When working in supply chain, materials handling, or logistics, developing a cohesive communication strategy might seem like an afterthought. After all, your business can succeed on the strength of its relationships with its clients or its self-evident efficacy, can’t it?
Looking at the way clients choose their industrial partners suggests otherwise.
Seventy percent of industrial B2B buyers look at a company’s online presence before making a deal with them. Additionally, 68% of industrial shoppers vet up to five vendors for their products. With a premium being placed on online presence and clients’ desire to find the right solution quickly, having a brand that immediately leaves potential clients with a strong impression is essential to winning business.
To achieve this objective, industrial companies develop a cohesive plan rooted in robust metrics. These should focus on three key pillars: a results-oriented PR strategy, client-centric brand building, and identifying the best metrics to quantify success. This article features the perspectives of communications experts whose advice can help you define what these metrics look like for your business.
Adopting a PR Strategy
Many traditional PR strategies ground success in surface-level metrics, such as the number of unique visitors to a website or growth in social media followers. However, these figures do not directly correlate to increased leads, sales, or growth. Companies need to understand how getting placed in publications propels their position in the larger ecosystem and earns business.
Our firm has pioneered a robust 9-point PR ROI framework about how to make PR campaigns as effective as possible. Call it our “secret sauce,” it’s an opportunity for us to view our PR and communications through an analytical and technical lens.
“Public relations in 2024 involves so much more than just a news story or trade article placement,” says DeAnna Spoerl, director of client services for Bear Icebox. “It encompasses a thorough understanding of the growing number of third-party validation tools out there: From podcasts to influencers to virtual and physical events to social media and everything in between. Our firm is helping supply chain companies and those servicing the industry tap into strategies and tactics to maximize their awareness and reach—one point at a time.”
These nine points are broken down into three broad steps. First, your company evaluates its target audience and considers how it can use or update preexisting content to reach them. After identifying your target, the team discovers how best to reach them—be that through a placed article, social media posts, or a conference.
After identifying its audience, your company needs to reach alignment about what its goals look like. Reaching alignment is an internal and external process. Internally, this may entail ensuring that everyone within your company understands its goal and mission. Externally, this means making sure every PR opportunity ties back to the company’s goals.
Once everyone is aligned on a story, your company needs to integrate storytelling into the heart of its identity. Buyers are 55% more likely to purchase if they like the brand’s story. For that reason, companies must keep their PR teams closely tied to the rest of the organization and track metrics to make sure they are telling the best story possible.
Building a Creative Brand
Branding might just seem like something consumer-facing companies have to worry about. But considering how quickly clients make decisions, it’s clear why this investment is worth it. Industrial companies should think creatively about branding precisely because they aren’t targeting the everyday consumer.
New York-based Bartley & Dick Brand Communications has an extensive background in helping industrial companies create distinct, ROI-driven brand identities.
“How a brand is perceived can directly drive interest , product pricing, and increase positive association across audiences, from customers to investors and employees, says Sai Sumar, a senior marketing strategist at Bartley & Dick. “Having clear, consistent, and memorable branding is key to attracting more customers at a lower cost per acquisition and increase customer lifetime value by continuously building emotional and mental brand equity.”
The ROI of branding is simple: a strong brand that works as hard as your business attracts more customers. Your brand is your company’s most valuable asset. It’s how people–both internally and externally–perceive your brand. The perceived value can result in increased awareness, sales conversions, and brand advocates.
Designing a logo might appear to be branding at its best, but this only scratches the surface of what good branding can look like for an industrial company. For instance, an industrial company that promises enhanced operational efficiency can quickly and effectively deliver that message to prospects by implementing a strategic brand video initiative.
Additionally, by studying how competitors brand themselves, a company can discover how to present itself to potential clients in a unique and novel way. This will significantly enhance memorability, a critical aspect in winning new business.
Tracking the Right Metrics
Of course, if these initiatives are to have any long-term success, companies need to understand what messages resonate and which don’t. That’s why integrating metrics into your PR campaign is essential. But, as mentioned earlier in the article, it is essential to go beyond basic metrics like viewership and instead use data to discover what drives sales.
North Ivy, a digital marketing firm based in Chicago, has worked with clients across a wide variety of industries to help them improve their marketing efforts.
“At the end of the day, B2B organizations are looking for high-quality leads,” says John Ryan, Managing Partner at the performance marketing firm, North Ivy. “To improve lead generation, it’s important to understand how each of the marketing channels participates in driving those leads and how those channels work together to boost the overall brand signal. With PR and content creation in particular, companies should expect to see a measurable lift in key site actions – white paper downloads, webinar signups, requests for quotes, and so on. By using data-driven attribution paired with standard analytics and CRM data, the conversion value of the content and press quickly becomes evident.”
Ryan goes on to say that the beauty of PR and content is its versatility. “The reason B2B content development is usually an easy sell (provided it’s well executed) is that it’s essentially create-once-use-many,” he says. “For example, a thought leadership piece can be published and syndicated as a complete article and then repurposed into extracts and segments that can be leveraged in email communications, social posts, ad copy and so on. Done right, the ROI on content is typically solid.”
What does this enhanced use of data look like in practice? Instead of focusing on how many visitors are coming to a company’s website, a team would instead track what percentage of visitors become clients. Knowing this, marketing efforts can track how campaigns impact client acquisition. With data like this, a marketing team’s actions stop being a matter of guesswork and can directly impact sales.
Succeed through Synchronicity
It is worth noting that these three steps are best performed synchronously. For your PR strategy to be at its best, it needs robust data to work with. Conversely, understanding what data you should collect is contingent on knowing what your PR strategy needs to accomplish.
If these steps are siloed off, they will not be as successful as they can be when put together. The same applies to marketing and branding within your organization in general. Taking the time to understand your brand and making it a central part of your organization will reap benefits by making you stand out from your competitors. Through this strategy, you’ll be able to find new clients and grow the brand you have invented.