In this episode, Bill sits down with Mike Maynard, CEO of Napier, to explore the pivotal role of PR in B2B marketing for tech and manufacturing companies. Mike shares insights on the forgotten art of PR, how it complements modern digital channels like SEO and paid search, and why it’s still essential for building brand authority. Whether you’re tackling PR at home or internationally, Mike provides valuable strategies on audience targeting, effectively engaging with journalists, and navigating complex markets. Bill and Mike also discuss budgeting for PR, common mistakes companies make, and the importance of differentiation in a competitive market.
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Bill: What do you think is something every tech company should think about and consider before starting a PR campaign? Like what's kind of like the first steps in their process?
Mike: I mean, this is a question where I know the answer is everybody's going to go, we're fine on this. But I think you've got to think about why you're interesting to your audience and why the journalists are going to think you're interesting to their audience. And everyone's going to go, yeah, we're great, we're fantastic. It's like, but why are you different? What have you got? Have you got an opinion on how you do something or on the kind of products you should use? is your product a different way to solve a problem to everybody else's? That's where it becomes interesting in B2B.
Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today, I have a very special guest, Mike Maynard, who is from the UK and is going to really help us understand maybe a forgotten art or an often not discussed art of PR in B2B marketing. Mike, thank you for joining us today.
Mike: Hey, thanks for having me on the podcast.
Bill: Mike, so PR is something that whenever I was in college and university, we talked about a little bit, right? And it was something that was probably more discussed back in the days of Ogilvy and some of those folks, but it really hasn't been at the forefront of B2B marketing and those conversations in the past 10 to 15 years. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that and then why you believe your approach to PR and what it is and how it's having an impact for your clients?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're right. People don't talk about it as much. And I think probably the main reason is, is that people talk about all these new exciting channels that we've got, you know, whether it be, you know, from, from SEO, from, you know, 20 years ago through to paid search through to paid social and LinkedIn. So everyone's got all these exciting new channels. And what's happening is they're getting a lot of the attention. People are focusing on them. And for some situations, those new channels work incredibly well. But for many other people, they're actually not the solution. And so the truth is people probably aren't talking about PR, but an awful lot of companies are doing a lot of B2B PR.
Bill: Yeah, and I think that's exactly right. Some of the behaviors that are working really, really well for companies would fall in a technically described and defined PR space. mean, when you think about content marketing and PR, there's a lot of parallels, right? And we just don't call it that anymore. But no, I think that's a great point. So Mike, let's talk a little bit about your background, what you do, and kind of what's brought you to this moment of your agency focusing on PR and the B2B space.
Mike: Yeah, so I mean, I actually started off my career as an electronics design engineer, which obviously is why we're in tech PR rather than anything else. And moved through different roles. So was initially designing electronic systems. Then I worked for a semiconductor company and I was helping engineers design. So being effective technical support for them, what they called applications engineering. And then after that, I moved into marketing. Liked marketing, and then I got a call from my agency and they said, you know, the two people who founded the agency are looking to sell it, we think you should buy it. And it was probably a crazy idea. Was definitely a crazy idea. But that's what I did.
Bill: Excellent, excellent. Well, congratulations on your success. And I know that you're now, you know, in that hashtag agency life. So I'm sorry for that. But, you know, we I guess birds of a feather flock together or misery loves company or something. So here we are. Whenever you look at the challenges in the PR space, because you guys, let's step back a second. You guys primarily go at this from a PR standpoint. So let's maybe talk about your ideal client. What you're looking to do and how you're helping those clients in that space.
Mike: Yeah. So one of our real core skills is PR. And so that's why we tend to do a lot of PR is we tend to build campaigns for companies to come to us for our expertise. Like people love our PR expertise, but actually we don't start out, you know, even by selling PR. So we have an approach, we call it a four step approach where we basically do, you know, some real in-depth analysis to find out what the problem is, what the client's trying to achieve, you know, what the issue is, you where the gap is. And fill in that gap. And as it happens, because of our expertise, the people who come to us quite often they have an issue with companies or potential customers not being aware of them or not knowing enough about them. They want to reach a large number of people. They want to do it fairly quickly. They want to do it at reasonable cost. And quite often that means they come to us and they end up doing PR. The reality is though, we also do a lot of other services as well. And they tend to be around the PR supporting and enhancing it.
