How to Successfully Launch and Manage a B2B Trade Publication PR Plan

Every industry has an ecosystem of trade publications—online and print outlets that cover the ins and out of said industry. They cover the latest innovations, how businesses in the industry are impacting the world, and the stories important to readers in that industry.

People like to say, “Print is dead.” The data pretty well proves that’s the direction the world is headed. But these niche publications are still very relevant. Many still publish print versions, but they also put those print editions online, and many have adjusted to publish their content directly online. Each publication’s long history covering a niche has led to a large audience of industry readers.

Many businesses (and marketing and PR professionals) discount these niche publications. But they’re some of the best sources for reaching a target audience and staying up-to-date on industry trends.

Every business has stories to tell. And niche publications are a great outlet for getting those stories in front of the people who care.

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The Trade Publication Landscape

Most trade publications fall into one of three categories:

• Owned and operated by a large media group with a portfolio of publications
• Small independent publication with a lean, tightly stretched team
• Connected to a trade association that serves the industry in many other ways

There are a few mid-sized independent publications, but most of those run a handful of publications, similar to the big media groups just at a smaller scale.

Even though they’re owned by large media groups, the publications that fall into that category are created by dedicated industry journalists who want to share the ins and outs of what’s happening in the industry. Their connection to the bigger media outlets helps them provide more robust advertising and promotional opportunities to businesses through ad networks, email distribution, and newer media like podcasts and videos.

The small, independent publications are still holding on in a world completely different from when most of them started. Many have a long history of sharing news about their industry and have been able to survive through drastic changes in the media landscape. These publications are run on a shoestring budget with dedicated team members who are passionate about the industry.

Many industry trade associations have publications (and now blogs, podcasts, video series, and more) dedicated to sharing industry news. Some are run completely within the association, while others are developed in partnerships with media properties that provide the print and publishing resources. Trade association media outlets run the spectrum in terms of how tightly ingrained they are with the association’s activities. Some only cover the association and its members while others broadly cover the industry as a whole.

From an editorial standpoint, the publications in each category run pretty similarly. Big differences, however, come in a publication’s approach to advertising, editorial content, and the relationship between the two.

Pay to Play Vs. Editorial Focused

There are two common content philosophies at trade publications:

• Pay to Play: The publication’s main goal is ad revenue. Editorial content can be submitted by advertisers and/or editorial submissions have a fee associated with them.
• Editorial Focused: The publication’s goal is to share the news of the industry. The editorial and advertising departments run separately—advertising status doesn’t affect editorial content.

Pay-to-play publications are easy to get into—you just pay a few hundreds bucks to get your article published (often as-is). But generally these publications don’t have as high audience loyalty or trust because the readers know the content is more advertorial than editorial.

Editorial-focused publications require more than money to get in. They require a good story and some level of trustworthiness. You can’t pay to get an editorial in these publications (if you do, it’ll be clearly marked as an advertorial). The journalists work to avoid even the perception of pay to play—the ad team handles ads, the editorial team handles editorial.

The strategies laid out here are for working with editorial-focused publications. If you want to get into a pay-to-play publication, it’s easy and you don’t need a strategy. But working with editorial-focused outlets—ones genuinely dedicated to journalistic integrity and being an industry resource—requires building relationships and telling good stories.

The effort of working with editorial-focused publications is absolutely worth it—much more so than paying to have your press release copied and pasted into a pay-to-play magazine. There are benefits that just aren’t available with other marketing approaches.

Benefits of a Trade Pub Editorial Strategy

For B2B companies, especially those in very niche industries and applications, a targeted PR strategy focused on industry trade publications has huge benefits. At a high level, an ongoing PR strategy is an awareness marketing tactic that can be drilled in and targeted to your ideal audience. It’s a way to garner “mass” broadcast reach while remaining highly targeted—a unique combination in B2B marketing.

Tell Your Stories

It’s hard to tell a story in a 5″ print ad—not to mention a 300px web ad. Even with a full-page print ad, it’s tough to show potential customers all the ways you could help them. Ads are great for highlighting products and their features, but they generally don’t go deeper than that.

You’re in business to help your customers solve problems and run their businesses better. You should tell the stories of how you do that. You may think, “Who cares?” But your customers care, other businesses like your customers care, and the publications that cover the industry care. Stories are how humans communicate. Product specs are great and very necessary, but showing how your product is making an industry better in the form of stories is powerful.

