In the technology industry, the business environment is not as traditional as before, it is entirely different from what it used to be – no longer business as usual.
The reason for this new trend is obvious – competition has intensified and companies strive to remain a going concern and foster business growth. One of the most effective ways adopted by companies is the development of a strong SaaS PR strategy. Hence, business survival tactics, including customer attraction and retention, evolves around having an effective PR strategy that projects your organization’s brand identity and reputation.
As a tech consulting firm, understanding PR strategies help you to establish good connections with your clients and other public members, thereby having a significant impact on the success of your business.
Essentially, SaaS PR strategies are effective tools that companies use in engaging clients to communicate and demonstrate their expertise and understanding of their client’s business environment and industry, and competence in providing working solutions to clients’ technology challenges.
There are several ways to go about the design and implementation of your PR strategy. Below are some of our top picks:
Developing Video Content
The use of video content is a powerful tool that you should consider exploring to attract customers.
According to HubSpot, about 73% of B2B marketers mentioned that they generate a positive and robust return on investment from developing video content.
As a tech consulting firm, your target audience is mostly core business owners like you and may not have sufficient time to go through your catalog to know the varieties of technology services you offer. Hence, it will be nice to have short videos that capture the solutions you offer and can give brief descriptions of your services.
The videos can be produced in the form of compelling stories as it relates to the services you offer. For instance, you can use your story to describe how you worked with a client in solving a problem. This will portray you as an expert in your field and a solution provider.
Your video should also be engaging and not too technical. Everyone loves to be entertained. As such, try to find a balance between clearly communicating your business solution to your potential customers and entertaining them.
Beyond sharing information about your solutions and services, you can also create and share videos that provide vital information to your clients.
Topics around best industry practices, industry trends, new technology, and innovation news, are some of the things that you can share in videos.
Using Influencer and Affiliate Marketers
In recent times, a common trend among business owners is the reliance on recommendations from fellow professionals or business owners. Business owners follow references of specialists, experts, and recognized authorities with deep industry knowledge when evaluating technological solutions and choosing their preferred tech consulting firms.
In a survey conducted by Demand Gen, it was revealed that 72% of technology buyers lookout for recommendations from industry peers while researching for solutions. Hence, you can explore partnering with known influencers who can help you reach out to your audience.
Before getting started on having an influencer marketing strategy, you need to clearly define and identify your target market. This helps you to understand their strategic goals, their preferred services, and the type of influencers they follow. The next thing is for you to spot who the industry influencers are and how to engage them.
A good way to go about this is by following your target customers on social media and spotting the activities or content that interest them. You can also use tools such as BuzzStream, Onalytica, and FollowWonk to search for influencers online.
After spotting the influencers, you also need to develop social credibility and a competitive edge. Let your clients identify you as an industry leader because influencers will not want to interact with you if they do not perceive you as an expert in the field. You should have leadership content curated toward a specific target audience.
The next step is to create quality content (writing or visuals) and share it on platforms that influencers regularly visit. You can also engage them directly by proposing a partnership for your brand promotion.
Live Event Integration
As unusual as it sounds, establishing face-to-face and personal interactions with clients is key despite the fast-growing adoption of digital marketing.
According to Regalix, about 91% of Business to Business marketers spend significantly on event marketing. Many clients want to interact directly with their tech consultants, mainly to assess their competence and establish connections with them. When you incorporate live events into your PR marketing strategy, your brand awareness will increase.
As a tech consulting firm, especially startups, you need to be publicly visible and an effective way to do this is by engaging business owners in live events. For mature tech consulting firms, live events help in generating business sales by collecting business contacts at events and having systems on the ground to set up sales meetings with them. As such, live events promote interpersonal relationships between you and your clients.
This helps you to retain existing customers and possibly get referrals and recommendations from them. However, live events should not be treated as digital marketing. You should participate actively on social media platforms even if you establish physical interactions with your clients.
Developing a working PR Strategies for Tech Consulting firms
Just like other aspects of business operations, developing and implementing a SaaS PR strategy requires a well-defined and structured approach. In this regard, we have highlighted steps you should take to have a great PR strategy:
Tips for a Strong PR Strategy
1. Articulate your story
PR strategy is expected to project your brand image and put you in the face of the media, indicating the need for you to have a compelling story to sell your brand. Hence, the first step to having a good PR strategy is to have and master a good story.
According to the Center of Neuroeconomics at Claremont Graduate University, a convincing story can influence our thought and decision process, thereby increasing our chances of trusting new ideas. That is, convincing stories trigger the willingness and openness to trust new ideas. Creating a good story is a complex art that does not come easy Hence, you need to strategically approach it.
To take a stab at developing your story, you should clearly define your business services and the solutions they offer. Your story should also capture the purpose of your existence as an organization. Let your audience understand why you are in business – you need to convince them that your focus is on helping businesses.
Also, your story should reflect your passion and interest in what you do. Your audience should be convinced that you are passionate about what you do and the solutions you offer. In summary, your story should describe your services, communicate your purpose and reflect your passion for what you do.
You should make your story captivating to the media and not just your clients because the media will help you project the story if they find it compelling and interesting. In essence, your story should be timely, relevant, and unique to make it newsworthy.