Bill: Excellent, excellent. And when you look at the specific clients that you service, how important is it for them to rapidly penetrate the market with their brand? Because it seems to me in that tech space, like we represent a lot of manufacturers and industrial companies that have been around for a long time and who have really long life cycles and are very difficult to this place because there are not new technologies that are going to gobble them up and make them obsolete. Right. Whereas in your space, you're dealing with companies that if they don't strike now, that opportunity once lost will never be regained because there'll be a whole new platform, a whole new technology, a whole new set of problems and solutions. Does that feel right? And how, why is that so important that they go to market so quickly?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. think it's actually not really that simple. So it's true. A lot of the companies we've worked with, they're bringing new technology to market. You know, they've spent a huge amount of money developing a product. They've got competitors snapping at their heels wanting to get in. So, you know, if it's a semiconductor company, they've got a new chip they want to sell. They've got a window where they've got leadership. They've got to be successful. And you're absolutely right. That's the case. I would argue actually more and more now technology is changing the world so much that a lot of your classic industrial engineering companies that have been successful for decades, suddenly they're having to change. And suddenly, you've got companies that are used to selling physical valves and these valves control water, hydraulics, whatever. And then their customers come to them and saying, so what's your cloud solution for maintenance of these valves? And these companies are suddenly like, wow, you know, the world is really changing. And the great thing is, is most of those companies have the engineering expertise to deliver the solutions. The challenge is then passing that message on. And I think perhaps one of the biggest uses for PR today is taking an existing company with an existing brand that's somewhat, you know, perhaps stayed a little bit out of date and actually, you know, really refreshing the way people perceive that company because the reality is, is a lot of these companies that are seen as being a little out of date are doing incredible work on, you know, high tech engineering. And they're just not getting the credit for it. I mean, ultimately that's why you want to do PR. You're doing some great work, developing great products. You're not getting the credit.
Bill: So whenever you look at the PR work, so let's dive into the actual work of getting it done and getting information from the client and preparing it for distribution. How important is it for you to have access to SME, subject matter experts, their engineers, their leaders in development, in R &D, and what does that mean to your work?
Mike: That's a great question. I love that because the truth is, if you're doing PR, what you really need to be doing is sharing information that helps your potential customers. And it's that simple. I mean, very much like any sort of marketing, just going in and going, pick me, pick me, buy me. It really doesn't work today. And so how are you going to help those customers? Well, the answer is you're going to, and okay, not in the real world, but via the magic of PR, connect them with people who are experts in particular areas of technology or particular areas of their industry where they need help. And as soon as you do that, that's where the magic of PR happens because people then get value. They then start to think of the world in the way that your client, if it were my client in terms of the customers are thinking. And so they then start building solutions that follow that same approach. And that's a great way because suddenly they're almost designing in the products before they know what they are.
Bill: Sure. So one of the other things we look at, I would like to get your take on this, the models we use to help our clients, one of the values we've seen in delivering to our clients is repurposing content. So we might have a primary objective and a primary roadmap that we're trying to solve a problem for or fill that gap. But then there's so many things in 2024 that we can do with that work that we can then repurpose and reuse across other channels. Do you see that parallel in the PR work you're doing for your companies today?
Mike: Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the biggest issues. The previous question when you asked me about subject matter experts, why is it so important to get with a subject matter expert and put them out as part of your PR campaign? Well, it's because so few companies are able to do it. These guys are an incredible demand. So few companies can put out knowledgeable subject matter experts who have the time to help their potential customers through PR or even through direct email or whatever. So once you've got that content, you've got to reuse it. And it's one of the reasons why, you know, we offer a range of services is that, you know, there's no point in us creating great content for PR, you know, getting it onto a, you know, important industry website and then walking away because the amount of effort to get that put together is really disproportionate. What you need to do is take that and use it 20 different times. And then suddenly you're getting real value. And also your SMEs, your subject matter experts are seeing you know, what they did produced lots and lots of results. And so suddenly they feel more valued. They're actually much more positive about this whole working with marketing experience, which let's be honest, not every technical engineer is.
Bill: One of the biggest adversaries of our work is the SME. They don't believe in what we're doing, they don't have time for what we're doing, and trying to get that, I mean, that's just such a huge hurdle to overcome, is to get access to those people. And then not only get access, but get them to buy into what we're doing so that they actually don't just check the box, but they actually aggressively pursue it and want to be part of it. And then hopefully on the next campaign, they're like volunteering, right? I mean, you can get that type of curve in it, but that is a huge mountain to overcome.