Display Authority and Expertise

When you take the time and effort to work with industry journalists on editorial content, it provides an automatic level of authority. Because of the way journalists work and take care in the stories they tell, an editorial placement in a publication is vetted and trustworthy. It’s already been through due diligence by the journalist and is told by an unbiased writer, not the company itself.

Contrast this with a paid advertorial. Any company can say whatever they want in an advertorial (outside of outright lies that break FCC laws, of course). Readers know this and inherently trust ads less than they trust editorial content (whether we realize it or not).

Exposure to a Targeted Audience

Building an audience is hard. Take a look at your opt-in marketing email list (if you have one). It’s likely nothing to write (or email) home about. And if you have a blog and/or social media profiles, your following on there probably isn’t going to win any awards.

But do you know who has an existing audience? Trade publications. They have high exposure and coverage within their industries. When you work with your niche publications, you get your story shared with their already-built audience of people in your industry (or the industries you work with).

Supplement Ad Spend

Many companies start with (and stop at) a paid ads strategy with trade publications. This is a great option for building awareness in an industry… however, the value of the ad investment can be increased drastically when you pair it with editorial content in the same publications. Readers can see your products, your messaging, and your brand—and they can also read your stories and see how you help customers. They’ll see your name more often, and you’ll look like an industry powerhouse.

Sure, you could just pay to place an advertorial (an ad created to look like an article). But that paid content placement is missing a key component: The trust of editorial content. Readers know that an advertorial has been written by and paid for by an advertiser, and they often skip past.

Combining traditional (and web-based) paid ads with editorial content is the best of both worlds for your brand.

Goodwill With Customers

One of the most effective sources for editorial content is your customers. Put them front as center, with your product or service mentioned, in a case-study type format. When you use this approach, you deepen your relationships with your existing customers—while sharing your stories with potential customers and industry members. Customers are flattered when you choose them for a case study feature, especially when you tell them it will be featured in an upcoming issue of the leading industry publication.

When customers are willing to share their experience with your company and its products and services, it’s MUCH more powerful than you just doing a run-down of your product specs. And once the story is published, they’ll often share the article on their own marketing channels—broadening your exposure that much more.

Get Internal Buy-in

A trade pub PR strategy is a team effort. It requires buy-in and help from the whole marketing team, the c-suite, engineers and product experts, the sales team, and more. It must be an integrated effort to get the most value from your efforts.

Identify Your Go-to Experts

You have so much knowledge within your organization. Use it! Find a few go-to internal experts for your PR strategy. It’s best to team up with experts who are bought in on the plan and willing and able to help you tell your stories. There are a few ways to structure what the experts’ help may look like:

• Brainstorming topic ideas – Anyone in the company can help with this part of the process. In fact, it’s great to encourage such participation.
• Being interviewed by your team – Experts willing to talk to you, someone on your team, or your outsourced PR team are vital for putting together strong pitches and creating the level of editorial content the trade publications want.
• Having article bylines – When you submit editorial contributions written internally, there will usually be a byline (and bio and headshot) from someone in your company. Finding several people willing to do this helps show the depth and breadth of expertise within your organization.
• Being a listed expert in the media kit – A complete media has a list of several experts in your organization, along with their bios, areas of expertise, and a headshot. In general, for someone to be listed as an expert in the media kit, you’ll also want them to be open to the next item: being contacted and interviewed by publications.
• Being interviewed by journalists – Many trade publication writers want direct access to the experts at your organization. It helps them write a more genuine story without the filter of the marketing and PR folks. Having experts in your organization willing to talk with journalists about your products and services will help give the publications what they need to help tell your story. And having the experts committed and willing ahead of time (with a headshot and bio already put together) means you can move fast and get information to journalists on a quick turnaround.
• Helping create content – Some members of your team may be good at (and enjoy) writing content. If you’re lucky enough to have someone up to the task, take advantage of it! Let them write about the topics they care about and work with them to create content they enjoy creating and that fits into your PR plan. 

These roles can be mixed and matched in any way. The above list is ordered from easiest to hardest for most people. Someone might be willing to be interviewed by an internal person to help provide information but don’t want the byline. That’s OK! Others may be happy to help brainstorm topics and put together bullet points but have no desire to have their name out there as an expert. Yet others may be willing to help in all areas, including being listed as an expert, having bylines, and being interviewed by journalists.

