Top Public Relations tips for 2017 for building product manufacturers
It’s around this time of year that we dish up our predictions for the year ahead. Here are what we believe will be the top three trends for 2017:
- Thought leadership articles
Thought leadership is one of those phrases that marketeers either love or hate. However, in terms of a PR strategy, thought leadership articles have the ability to directly influence the people that specify your product. Gone are the days when you could simply rely on sending out a press release in the hope that it will gain press coverage with the relevant magazines.
Now it is much more about expressing an intelligent opinion and getting across in a well thought out way exactly how your company or product is able to meet a need that a customer has. For example, our thought leadership articles are topical and insightful to the reader, for example, ‘The future of the built environment’, or ‘The UK housing crisis isn’t a crisis, it’s a design project’.
Neither of these are specifically saying; look at how good our product is, which would be seen by all editors as an advertorial, yet we are able to get across, in a more subtle way, just how your brand is contributing to the built environment.
- Social Influence marketing
Our second prediction is that there will be a continued rise in the use of social media in 2017. Most building product manufacturers are now using social media, some more effectively than others. There are those that are active on social media but don’t have a clearly defined strategy, then there are companies that are making the most of social media with a well thought out approach based around campaigns. We are helping a growing number of clients to achieve this with our social media campaigns and you can see examples in our case study section.
- Contributor lead
The third of our public relations predictions for 2017 is the growth of the ‘contributor lead’, which involves us identifying key influencers in a certain industry and writing a thought leadership article for them on behalf of our client. In simple terms, an informative article in the right trade magazine or online that is written by a person not directly involved with our client is far more effective that one directly from a manufacturer.
As soon as people realise that it’s written by a specific building product manufacturer they know that it will be based around the benefits of their system. One from an independent source, however, carries more weight and will be more widely read. It does, of course, have to be well written and completely generic, but done in the right way it can be very powerful.
Get in touch with us today to see specific examples where we’ve have generated some extraordinary results for clients in this way.
As Public Relations and digital marketing is constantly changing, 2017 might be the year that you look for some fresh ideas and for help in generating better results.
At Dragonfly PR, we specialise in public relations for the construction and manufacturing sectors. As a dedicated B2B agency with creative ideas, we generate impressive and consistent results for our clients.
To find out more, contact us by email: hello@dragonflypr.co.uk or call 01709 300130.