Mike: Absolutely. I I think the SMEs initially, they split into two sides really. And you've got the side which is like, yeah, I want to sell the product. These marketing people are a bit stupid. I will talk to them and try and dumb it down for them and help them. And that's normally the first thing. And there you're having to say, actually you need the technical details because we need to help people in real world. And then the other side are the people, and they're sat there going, well. To be quite honest, if someone isn't prepared to come to our website and spend four hours understanding our products and learning about why they're better, they don't deserve to benefit from our products. And they're going, that's crazy. Actually, what happens is good experiences change people's mind. And I think that really is the thing. There is some degree of truth even in the people who are saying, unless potential customers understand our products, they don't deserve them because
actually, customers need to make an effort. You need to recognize that. But, you know, there's no point making it hard, you know, use marketing to make it easy for the customers. And that's my view.
Bill: Well, I think this pivots exactly into our next topic, which is talking about, OK, one, we have to interview the SMEs. We have to get that technical know-how and knowledge and all the information. But at the same time, we can't let it be engineering driven. We have to look at that audience perspective. We have to understand our audience and whether that's voice of customer research or however we're going to get that. We need to understand their problems and pain points and then flip and put both of those together to go to market. Do you see that parallel in the PR approach as well?
Mike: Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the issues you have is when you work with experts inside a company who've typically been there a long time, they're totally bought into what the company does. They totally see things from their own way. And actually the real world's not like that. There are people out there that actually probably would be better using a competitor's product. And it's really important to understand that, partly because you then want to highlight the benefits of your customer. But ultimately, the company's got to build products to solve that customer's problem, as well as the customers that they're embedded with. And so I think marketing has a huge opportunity to actually bring information back from those potential customers, and particularly the customers where you haven't won, where you haven't been successful, and take information from those and find out what opportunity there is to grow and win new customers.
Bill: Whenever you prepare, you know, you understand that customer and you understand that market, how do you compare and make the recommendation between PR and direct advertising? Because like you said at the beginning, there's a lot of shiny objects, right? And neither you or I are in the TikTok space, right? We're not that cutting edge on our communication strategies, because I don't think a lot of purchasing managers are getting a lot of their information from TikTok. But certainly, they're, like you said before, SEO, paid channels, there's a balance we have to find. How do you approach looking at that mix and kind of making, and I'm sure it varies, but just from a general construct, balancing PR and paid?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, the first thing is at a high level that there's fundamental differences, you know, direct advertising costs scales in terms of size of audiences, your audience grows across scales. PR crudely speaking, the cost doesn't scale. You know, it's all about how much coverage you get. So if you're looking for broad awareness, if you're looking to reach a lot of people, if you're not quite sure maybe exactly who your market is, if you're trying to reach a new market, all of those things are fantastic for PR. Direct advertising is great when someone is aware of your product. If somebody's never heard of you, your ads are going to suck. I'm sorry. One of the big secrets is that one of the great benefits of PR is it makes your ads work better. And the advertising guys somewhat hate to hear that, but actually love the PR to help them look good. You need some awareness. You need some sort of knowledge of the company, or you need an incredibly powerful hook that's going to grab attention. So that's really hard. So typically you need awareness. And also typically you're reaching people a little bit further down that customer journey. So they're much closer to actually selecting a product or buying a product. And quite often direct advertising is much more effective when you're looking at the lower value, lower involvement purchases in B2B than the really highly technical ones that take a lot of decision-making. All sorts of factors, you know, sometimes B2B, you know, it's PR that works. Sometimes it's the direct marketing. Actually, the reality is in most situations, there's times when you need both. So you should mix them together.
Bill: No, I love that. And I love what you said about how PR and branding will help direct response work better. If the first thing we do is go in front of a buyer and say, buy me, they're just going to swipe a different direction. They're going to move on. We have to build authority. We have to build value. And I love that quote. And I'm going to actually steal that at some point because that's great. Whenever you look at the timing of PR, I mean, I think it's very parallel to some of the branding work we do and just some different channels. But whenever we talk to our clients about branding, about this PR space, this is not a 90 day thing, right? This takes a lot of time. We have to get out in front of the market. We have to be there for a consistent amount of time. What do you see even in a space that's a little bit faster, right? And a little bit more aggressive on the tech side. What is the timing of these engagements and what does it take to see results?
