees at events, businesses can establish trust and credibility, leading to increased sales and revenue.
- Generating leads: Events are a great way to generate leads for businesses. By gathering contact information from attendees, businesses can follow up with potential customers and turn them into paying clients.
- Improving brand reputation: A well-executed event can help businesses improve their brand reputation by showcasing their professionalism, attention to detail, and commitment to customer satisfaction.
What we do to make it all run seamless:
- Planning: This involves identifying the purpose of the event, defining goals and objectives, and creating a budget and timeline.
- Venue selection: Choosing the right venue is critical to the success of any event. The venue should be easily accessible, have adequate space, and provide the necessary amenities.
- Marketing and promotion: Marketing and promotion are critical to the success of an event. This involves creating a marketing plan, identifying target audiences, and leveraging social media and other marketing channels to promote the event.
- Logistics: This involves managing the logistics of the event, including coordinating vendors, managing registration, and overseeing the setup and teardown of the event.
- Evaluation: After the event, it is important to evaluate the success of the event based on predefined goals and objectives. This involves gathering feedback from attendees, assessing the effectiveness of the marketing and promotion efforts, and identifying areas for improvement.
Content Marketing
Marketing without lead generation is comedy, while sales without lead generation is tragedy. We have spent the last twenty years building a system that gets you in the door with decision makers.
Using engaging and timely content, we stimulate and capture interest to develop MQLs and ultimately SQLs for your brand. We employ a range of techniques, but most often use SEO, social media, blogging, web page optimization, paid search, email marketing, event promotion, and various outbound techniques depending on your product or service. We work with you to score leads, segment, and manage your lists to ensure that we’re not just providing you with empty data.
We can have a light or heavy touch, depending on your preference. At full capacity, we can provide website traffic and engagement reporting, Influencer reporting, Lead Conversion reporting, and we can directly attribute revenue to marketing activities to determine where to focus marketing budget.
Sometimes our clients need a more one-on-one approach to content/interaction and we pride ourselves on our focus on ROI. We’ve spent many hours and dollars on our own technology to reach customers in the most efficient, effective way. Yet still, sometimes the best results are achieved through a simple introduction.
We have spent a combined 74 years developing and nurturing our networks to ensure that we can reach that one contact that can be a game changer for clients. Our clients have seen tremendous ROI through this simple, age-old approach.
website Design & Content Dev
Most companies focus on the products and services that generate revenue – that IS a company’s core responsibility. However, important customer-facing marketing tools typically get put on the back burner or designed by someone internally to just “get it done.”
The highlight of this trend is the corporate website. This is the single most important marketing and sales tool available to a company today – it’s the first thing a customer looks at, and if designed wrong, could be the last.
We design websites only after messaging is completed so that every aspect of the site tells the right message at the right time. We also incorporate the right mix of social media appropriate for the corporate structure. Moreover the design and content we create for the website is used to help create additional marketing collateral; such as press kits, product briefs and whitepapers.
Whitepapers and highly technical papers can be a huge burden on small and even mid-sized companies, taking a toll on stressed engineering teams. Traditional PR firms do not have the engineering background to even attempt such writing – leaving a great thought leadership opportunity underutilized. PRIME|PR can handle any whitepaper from nearly any technical vertical – keeping your engineers happy and your marketing efforts moving forward.
Beyond pen to paper (or keystroke to file), PRIME|PR has great expertise in the king of content – video. Our internal team and our world-class partners can generate all the video content a company needs to best tell their story, from quick and gritty social videos to polished corporate videos to full broadcast quality ads.
Crisis Management
No business is immune to a crisis. Whether it is a product recall, a social media scandal, or a natural disaster, crises can strike at any moment and wreak havoc on a company’s reputation, finances, and customer loyalty. This is where crisis PR comes into play. Crisis management is a critical component of public relations that involves planning for, responding to, and recovering from potential crises.
The key elements of crisis management include preparation, response, and recovery – but above all TRANSPARENCY. Preparation involves identifying potential crises and developing a crisis management plan. This plan should include steps to be taken during a crisis, such as who should be involved, what information needs to be communicated, and how the communication should be carried out. Response involves putting the plan into action and communicating effectively with all stakeholders, including customers, employees, investors, and the media. Recovery involves repairing the damage caused by the crisis and taking steps to prevent similar crises from happening in the future.
Once you have identified the possible crises your business might face, it is important to have a crisis communications plan in place. This plan should outline the necessary steps to take during a crisis, such as who should be involved, what information needs to be communicated, and how the communication should be carried out. It’s important to have a designated spokesperson who is well-versed in crisis communication and can handle the media and other stakeholders in a calm and professional manner.
PRIME|PR has extensive experience in “Crisis PR” ranging from handling layoffs, product safety crises and other potentially damaging news, helping keep it out of the media entirely or greatly minimizing the damage of the news.
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Social Media
Before a company can tell the right story to the right people, strategic messaging must be completed to ensure we are working with the right story from the start. We find that in most companies, especially start-ups, there are as many disparate messages as there are executives.
There are times when messaging needs to be done at the corporate level, other times just at the product level, and at other times for a particular vertical or target audience. PRIME|PR works with a variety of messaging hierarchies and structures designed to ensure messaging consistency across different units, while still allowing for the messaging flexibility of being able to target different audiences with the opening statement that will appeal most to them.
After the messaging is completed, the only way to ensure your story is retold to your customers correctly, is to make sure your entire company speaks with one voice that reiterates the important key messages over and over again.
One PR rule is that having no coverage is better than getting covered by multiple publications with differing messages in every article. You’ll confuse your target market and spend precious budget helping your competition by building the market and not focusing on your unique differentiators.