2. Human Relations should be a priority
After developing your story, how you communicate it to your audience (both your clients and journalists or media) is crucial. Everyone loves to be singled out in the crowd, and that is something you should consider leveraging. Engage your clients in personal discussions and establish good relationships with them. When they see you as relatable, they will feel more connected to your brand stories. Good relationships with clients make your effort to develop a PR strategy easier.
However, you should avoid pestering your audience, it can be a turn-off for them. Consider having an online community where your clients can easily interact and share their customer experiences and their responses regarding your services with you. You can go a step further by giving them free professional advice once in a while. That will boost their confidence level in your organization and the professional services you offer.
Also, endeavor to invest in the relationships you establish by adding value to their lives and businesses before you think of asking them for something in return.
Beyond your clients, establishing connections with media and influencers is also essential. For this set of people, you can add value to them by joining and making relevant contributions to their group, giving insightful comments on their publications and posts, and sharing part of your journey through your networks.
The aim is not to send marketing content out, the focus should be to provide industry knowledge. This positions you as an industry leader, thereby making you attractive to other industry experts and influencers.
3. Have a strong social media presence and utilize digital technologies
Beyond interactions with journalists and influencers, you should be feasible on social media platforms. With a strong social media presence, you can attract many clients online.
There is an opportunity to create niche communities to engage clients and drive insightful conversations. Your brand story and other creative content should be published from time to time on these platforms. This helps to reinforce your brand image in the face of the public.
Beyond having a site of your own or having social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), you can leverage bookmarking sites such as Inbound, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Quibb, among others. These sites are great platforms for tech consulting firms and other businesses to initiate discussions and interact with the audience.
4. Create original content on your blog
Creating original blog content can help boost your SaaS PR by improving SEO and increasing brand visibility. Unique (and helpful) blog posts are indexed faster by search engines, which can result in higher visibility of your website as well as a better ranking.
Additionally, well-crafted blog content that speaks to target prospects can help to educate them about your solution and establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry.
Especially with Google’s helpful content update, you want to make sure your articles are providing useful information for your core audience. This should be content that provides a leadership perspective on a topic relevant to your industry.
Along with original content on your own blog, you can also have guest posts where you feature another leader in your industry to share their unique perspective on a topic.
Another tactic you can try for your SaaS PR is for you to guest post on another leader’s blog to expand your reach and engage with a larger audience than just your own. Overall, blog content marketing can be extremely useful when you do it correctly for your targeted niche.
Benefits of PR Strategy
PR strategy offers several benefits to businesses in very effective ways. These benefits include:
Enhances credibility:
As a company with a strong PR strategy, you have the power and ability to positively influence the public’s perception of your organization. As a result, the public has a good impression of your organization, thereby boosting your credibility.
An organization with good credibility has a competitive advantage over the competitors as the clients will most likely trust and patronize them more. Hence, good credibility is one of the fundamental criteria for business and enterprise growth and survival.
From a PR point of view, media content that mirrors your company’s leadership and expertise, especially when published in recognized industry publications and journals, will help in strengthening your brand reputation.
Also, customers are more inclined to read content from organizations than watch paid advertisements or marketing content.
Positive brand reputation and user experience:
Another benefit of PR strategy is that it helps in building a good brand reputation. When you have press releases (your company information or industry news) from time to time, the public will have the image of your company registered in their mind.
In that way, your brand reputation becomes more visible, and the public will have a positive impression of it. Through a strong PR strategic continuity plan, you can easily manage misconceptions, scandals, and other crises.
As such, you can avoid severe damage to your brand reputation and influence the public’s perception of your organization.
Boosts customer relationships and level of engagement:
PR strategies can assist your organization in achieving its set business objectives and target goals. PR strategy also influences your mode of business operations and overall transformation journey and internal business processes and systems.
As a result, your organization will become stronger and have a good brand image in the industry. With that, customers get more familiar and comfortable with your brand. Through your PR strategy and media visibility, you can create platforms where you interact with customers, exhibit technical proficiency, and provide useful tips to help their businesses.
In that way, your relationship with clients becomes stronger, thereby boosting your sales and revenue generation. You can also get honest feedback from the clients, helping you to improve your service offering and overall business processes.
Cheaper to operate:
When launching a massive marketing campaign, you will most likely incur more costs, depending on its scope and width of coverage. Many companies spend significantly on marketing activities, thereby inflating their operating expenses.
Meanwhile, the adoption of a SaaS PR strategy offers you the opportunity to reach a larger audience at a lower cost. Rather than paying for advert placement on television, you can share your video content on social media platforms. In that way, you can reach people beyond your local environment.
Aside from video content, publishing articles, participating in live events, and speaking at conferences, are a wide range of tools to echo your brand image at little or no cost. Insivia specializes in developing successful PR strategies for technology companies and helping them scale – fast. Learn more about our software and technology consulting expertise.
Key Takeaways
There are a variety of public relations strategies that you can implement to improve your marketing strategy for your SaaS business. The key is to figure out which ones work for your particular product/service and the audience in which you want to reach.
This requires research into your niche industry and what your core business goals are. Once you figure out exactly what you want to accomplish with your marketing strategy, then it will be easier to narrow down what channels you should hone in on.
The benefits you reap from your SaaS PR strategy can be bountiful when you fully optimize your efforts. You gain stronger relationships with your customers, enhance your credibility, and consistently build upon your brand’s reputation.