Mike: So that's a really interesting question. I think, you know, the challenge is with B2B, you've typically got complex products and you've also to a large extent not got massive differentiation. So if you think about the consumer space and you know, you're looking at cars, you'll have perceptions about different car brands and you'll have a view on Tesla and you'll have a view on Ferrari and actually Tesla and Ferrari releasing a new car is probably not gonna change that view particularly. Now, if someone like Fiat comes out with an incredibly beautiful sports car that's incredibly fast, it's $20 to buy, suddenly you'll change your view on the Fiat brand. But that never happens, right? We never or very rarely see these massive jumps ahead in B2B because the products are complex. So what happens is one company will jump ahead for one area of a particular product. And so a particular subset of the features will be really good, but others will be fairly generic. The same with the, so it's kind of all this incremental stuff. So people are not going to change their mind instantly because there's nothing compelling to make them change their mind. So inevitably these branding things, and even if you do release a compelling product, it's still unbelievable the percentage of people who see the product and then don't recognize it's a leadership product. So it takes time. And we don't take short three month PR engagements because they just don't work. They just don't produce results. Typically what we're talking about is at least a 12 month engagement. And through there we'll have some milestones measuring to see that we're achieving the coverage we want, starting to see some impact, starting to see some change of perception. But realistically, that's kind of the timeframe that PR works over.
Bill: No, I agree. I think we have to, especially when we have long buying cycles. And I think we've, we as a group, an industry are doing a better job of educating our clients that this isn't overnight. Like we aren't selling a $29 SaaS product that people can buy on their credit card and the, you know, the direct response works. So I think that's, that's changing the game. Mike, one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about, cause I think this is something that you're really an expert in and something that you can help our audience understand what's missing. So the Missing Half podcast is about what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing and the whole space. And when we look at international PR, we deal with a number of clients who are multinational, global, and I know you do as well. Could you maybe talk about international PR, maybe define it, what it looks like, what's effective, just kind of give us an overview because I certainly think while PR is minimized today, international PR is never discussed.
Mike: Absolutely. And I think there's really two sorts of international PR. And that's where, one is where companies hit these kind of global media outlets, Businessweek, CNN, things like that. And they go, huh, we've done global PR. And you've got some reach out there. And this is not just an American thing. Trust me, there's lots of companies in the UK that say, there's English language publications that go all over Europe. So let's just target those websites because they've got traffic from Germany. That's not gonna really work. It's better than nothing, you know, but you're hitting that subset of people who are really open and engaged to English language, typically. And the reality is, that those people are also generally speaking not quite so focused on the way people approach things. So, you know, my favorite example is we're working with a company who made storage systems for high-performance computing, so supercomputers. And we tried all sorts of different things, you know, to get engaged. So you know, we were selling this product. It was super fast. It was, it was, you know, really good. It basically made your super computing cluster process a hell of a lot more than it could do before, which is incredible. You know, you've spent a huge amount of money on this. It's doing more for, you know, very little money. Everyone loved it apart from the Germans. And we were like, this is really weird. We tried this, you know, obviously all in German, not working. And eventually what we found out was the pushback from the audience. And this goes back to the earlier point of understanding the customer was because it was positioned as so revolutionary, they felt it wouldn't fit in existing workflows. And workflow in Germany is a really big, important word. Everybody likes to have this really clear work process. So as soon as we started saying, it's really good and it's flexible, so it fits in your existing workflow, it just took off. Everybody started loving it. And that's a great example of what international PR is about. It's about understanding those little nuances where, you know, frankly, no one in the UK said, does it fit in my workflow? It just wasn't a concept they addressed, but it's a hugely important concept in Germany. And it's the way they think, the way they approach work is slightly different. So it's not just going out and getting in front of people from different countries, not just getting in front of them with their own language, but it's also getting under their skin and understanding that in each country there will be subtle differences about what people want, what people care about, and what they value.
Bill: When you think about that test that you ran or that hypothesis and figuring that out and then testing it, that is not easy. And I think that's one of the things that is underestimated in our industry is it's not one plus one equals two. There's always variations in your audience, in the message. And then you add in the international variability, right? We have multivariate analysis we have to do, and that's very difficult. But my guess is, and not to get into the details of that client, but that the outcome of figuring out the workflow narrative was worth millions and millions of dollars of business that was just outsized of the investment they made with you to figure that out. Is that probably accurate?
Mike: I think with most marketing actually, when you have something like that that makes an impact and believe me, high performance, this was the fastest storage in the world for supercomputers, it's not cheap. I think one of the interesting things about B2B marketing is that the return is incredible. The return on investment from B2B marketing is absolutely incredible. And particularly I think the return on brand building is unbelievable. If you look at, I mean, a company we've never worked with, but if you say CRM, people immediately think Salesforce. It's all brand. I mean, it's purely how they built their brand. You know, you can argue whether it was the best or the worst. They had some great concepts. You know, did a few cool things, but, but ultimately they built this incredible brand around Salesforce. That means that, you know, literally at the top of the list, when someone's thinking about which CRM to go for, they may research and choose something else, but they get first crack at winning that customer. And that is so powerful, I think.