The person coordinating internal PR efforts needs to be flexible and empathetic to each expert’s preferences. Most of them didn’t get into your business to be a “public face” (even within a small industry) or have their name, photo, and bio out there. So be understanding and work within what they’re comfortable doing. If you’re dragging them along kicking and screaming the whole way, it won’t be fun for anyone. You’ll all get burnt out, lose momentum, and likely forgo the PR strategy before you even see its full potential.

Collect Stories

Your team has your best stories about your products and services and how you help your customers. Use that to your advantage!

• Sales team – Your sales team members are working with prospects and customers on a daily basis. They have a good eye on what questions people are asking, new applications for your products and services, and what the industry is talking about.
• Engineers – Your engineering team has a lot of knowledge in their brains, and you can turn that knowledge into helpful articles for industry publication readers.
• Customer-facing team members – Anyone who has contact directly with prospects and customers (i.e., project managers, customer service team members, and the people who answer the phones) have insight into what conversations are happening around your products/services and the industry as a whole.

Make it easy for team members to tell you about stories…and don’t expect them to remember to do it. PR and content aren’t top of mind for your experts. Make a note to check in with them periodically and/or schedule team brainstorming sessions.

Here are some questions to ask to help your team of experts think of stories:

• What customer problems have you/we solved lately?
• What projects are you and our customers working on currently?
• Are customers doing anything new or novel with our products/services?
• What common questions have you heard from customers and prospects lately?

Marketing Can’t Do It Alone

A marketing and communications team shouldn’t venture into an editorial PR strategy alone. Advanced buy-in from c-suite, sales, and engineering team members helps ensure the whole team is ready to work together to build an editorial strategy and content that the industry cares about.

Create a Media Kit

A media kit is a central place for helpful information that journalists often want and need to cover an organization. Best practice is to house the media kit on your website so editors and writers can access the information quickly and whenever they want.

Here are standard elements of a media kit:

• About – A boilerplate overview—generally a few paragraphs—about your organization.
• C-suite Bios – A few paragraphs about important company executives who may be quoted or interviewed.
• Expert Bios – A few paragraphs about your go-to experts who may be quoted or interviewed. Include their topics of expertise. This serves as a “who’s who” of your team.
• Photos – High-resolution, downloadable photos of the people with bios, your products, your logo, and other relevant images.
• Fact Sheet – A list of facts about the company, often including things like founding year, employment numbers, annual revenue, high-level product information, and more. This list is often combined with the about paragraphs into a one-page company overview.
• Press Releases – Include a few past press releases. The full database of past releases can live on your site, but pick a few of the most relevant ones to feature within the media kit.
• Past Coverage – Link to editorials that have been published on industry outlets. Again, the full list of these can live somewhere on your site, but keep the media kit links trimmed to the top stories.
• Product Information – Provide downloadable (or easily accessible) product info sheets that will help journalists easily integrate information about your products into their stories.
• Video and Audio – If you have video and/or audio content that makes sense to include, embed it or add links to it.
• Customer Quotes – Collect testimonials from your customers about how your products have helped them and why they like working with you.
• Relevant Links – Include links to your social media profiles and any other helpful resources.
• Media Contact – Prominently display contact information for your main media contact. This can be someone in your organization (often the person driving the PR efforts) or your outsourced PR agency.

By making the effort to compile this information into one central hub, you make both your job and the job of your industry journalists that much easier. You can move quickly when a journalist has a request and allow them to access core information on-demand whenever they need.

Download My Media Kit Template

Quickly create your own media kit using my template.

Identify Industry Publications

Your trade pub PR strategy will focus on working with a small number of niche publications in your industry. You won’t work with a database of hundreds of publications—it’s quality over quantity with this approach. You should identify 10-20 of the most relevant publications for your audience. Keep the list small so you can build deep relationships with the editors and journalists.

Where to Find Your Industry’s Publications

You likely have a good handle on the top publications in your industry. As you compile your list, here are a few places to look to help make sure your list is thorough:

• Ask your team. What do they read? What industry emails do they subscribe to?
• Look at your industry associations. They likely have publications of their own, as well as relationships with the other outlets in the industry.
• Ask your customers. What publications do they subscribe to? What industry emails do they get in their inbox? You can even take this further and ask which ones they like best and why.

