Entering new markets - why companies need PR
As we move beyond the lockdown and companies start to look at how they can grow their sales back to pre-Covid levels, new markets are always going to feature highly in a business development plan. The question, of course, is how to effectively target these new markets, whether they are in the UK or overseas.
Advertising is the traditional route and one that people think of first. However, for a company that offers a specialised product or service it doesn’t always achieve the best results, because conveying a message that addresses often quite complex challenges in, say, the oil, gas, industrial, construction or manufacturing sector isn’t easy when you’re restricted to just a few dozen words at most. Factor into that the cost of a sustained advertising campaign, which can be huge, and the fact that once you stop spending all the online SEO benefits are lost and you can see why more companies wanting to enter new markets are looking for alternatives.
In today’s digital landscape, content creation – or online PR – and SEO are taking a growing portion of advertising budgets. With good reason, too, because marketeers know that the benefits of getting good quality written content online takes some beating. For starters, once it’s published by an online magazine or industry website such as Industrial Plant & Equipment or Building magazine, it stays there indefinitely, providing search engine optimisation (SEO) benefits. These include backlinks, keywords and other common search terms. We know this approach works, because we do it day in day out for our clients, such as this one for Manufacturing Today India for our client Sheffield City Region. Good quality content does this because it is useful, informative and seen as a reference source for anyone searching for a solution that our client’s product or service addresses. That’s something that is difficult to get across with advertising.
SEO is another area that businesses looking to exploit new markets can take advantage of. In reality, SEO isn’t that much different to content creation and digital PR, even though some marketing agencies will try and blind you with techno-speak! Google has gone beyond all that, with clever algorithms able to identify and stop ‘black hat’ type SEO practices. That means the most effective way of that B2B businesses can deliver an SEO strategy is through good quality written content, whilst the best way for creating this is to use the skills of a PR agency that specialises in the construction and manufacturing sector.
So, companies looking to enter new markets ought to implement a PR content creation and SEO strategy. We specialise in the manufacturing and construction sector. We have managed PR campaigns for clients such as Etex Marley Eternit (a top 5 building products company in the UK), Pandrol (a leading supplier to the rail sector around the world) and AMETEK Land (remote temperature measurement for the industrial sector), as well as many other industrial and technology clients. Our coverage in new markets includes excellent media contacts in India, Far East, Middle East, Europe and America.
We are currently working with international clients to help them enter new markets. We advise and assist our clients in media relations, including the PR, social media, SEO, crisis communications. Our content creation strategies target both consumers and B2B specifiers and buyers.
Dragonfly PR is a South Yorkshire-based PR and content marketing agency with almost 20 years’ experience in the business to business sector.
To find out more about our PR and content creation services, email: john@dragonflypr.co.uk