Bill: Sure. Well and when we look at investing in marketing, investing in PR, when you think about giving budget recommendations, and we talked about the timing. So the timing, it's 12 months, is kind of a minimum. That has a budget implication or an inference there. But when you think about budgets and planning, because we're coming into budget seasons here in the US, we're all on a calendar, right? So we're looking at the January 1st budget. What are some guidelines or tips or tricks that you could offer when you're thinking about budgeting and maybe specific, not so much like the amount, because that's dependent on the value and the LTV and that type of thing. But when you think about timing and the the framing of the budget, because the other thing we're trying to do is prepare our marketing managers to communicate to the C-suite, right, to get their budgets approved and to get buy-in. What would be some tips and tricks you could offer?
Mike: That's a great question. I think one of the challenges PR has is that CMOs tend to have a fairly short tenure, shortest tenure of any of the C-suite people. They tend to be focused quite short term. And I think what people should be doing when they think about budgets is they should be looking at two things. The first is what's their biggest problem to solve at the moment. And if your salespeople are walking into a customer, or potential customer and the first thing they say is, so tell me what do you do? You've got a real awareness problem there, you know, or it’s great to see you, but competitor X is, you know, the leader in the market, aren't they? You know, that's a PR problem to solve. So if that's your issue, then go fix that and put a disproportionate amount into fixing that problem. You know, if your issue is that you know, whenever you walk in, you close a deal, you just don't have enough leads. Then maybe you want to go to, you know, direct response advertising. If people know you and they buy you and it's just telling them that you've got products. I would say, you know, pick that biggest problem or biggest couple of problems, put money in to fix the problems. Cause generally speaking, everybody, when they look at their customer journey or their sales funnel, they've got areas, they do well, areas they don't do so well, you know, fix the, the areas where you're losing all the opportunities. And then look at how you're going to balance long-term versus short-term. And long-term, when I say that, you're thinking about things like brand perception, awareness, how many people think of you when they think of a category. So something called mental availability, you put all that into one bucket. And then there's also the short-term, there's people who know you, familiar with you, are considering you, how do we close them? And then pick the tactics to achieve those goals. It's about balance. You know, for me to say a hundred percent PR is a great solution is absolutely ridiculous. It's not. It's very rarely the right thing to do. Equally very rarely a hundred percent Google ads is the right thing to do. You know, but you'll see big corporations spending a lot more money on PR because they can't go out and promote all their products. They've got so many products and you'll see, you know, SaaS companies spending the vast majority of their their money on Google ads because they're in a category where people basically search and buy or search and try. And both of those are right for those two companies, know, swapping the tactics would be completely ridiculous. So it is very contextual. It is very dependent upon your situation.
Bill: One of the things we use as a frame to discuss with our clients as we're helping them prepare their budgets is we come back to them with, maybe we misunderstood the problem. So, you know, a company tells us what's going on. We identify the gap. We identify what closing that gap or bridging that gap would do financially for the company. And if, if we can solve, like you said, this brand awareness problem. And so when they're walking into the sales pitch that they're, the company is brand aware, problem aware, solution aware, and that that's millions and millions and millions of dollars. And then you say, like just for illustrative purposes, $100,000 for a budget to solve this. And like, wow, that's a lot of money. And then you're like, wait a second, $100,000 to get 10 million in revenue that has a 35% gross margin. Did we misunderstand the problem? So that's one of the frames we go back to our clients with to kind of discuss that. But yeah I think when you look at it, we have to prescribe the right thing for the right company at the right time. And certainly there is no one size fits all solution.
Mike: I love, I love that idea of, of misunderstanding the problem. I think it's, it's great. mean, I think, you know, there's a lot of talk amongst agencies about value-based pricing where, you know, if we can solve a problem that brings in a million pounds of profit, can we get half a million pounds? And the answer of course is it's never yes in B2B. I'm not sure it ever is in consumer either, but, but, you the answer is no, we'll pay you what it's worth to do that and what your competitors are charging. but I think in terms of selling what you can achieve as agencies. Quite often B2B agencies are a little reticent in saying, well, if we do this and it fixes this issue, it's gonna bring you this much money in. Because companies typically know that and they typically don't want to address it because they don't want to admit how much money they're missing out on.