Download Editorial Calendars

Many niche publications plan and work from an annual editorial calendar that they make available for download online. Once you identify your list of publications, go to each of their websites and look for an editorial calendar. If there’s not an explicit “editorial calendar” tab, look for a media kit or an area for advertisers. If there’s a media kit, it could be tucked in with advertising resources.

When you find each editorial calendar, download it, save it, and add a link to your publication database.

If you can’t find an editorial calendar, you can make a note of this and use it as a conversation starter with your contacts (discussed in the next section).

Do Your Research

For each publication on your list, spend some time digging into their content, reading a few recent issues, and learning everything you can about them. The beauty of this targeted strategy is that your publication list won’t be massive, so you can dive in deep and do due diligence on each one.

A few things you should look to learn about each publication include:

• The appropriate editorial contact or contacts
• The types of stories they tell
• Editorial guidelines
• Pitch preferences

You can record this information in your publication database so you have it handy anytime you need it.

Subscribe

As you’re researching publications, it’s a good idea to subscribe, if you aren’t already. Most have email newsletters you can sign up for. And many let you decide if you prefer to receive the print edition or view it digitally.

Start Your Publication Database

Download the template I use for researching and tracking trade publications.

Build Relationships With Writers and Editors

At each publication, you’ll likely identify one or two primary contacts in your research process. Look for editors, managing editors, and staff writers who have covered relevant stories. Your goal with this PR strategy is to make it as easy as possible for the editors and journalists to tell your story. Do everything you can to make their job easier—respond quickly, communicate clearly, provide information in their preferred format.

Read Their Work

Before you start to reach out, it’s important to do your research. An effective B2B PR strategy focuses on relationships, not a throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall approach. Read your potential contact’s bio, look at their latest headlines, read several of their articles. You can also see what they’re talking about on Twitter if they use that platform.

Get yourself familiar with the types of stories they like to tell so you can make sure they’re the right contact for you and can provide the right stories and information.

Introduce Yourself

Once you’ve done your due diligence, it’s time to reach out and start building relationships. Your initial introduction email is not about pitching or “selling” anything—it’s about letting your contact know who you are, what your company does, and see how you can work together. You can be blatant that you’re looking to place editorial content; there’s no reason to hide. Journalists are busy, so keep it short and to the point. The intro email is a good place to link to your media kit and ask for an editorial calendar if it wasn’t on the site (or confirm you downloaded it if it was).

Introduce Yourself

Download my journalist introduction templates to make a good first impression.

Ask for Their Preferences

As you correspond with your contacts, ask them how they prefer to communicate. Do they prefer email? Do they want to use the phone for faster responses? Do they like pitches, press releases, contributions, or a mix? What information do they want from you on potential stories? Don’t blast them with a bunch of detailed questions, simply ask how they prefer to communicate and receive information, make notes in your publication database, and make good on their requests.

If the publication has editorial guidelines on their website, make it clear that you read and understood them.

Check in Periodically

If your contact is OK with it (you’re not out to nag them, after all), make a note to check in with them periodically. See what they’re working on and if they need any specific sources. As you build relationships, these conversations often evolve into bigger discussions about the industry.

Again, if your contact doesn’t want this type of check-in, abide by their request. Each journalist has their own preferences, and it’s your job to learn about and adapt to them.

Find Compelling Stories

The crux of a trade pub PR strategy is finding good stories to tell. Sometimes these are your stories, but oftentimes they’re your customers’ stories. Find your stories and plan topics that are of interest to your target publications’ readers. That’s what editors care about—sharing stories that resonate with their readers and the industry as a whole.

You have stories—you do—it’s just a matter of finding and sharing them.

Customer Case Studies

One of the best approaches to PR is to put your brand in the background. It sounds counterintuitive, but it helps remove the temptation to be too marketing and sales focused in the stories you choose. When you tell your customers’ stories, your content is inherently less salesy. You’re not saying how great your products and services are—you’re showing it.

Industry Innovations and Impact

Industry publications want to cover industry innovations. It’s their job. But they won’t know about the innovations unless you tell them. Share stories about technical breakthroughs, revolutionary products, and any other new initiatives you’ve worked on. These initiatives don’t even have to be product related; they could be about employee support, diversity programs, industry support initiatives, and other ways you’re benefiting your industry or community.

