Transforming your PR efforts into lead generation campaigns

Seeing the signals: Notice how PR has changed in B2B

Now more than ever it’s time to recognise what has changed for PR and communications to transform an organisation into a better lead generating machine. It’s a question of seeing the signals. Companies are still doing PR, but it looks a little different today. PR and communications can be hosting and participating in webinars. It can be having your salespeople out their talking about your organisation as your subject matter experts.

Many companies have realised that the tradeshows that sales departments have relied on to generate leads for years are probably not going to come back in Q1 in 2021 – or maybe longer. Plus, there is strong chance that if they do come back, they will look very different. For communicators, this means it’s time to be opportunistic. It’s also time to discover our nerdy side…

If we understand the metrics and technology, we can understand our audiences better and therefore understand how to get the most effective message to them at the right time. PR and communications professional will need to look beyond the basics of click-throughs and see who has been interested, who has signed up for a webchat or who has accessed gated content. Rather than pushing out information and content, it’s now about tracking and measuring who accessed the content and then driving them through the funnel to become a lead.

Sales and Communications working together

Salespeople know what resonates with their audience and they know whether or not pieces of communications work for them. Communicating with your sales department is key to transforming your PR for the better. It’s surprising that sometimes the sales department is not even aware of what PR efforts have been made: no idea what messages are being sent out. So, it can go both ways.

If companies want to pursue effective lead generation through communications, getting different departments to work together to figure out what’s best for a business and how they can support each other is a must. Lowering that communications barrier between teams is the first step towards lead generation. The transformation of all marketing, communications and PR efforts into a sales lead stream will ultimately help sales teams better reach out to their audiences. Both sales and communications teams have to be on the same page in terms of what kind of messaging is going to generate leads and how this messaging will be communicated. Teams have to help each other out for lead generation to truly work successfully.

Time to start transforming

As an organisation, you should be willing to change and ask the right questions before you look at what tools can help you. The right questions need to start the journey and the right questions also have to continue the journey. There are many parts of the PR and communications transformation process, especially when you push lead generation. You may need to restart and re-examine to ask whether your methods are working. You need to be willing to make mistakes and learn from them. Try ideas out. Take the time to understand the analytics and discover the effective methods. After all, we have more channels than ever before to use to test what works on our audience and adapt.

It’s a beautiful opportunity for communicators today. Many of us are sitting at home and spending a lot of time online. We’re reading a lot, we’re watching a lot of videos and consuming a lot of messages digitally. B2B audiences – your customers – are at home, ready and waiting. It’s the perfect time for communications teams to put quality messages out there. But it’s also a great time to learn how to do it right as lead generators.

Watch our full webinar discussion on how communications can help with lead generation here.