Bill: Correct. Yes, well, and they're risk adverse. They don't want to face that problem, right? They don't want to step on the scale in the morning and see that they're still overweight or whatever, right? Like they'd rather just keep going about their day and kind of bury their heads in the sand. Let's run into some, maybe some lightning round questions, Mike, some kind of like hit it on the point and see what we come up with. Like whenever you look at PR and B2B, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see being made by companies and by agencies in that space?
Mike: I think we kind of touched on this earlier. It's not understanding why they're doing the PR. So people do PR because they're doing PR. What are they trying to achieve? If you don't know you're trying to achieve, you don't know where you're going, mean, how do know which direction to head off in? So not understanding why they're doing PR is the biggest issue to me.
Bill: Whenever you look at that problem, how do you address that in your stack? Like your approach to dealing with companies, what is your solution to that?
Mike: So we go back and again, I said we have this four step process where we look at, know, the first two steps are around determine, which is a situation analysis process, and then focus, which is an audience process, an audience messaging process. So we look at those two steps and we go, okay, so what's the problem? You know, where are you? Where are your competitors? Why aren't you selling more? Why aren't you ridiculously profitable? It's all these issues here you're trying to overcome. you know, it's because these people don't understand this. Okay, this is what we need to change. It's not difficult. I mean, it's alarmingly simple. And I think people sometimes are a bit reluctant to go back to basics in marketing and they like to try and stay at this sort of really specific level. So whether it's like looking at numbers from digital marketing or how many clips you've got, know, those kind of factual things seem to be quite reassuring, but actually go back to basics. Why are we doing it? What's the problem we're solving? That's the easiest way to work out what you should be doing.
Bill: I had a conversation with a CEO a couple of months ago and they asked me about AI chatbots. And they wanted to see if AI chatbots could create an impact for their business. And I think this illustrates your point. We had such a branding challenge with this client. They needed so much work on branding and understanding the client and developing core content. That's where the problem was. And we were expressing that. And then in the meetings when we were going through the discovery and planning and the, you know, kind of the building out the solution, we were talking about AI chatbots. didn't, they didn't have frequently asked questions. They didn't have any of the core information to build into that chatbot to like move that forward in a meaningful way. But I think you're right. Companies get so focused on the new and getting the clicks and the views and the impressions when if we were just defining our brand and understanding our client and focusing on that issue back to the basics, we would get a far outsized result from that as opposed to chasing these shiny objects. It's still hard work, right? You still have to invest time and money, but that's where we need to be spending more of our capital, more of our resources than chasing these shiny objects.
Mike: I think that’s a great example, mean, to me, you look at some companies and they've got no ability to chat on the website. And suddenly they say, right, the future’s AI chatbot, this is where we're going to go. Now, there's a little bit of truth that the way people want to interact is changing and chat is becoming more of a, but that's really tiny. You know, if having a chat bot on your website is that important, you should have had live operators on there for years, you know, and if you haven't believed it's worth paying for someone real to answer questions, there probably aren't that many questions. Or you've made terrible decisions in the past, you just don't want to admit it.
Bill: Yes. No, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, because if you look at that, the AI chatbot should be an opportunity to optimize, streamline and do a more efficient job of having those live operators, right? And scale that opportunity, not, this is the newest thing that's just automatically going to change our lives. So, you know, we face that challenge. I know you face that challenge. Another question. How can companies test PR? How can we kind of lean into that with our budget and do some tests without blowing the budget or without, you know, not doing enough to actually see if it actually will work or support our goals?
Mike: So I think testing PR is very difficult. It's somewhat like saying, well, how can we test if display advertising works? Well, the answer is we know display advertising works. We know what it does. If what it does and the return on investment you like to get is within the bounds of your plans, you shouldn't retest it. You should do it. And so I think testing PR is really hard because first, you're going into a project where the goal is to test PR. Well, that's a pretty poor goal for a PR campaign. So I think maybe looking at it and saying, if there's a particular problem, is it worth running a project to see if you can address that problem? That's probably a better way to approach it. And if you haven't used PR before, I guess it's kind of a test. But I would say, you know, the way to do it is to identify a problem that PR is going to be very effective at solving and then use the right tool to fix the problem.
Bill: Okay, great. No that, and see, think one of the things our marketing managers face is whenever we're bringing up these new budgetary items, right? And these tests, we have to have a clearly defined outcome so that we're, they're not being skewered by it at the end of the year when like, what did we spend this on and why, what did it do? So I like that. Let's not frame it as a dip our toe in it. Let's define a problem, come up with a plan, execute the plan, and then see if it solved the problem. See if it worked or if how we can improve that in the future to help that work and accomplish that goal.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's the same as Google Ads. I've seen people run tests on Google Ads and they've run search ads that drive traffic with no purpose. And at the end of it, they come up with these lovely, gorgeous spreadsheets. And if the CEO's smart, they'll just say, and what does this mean to my business? And if you've not got a purpose, you've not got a reason why you're doing it, it's like, well, more people came to your website. Fine. It's not necessarily something a CEO is going to light up and be excited about. So I think it's about having those clear and as close to business goals as you can really makes a difference.