Stories about your own initiatives are easier to accidentally turn too salesy. These types of stories are great to collaborate with your publication contacts to determine the angle of the story and how to make it relevant to their readers.

Ask Your Team

Your team is a great source for story ideas. Ask them about what they’re working on, why it’s important, how it impacts customers, and what’s happening with customers. Everyone from engineers to sales to the people answering the phone, anyone can have potential story ideas. You can hold brainstorming sessions, or send out a periodic reminder for people to be on the lookout for stories.

Plan Your Editorial Calendar

The publications have their editorial calendars, and you’ll want one too. Your editorial calendar will serve as a place for your big-picture planning. It’s a central place for your planned editorial content and the status of each piece. For each planned submission, you can track:

• Publication date
• Due date
• Publication name
• Pitch topic
• Internal expert
• Contribution, interview, or press release
• Writer
• Status
• Link, once published

Download My Editorial Calendar Template

Track your upcoming pitches and story ideas. Download my template:

Look at the Publications’ Calendars

One of the first steps in planning your own editorial calendar is to look at the editorial calendars you collected from your target publications. The publications that use an editorial calendar will have information like publication topic(s), publication date, editorial due date, and other important information.

As you go through each editorial calendar, identify the issues with topics that you could have stories for. Plug those issues into your own editorial calendar document and you’ll start to see a picture of what your PR strategy for the year will look like.

Make sure you identify and document the editorial submission deadline for the issues you’re eyeing. With print magazines, submission deadlines can be a month or two ahead of publication, so it’s important to be ahead of the game.

Know Your Capacity

When you start an editorial PR strategy, it’s tempting to sprint right out of the gate—to get as many submissions as possible in the first few months. But you’ll quickly regret that approach. If you blast out pitches and get four placements in your first month, two of which want you to write the submission and two of which want an interview with your expert, you’ll be stressed.

For small teams, a goal of one to two placements per month is a good starting point. Any more than that can get overwhelming, especially as you’re getting your bearings and figuring out your process for submitting and creating stories.

Avoid Cross-pollination

A B2B trade pub PR strategy relies on building relationships with editors and writers. Relationships are built on trust, which means transparency and honesty are of the utmost importance. Public relations has gotten a bad rap because of the people and companies who use sleazy tactics and take a self-centered approach. When you use an empathetic approach and focus on what the editors and their readers want, you can have genuine, mutually beneficial relationships.

Part of this trust means following a few rules when it comes to submitting topics to publications:

• Don’t send the same story to every publication in an industry. Pick the best fit, pitch it, and only pitch to someone else if that publication doesn’t want it.
• If you are submitting a story to multiple publications, be open that you’re doing so. The editors will appreciate finding out from you, rather than reading a similar story in another publication a few months down the road.
• Be aware of which publications compete with each other in each industry and be conscious of submitting separate pitches and content to each.

There are some instances when it’s OK to submit the same information to multiple publications.

If your product or services apply to different industries, it can be OK to submit similar pitches and stories to publications in different industries. Again, just be open that you’re doing so.

Press releases and company announcements are also cases when you can submit the same story to multiple publications. If you’re broadcasting a story to many publications, just be sure you formulate it as a press release without exclusivity. You can offer an interview to your top publications, but by using a press release, you’re sure to avoid confusion about exclusivity.

Work Ahead

Many publications, especially those with print editions, work several months in advance of publication dates. By being proactive and working ahead, you save yourself and your editor partners a lot of stress.

Timing is another great preference to talk with your contacts about. Many don’t want stories TOO far in advance, so if you can work with them to understand when they want your pitches for certain issues, you can hit the sweet spot without being too early or too late. You can do your internal work ahead of time getting the story, the experts, and the photos ready—and then reach out to your contact when the time is right.

Pitch Your Stories

You’ve done all the prep work. You have stories planned, experts on board, and are building relationships with industry editors and writers. That means it’s time to start pitching your stories to editors and writers.

Focus on the “Why”

When you’re pitching a story, tell the editor why their readers will care about it. What will the readers learn or get from the story? Is it similar (yet a different angle) to other articles in their publication?

Despite many businesses’ approaches, PR isn’t about talking only about yourself. It’s about telling good stories and sharing quality information with publications and their readers. It’s more about them than it is about you.

You may have heard of WIIFM: What’s in it for me? That’s what the editors and writers are thinking…so answer the question before they have a chance to ask.

