Reasons to be cheerful with your PR agency
Finding the right PR company can sometimes feel like looking for a needle in the haystack. In our experience, the concern for many clients – and we know because quite a few in our team have worked in manufacturing businesses – is that some PR agencies just don’t have the right level of industrial experience.
By that we mean they don’t specialise in a specific market sector. Being the ‘Jack of all Trades’ may create more ‘potential customers’, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you benefit from a company that understands your products and market sector.
That’s why we think we’re different. As a roll your sleeves up, B2B PR agency that specialises in themanufacturing and industrial sector, we can offer you the breadth of understanding that you are looking for.
So, if you’re unhappy with your current PR agency and looking for a company that understands your market sector better, here are our top five tips to help you find that needle in the haystack:
- Experience counts
There really is no substitute for experience, so if you are looking for a PR agency then make sure that they can demonstrate where they have generated magazine and online coverage in the sectors that you are targeting.
They should, at the very least, have an understanding of the different sectors, whether it’s OEM, engineering specifiers, Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF), Condition Based Monitoring (CBM) or upstream in the oil and gas sector, for example – that’s right up our street!
Give us a product like bearings, cryogenic valves or building facades to write about any day! What else would you expect from a marketing agency based in the heart of industrial South Yorkshire?
- An integrated approach between PR and SEO
All of our clients are now switched on to the fact that PR and SEO require an integrated approach to work effectively. In fact, Google’s algorithms are quick to recognise the tricks used by some SEO companies of cutting and pasting online content with keywords, as this now leads to a lower ranking.
What matters is being able to generate good quality content and that is why a PR agency that specialises in your sector is the best route for your social media platform – high quality written content that is valued by Google.
- Think like an engineer, write like a journalist
When it comes down to it, the PR agency you hire has to be able to deliver the goods. So, before you appoint them, make sure that they can write a technical article. To do that they need to think like an engineer but write like a journalist with flair and finesse.
Of course, your product solutions have to appeal to a wide range of users from someone with a doctorate in engineering to an apprentice and so it is important that they can write a technical article but still make it readable and interesting. If that sounds like what you are looking for, then that’s the reason you need to speak to us.
- Having the contacts
Knowing which magazines have the best readership is essential, which any PR company should know if they specialise in the industrial sector. That is just the starting point. As well as having a good relationship with the key editors, your PR agency should know when they are running a feature relevant to your product or service.
They should be able to build this into an editorial programme for the year and complement this with a blog calendar to ensure your online PR is optimised too.
- Stay ahead of technology
Do press releases work anymore? The simply answer is that they don’t always, especially if you send them out to 100s of contacts and rely on the fact that they incorporate a couple of SEO terms. Read this interesting article if you’re not convinced:
http://www.meltwater.com/blog/press-release-seo/ . To generate coverage you have to write outstanding content and make sure you get it placed in the best magazine and websites. The only way to do it is to build a relationship with editors so that they know they get ‘real’ news stories from you.
If your PR company is doing all the above and more then there are many reasons to be cheerful. If not then, contact the Dragonfly PR B2B team on hello@dragonflypr.co.uk or call 01709 300130.