Bill: No, I couldn't agree more. What do you think is something every tech company should think about and consider before starting a PR campaign? Like what's kind of like the first steps in their process?
Mike: I mean, this is a question where I know the answer is everybody's going to go, we're fine on this. But I think you've got to think about why you're interesting to your audience and why the journalists are going to think you're interesting to their audience. And everyone's going to go, yeah, we're great, we're fantastic. It's like, but why are you different? What have you got? Have you got an opinion on how you do something or on the kind of products you should use? is your product a different way to solve a problem to everybody else's? That's where it becomes interesting in B2B. And I think it's really hard sometimes to get differentiation in B2B and where you can get it, that really works magic, not just in PR, across the whole marketing mix.
Bill: Sure, no, differentiation is very difficult, especially when we're looking at products that are, let's be honest, different by a degree, right? We don't have red and blue. We have very close on the color wheel, right? It's everything is kind of mashed together.
Mike: And lots of standardization as well, which means that the products almost by definition have to be pretty similar.
Bill: Let's, we'll go off script here for a second, ask a couple of questions because something came up, Mike, and we'll see if it works, if that's okay. So you brought up talking with journalists, enticing journalists to cover you and really engage with the content and the company. Could you talk a little bit about that process and what you feel is the key to success in working with those journalists and maybe like an overview of that process?
Mike: Sure. So I think there's a couple of things there. I mean, the first thing is clarity about what you're doing. And that's not just clarity of language and clarity of how you pitch things, but it's also being really clear about what you're saying. know, the one thing that I guarantee is gonna wreck a relationship with a journalist is if you go out to a journalist and you say, really want to talk to you about this new product. It's amazing, it's the fastest in the industry. And the journalist says, okay. I’ll come in and have a call with you, talk to you about it. And you go, yeah, it's been released for 18 months. And actually now there's a couple that are probably faster. But when it came out, it was the fastest 18 months ago. And it's just like, and there's so much of this. There's so much of the, yeah, it's kind of been our website a couple of years, but we haven't really press released it. So it's new. And like the chance is not new, it's old. Your customers know about it. I'm going to have readers going, why are you saying this is new? I've been buying it for two years. You've got to be really clear and you've also got to understand what a journalist cares about. And different publications, different journalists have things that they're interested in. They've built their publication around them. So some might be the latest, greatest new products. Some will be much more around advice to engineers and technical information and things like that. Others will have different focuses as well. They may be want C-suite type of advice rather than low level engineering. Understand the journalist and pitch them what's interesting. I mean, a great example for us is we've got a lot of tech companies and the classic thing is, what about the BBC? I've heard of the BBC in the UK, they're pretty big. They're the biggest website in the country. They've also got a couple of TV channels and all this. They're pretty important. Can we get our product on the BBC Tech News? And if you talk to the BBC tech journalists, one of the things they'll say is, What we want to do is cover something around B2B that means that the majority of our audience are going to walk into work tomorrow and do something different because they've read our story. And that brings it home because actually the BBC isn't about covering all technology. It's about covering technology that impacts or interests a very broad number of people. So if you've got a very niche technical product, the reality is the BBC aren't going to cover it and they shouldn't cover it because that's not their goal. That's not what they're trying to do. They're trying to engage a very large audience. So I think understanding that that journalist’s requirements, interests, that that's super important.