Be Flexible

Again, the theme of this strategy comes back to thinking about what your editor and writer contacts want and need. When you send pitches, offer the writer various ways of getting the story completed:

• You could submit the article in full as an editorial contribution, with the byline as one of your experts
• You could provide an outline and other information for the journalist to compile the story
• You could set up an interview (or interviews) with the journalist and whichever expert(s) they want access to*

With these options, the journalist can choose the mode they think works best for telling the story.

*To make scheduling easier, set up a calendar link through a tool like Calendly so the journalists can pick a time that works for them and you avoid the “what works for you” back-and-forth.

Offer Exclusives

When you pitch a story to publication, you can offer it as an exclusive. As discussed above, you don’t want to push the same story to every publication in your industry, but true exclusivity is an offer many editors want, especially for in-depth and feature stories.

When you offer an exclusive, make sure to:

• Give an acceptance deadline. Make it clear that the exclusivity offer is good until a specific date. After that, you’ll be pitching to other publications. Any story good enough for an exclusive offer is good enough to be pitched around if needed.
• Keep it exclusive. Be honest about your exclusives. Use them sparingly, and when you do, hold to them.
• Be clear on any exceptions. If your exclusivity comes with any caveats, state them clearly. For example, you may offer the exclusive for a specific period of time (for example, 6 months). Or, you may offer the exclusive within a certain industry; if you do this, make it clear the definitions of the industry and be up front that publications in other industries may run the story.

Download Pitch Templates

Copy and paste the simple pitch email format I use:

Track Trade Pub PR Results

As with any marketing initiative, it’s important to track the impact of your trade pub PR strategy. PR is an awareness marketing tactic (as opposed to a direct marketing tactic), so tracking doesn’t cleanly go in a straight line from “story in a publication” to “new customer.” But when you set up appropriate KPIs (key performance indicators), you can see how your PR efforts are paying off.

PR is a Top of the Funnel Tactic

As an awareness tactic, PR sits toward the very top of the funnel in terms of marketing strategies. The purpose of PR is to help new potential customers learn about your company and how you could help them.

Go Beyond “I Saw My Name in Print”

Seeing your name in print (or on someone else’s website) is exciting. You’re published! But the PR strategy is about so much more than that. It’s about growing awareness, building goodwill, and having more of your target audience know about (and eventually buy from) you.

There are a few metrics you can track to make sure you’re tracking beyond the vanity of seeing your name published.

• Website Traffic – If you have Google Analytics or another website analytics platform installed on your site, you’ll be able to see referral traffic from the sites on which you’re published.
• Link Tracking – For more detailed tracking, you can create a custom tracking link for each publication. One caveat: Make sure the publication knows and is OK with you providing a link with built-in tracking. You can use a tool like PixelMe to create custom links and view click analytics.
• Hearing from Your Network – When you first start getting stories in publications, you’ll often notice something fun. People in your network will send you links to the stories (just in case you didn’t know you were published!) and saying, “I saw you in _____” when they run into you at events. This feedback is a good measure of success, even though it doesn’t tie directly to revenue. (Again, PR is awareness marketing, not direct marketing, and your measurement expectations should be set accordingly.)
• New Contacts and Leads – Adding new people and companies to your network is the goal of top of the funnel marketing like PR. In order to know which contacts came from PR, you need to have tracking in place. This is usually accomplished through attribution in your CRM.

Ask “Where Did You Hear About Us?”

This is just good advice for any business: Ask your contacts where they learned about you. Get in the habit of asking any new contact, and also get yourself and your team in the habit of recording the information. This tracking is invaluable for understanding what awareness marketing tactics are (and aren’t) working.

You need three main elements to make this tracking work:

1. Asking – You and anyone at your company who talks to prospects should get in the habit of asking how a new contact learned about you. It can take time to build this habit, and it may feel a bit weird at first, but it’s vital to understanding the impact of your PR efforts as well as your other marketing strategies.
2. Recording – Once you collect the information, you need to put it somewhere. Set up processes in your CRM for team members to record “lead source.” Have standard categories (i.e.: PR, social media, networking, referral, etc.) and then a space for comments.
3. Analyzing – Periodically (every 3 months or so at the start), pull a report on the lead source data your team is now consistently tracking in your CRM. Review where contacts are hearing about you, and which contacts are moving through the sales funnel. If your sales cycle is long, you may not have data on new customers by lead source for several months or years, but the small effort to start tracking will be well worth it when you do.