Bill: Whenever you look at journalists, do you have to create journalists personas? Like you said, it's like some of them are for the corporate and for the, maybe the CFO. Some of them are for the technical engineers. Some are for the process or workflow, whatever quality portion of the company. How do you approach, like, do you, it sounds like you to get way down in the weeds and classify these folks and really understand them. Because if you're not pitching to what they want to talk about, they're just not going to respond to you.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just like marketing really. We're just marketing stories to the journalists in a way, in PR. And you've got to segment. Treating the audience as one homogenous group is crazy because they're not. So yeah, we'll absolutely segment people on the products they're interested in, the markets they're interested in. A very simple example is that we have journalists that write about electronics for automotive, so for cars. And that's all they do. And they just focused on that. So sending them another electronic story is just going to waste their time. And that's not a good way to build a relationship with a journalist. But we also have journalists who write fairly broadly on electronics. And there they will cover some of the time they'll cover automated and some of the time they'll cover other applications. You've got to understand that. And that does take time. There are tools to help, but really it's about looking at publications, looking at what journalists have written. And then you know, going back to them, I mean, one of the best things you can do is here's a free PR tip for anyone here. If you see a story that a journalist has written about a competitor, don't get upset. The thing to do is to email the journalists and say, and notice you wrote this great article on this and you said this was really important. Have you ever thought for the market that this and this is really important? And it then gives you an opportunity to pitch your, you know, your view of the market, your, your approach to the market to that journalist and potentially get a follow-up story. So, you know, really understanding the journalist is incredibly valuable.
Bill: I love that. And I also love that story about the BBC. And we have to recognize that a lot of executives and C-suite think that like in the US being in Times Square or being on CNN or the tech desk is the penultimate. And maybe if you're trying to get your stock price to tick up a little bit, that is true. But from a true sales standpoint, I love that feedback of, OK, just because you're on the biggest and the best and the broadest platform, one, doesn't mean it's right for their audience, and two, I wonder, even if you were able to get that company on the BBC, is it really going to move the needle forward for them? Because if someone is watching that BBC segment, they're not watching that with the mind of, I need to specify this product at work. It's more like they're getting ready in the morning or they're like, you know, it's their entertainment. So like, what do you feel is the right response to that executive who's looking for that?
Mike: I mean, that's a great question. And sometimes that executive just wants to get on the BBC for ego reasons. You've got to do that sometimes. I mean, the reality is, if you're trying to get onto the BBC on a particular segment, probably the audience there that's relevant to you will be smaller, much smaller than the audience on a trade publication, for example, a classic little trade publication. And it's very interesting. It's particularly difficult with American clients, to be honest, because the way people write and think about business in the States is completely different to Europe. So people are much more switched on. People invest in individual stocks in the States. They're much more concerned about the financial news, the amount of media is broader, the topics they cover are broader. The reality is if you want a publication like Forbes in the UK, the answer is that publication is Forbes.com because there's nothing that's quite the same in the UK. So it's an interesting thing again, that's relating to the international side as well as the, you know, the which publications do you target side, but you know, it's interesting. You have these discussions, it's very hard to explain sometimes to an American client how different the media actually is in certain segments. In other places, it's exactly the same. And so, you know, that's always a challenge.
Bill: Here's a question. I don't know if there's an answer for it or not, but I'll throw it out there. Whenever you're looking at the entire array of opportunities that you can take to market with PR, and you know you have 10 or 20 of these journalists who cover everything from the C-suite to the super technical, and you look at that and you have to provide prioritization to your clients. If someone was going to start, where would you recommend that they start? Because we can't work on articles and work on 20 journalists and go 20 directions at one time. Where would you recommend we start?
Mike: So I think what you've got to do is understand who's the primary buyer. I this is classic marketing 101, right? But we'll talk about electronics. We do a lot in electronic components. If you're talking about a small commodity, low value part like a resistor, that's a junior engineer decision. Target the junior engineers. They read the trade magazines. Go there. If you're talking about perhaps more complex semiconductors, that's probably a senior engineer. Maybe a similar trade magazine might be slightly different, certainly much more technical in terms of the decision. And then if you're talking about trying to build a brand, that's really at the CTO level. Because I can tell you, I mean, as you said at the start, I used to be an engineer. The one thing you don't wanna do is go to the CTO and say, I'm planning to use this product from this vendor. And the CTO goes, who's that vendor? I've never heard of them. It's like, you know.
Bill: Yeah, start sweating a little bit, right?
Mike: And trust me, engineers do a lot to make sure that never happens, including never recommending vendors they think are great. So, you know, I think that there's different levels. So where are you going to start? Well, who's going to be the most important person? Let's address them first.
Bill: No, I love that. And I mean, it sounds like we have to not only research that journalist, we have to research their audience and make sure it's that they're speaking to the right audience, that they have it dialed in and they're talking to them meaningfully and consistently in a way that our message can be delivered. So that's, I love that. Well, Mike, this has been just a great chat, not only to look at PR from like the top down, but then to really hear at the end, get into the weeds of some of the like probably the inner workings or as we would say in the States a behind the curtain look at what goes on. So I just really wanna thank you and appreciate your time today and sharing with us about B2B PR.
Mike: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It's been a great discussion.
Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Please subscribe, like, or share. Have a great day.