Build Customer Relationships

When you share case studies and stories about your customers, they’re reminded about why they work with you. They get to tell you and whoever interviews them about all the ways your business has helped their business. This process inherently produces good will. Customers often feel honored that you value the work they’re doing enough to share their story.

Plus, your customer gets to see their name in print…without having to do any work! They’ll likely share the article with their network, exposing your products and services to even more contacts in the industry.

How You Know You’ve “Made It”

As discussed, PR is an awareness tactic. It’s harder to measure success for PR efforts than it is for, say, direct outreach. But one way you can tell your strategy is working is when the editors and journalists you work with come to you for a story. This shows you’ve built relationships and proven your expertise (and the expertise of your go-to experts).

That first email from a writer asking for an interview or quote for their story spurs a pretty great feeling.

What About Press Releases?

You may have noticed part of this PR process isn’t to “blast a press release on the wire and to every media contact.” Many B2B companies rely solely on press releases. If you hear “PR” and think, “We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work,” then you probably focused on mass-broadcast press releases instead of a targeted editorial strategy with trade publications.

Press Releases Have Their Place

Press releases do have their place in PR, absolutely. Yes, even within an editorial trade pub PR plan. But they should be used as a supplement, not the central strategy. Many companies are surprised to learn that press releases don’t result in much (or any) exposure to your target audience.

For small and mid-sized B2B companies, press releases are great for a few specific things. They’re a quick way to get some backlinks (usually no-follow) to your website. Your release gets published on whatever wire services you use and then several news sites across the web. They’re also optimal for major announcements that can be covered by many trade publications and possibly traditional news outlets.

• Product Launches – When you release new products and services, a press release makes sense to announce the features and benefits.
• New Client Agreements – In some industries, press releases are distributed when large engagements are entered into.
• Company News – Big updates about your company—including new executive hires, noteworthy promotions, and company milestones like 100 years in business—can be announced through press releases.

Keep most press releases short and sweet; there’s no need to send a 400-word release on an internal promotion. Only provide the necessary information, and include contact information for any writers who have additional questions.

Distributing Your Press Release

You can put your press release on a wire service like Business Wire, PRWeb, 24-7 Press Release, and eReleases, but don’t expect your industry publications to pick it up. When you put releases out on the wire, you get published on the distributor’s site as well as some syndication on small, often unrelated media sites. So you get those backlinks (again, usually no-follow) and your company’s name in media outlets. However, you also get a lot of competition for your own brand name in search results and very few eyeballs on your story from the people who actually matter.

When you have a story where it makes sense to send a press release, take a similar targeted approach as with the editorial strategy. Send the release by email to your targeted industry publications. You can expand the list beyond your small editorial list to include pay-to-play and other publications.

Hot tip: When you email a press release to multiple people, use BCC. It’s just polite.

When you send a release by email, be sure you’re clear that it’s a press release so your contacts know it’s going out to the masses. You can include “Press Release:” in your subject and then follow standard press release formatting structure. You can send the release to your top contacts and offer an interview with someone at your company (usually whoever is quoted in the release) so they can cover the story from their own unique angle.

Some of your contacts will want all press releases—their publication may have a “business briefs” section—while others will have preferences on which types of releases they want. As with everything else, just ask. Learn which types of releases to send which contacts so you get the right information in the right hands without annoying anyone.

Focus on an Editorial Strategy

Press releases seem great. They’re easy—you write one piece and send it to everyone. But the results often leave much to be desired. Take the time to build the editorial strategy discussed throughout this piece and use press releases as a supplement to those efforts. The editorial strategy is more work, but the results make the payoff worth it.

Get Your Press Release Template

When you do use press releases, make sure you do it right. Download my template:

How to Start Your Trade Pub PR Plan

If you’re a small or mid-sized B2B company in tech, ag, manufacturing, energy, or other niche industries, the PR strategies laid out here are a cost-effective method of getting your stories in front of the people who matter.

Use this strategy and the corresponding templates to build your PR plan into a powerhouse.

If you don’t have the capacity (or desire) to do all this work yourself, let us take care of it for you. We’ll build (and use our existing) relationships with your industry publications, extract stories from your team, and share them with the world.

Learn how a trade pub PR strategy can work for you.

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