This guide will help you create a PR strategy that builds your company profile and generates leads

Every tech business needs leads to survive. Many turn to PR to bring them in. However, it can be an uphill struggle if you haven't got the right ingredients. For starters, you need a board and sales team that understands PR isn't a lead generating tap that produces instant leads. It takes time. You also need a great story to tell, and most importantly people who are great at telling it for the press to take notice and write about it.

This guide will help you navigate some of these challenges and produce a strategy that will deliver results.

First step: Convince them of the value of PR

You will struggle to get any PR programme off the ground if the board doesn't see its value. Firstly, they won't fund it, and worst still, they will pull the plug if they don't see instant results.

So how can you convince your CEO of its value?

Reputation is everything. CEOs understand that customers make buying decisions based not just the quality and price of your product or service, but on factors such as whether you are ethical in your trading arrangements, fair to suppliers and a responsible employer. Demonstrating your values is essential to underpinning the brand's success.

But what the board is interested in is the bottom line. You therefore have to show that PR coverage will contribute to the overall company goal. Start from this point when you are designing a strategy and you will convince the CEO it's worth pursuing PR. If the goal is to increase market share, attract investment or find channel partners, then you need to show PR will support this aim.

Looking at competitor activity can help. If other businesses in your space are in the press with positive PR coverage week in week out and their market share has been growing, then you have a case to say PR is contributing to their brand perception and growth. That's a powerful argument and one the CFO will buy-in to as well.

It's also a helpful way to point out that the industry debate will be happening regardless of whether you contribute or not. It's better if you take part in the conversation about where your industry is heading.

Building a brand and generating leads

Convincing the board of PR's value is a huge step forward. However, you do need to set some expectations as to what B2B tech PR will achieve, because it won't generate leads overnight.

What it will do is start to build your profile with the press. The more familiar the press is with your brand, and the contribution you can make to the debate, the more likely they will write about you when you offer comment. Get it right and over time you will become the 'go to' to ask for comment on hot topics.

That said, it is possible to generate leads from PR. The trick is to get all of the ingredients right - clear message, great spokespeople, proactive campaigns to generate coverage, and a concerted effort to use the coverage you achieve for marketing purposes.

The next section will explain the ingredients in more detail and how they work together.

Positioning your business as an authority

It's beyond just your product or service

The importance of key messages 

It's often assumed that PR programmes require an endless stream of press releases. In fact, in 90% of cases, PR coverage has come from everything but a press release. Mostly it's down to using your opinion to join the conversation the press is interested in writing about.

There are lots of ways in which you can join the conversation, but before you get started, you have to be clear about what you want to say. Your prospects will be searching for your opinion as part of their decision process, and your clients will be looking for continued reassurance you understand what the future holds for their sector.

It's therefore crucial what you say resonates with them and positions you as an authority. For some CEOs, it's hard to break the tunnel vision of product and service and talk about wider issues. But it's vital to think more broadly because that is what the press wants.

That's why we always suggest you develop a set of three to five key messages that you want to be famous for. They will be aligned to the company goals. So, for instance, you might have developed a cloud security product that reduces risk to IoT devices connected to a network with everything resting on it to grow your business.

As it stands the press won't be interested in the technology itself, or that you want to grow your business with its launch. What they are interested in are the issues related to the product - in essence, why does the product need to exist in the first place?

So consider the problems your product or service solves:

• Why does that problem exist?
• What will the problem look like in the future?
• What needs to happen to bridge the gap?

Asking questions like this will help you understand the important issues of the day and establish your key messages.

It's useful to get senior people from across the business involved in this process. Not only will you get a picture of what's happening in the market, but you'll also start to identify potential spokespeople as you can't always rely on a CEO to be available. You might find people who are experts in the issues facing retailers or banks so you can create a vertical version of your story, and others who can talk about R&D and enthuse people about the future. This will broaden the opportunities you have to speak to the press and ensure your message lands every time, generating PR coverage for your business.

Validate your messages so you stand out

It's a good idea to test the messages you arrive at. Check they stand out from the crowd, and offer something new to the debate, as it's this that will get a journalist's attention. If you overlap with a competitor too much, then you aren't giving the journalist a compelling reason to choose you - especially if you're unknown in comparison. If you fail to get this part of the strategy right, then the PR programme will fail and you will be back to square one with the board.

The final step is to rehearse the messages. Make sure the CEO and your other spokespeople can deliver them eloquently and succinctly, because if they can't the press won't listen - nor will employees or customers. This is a skill and it doesn't always come naturally.

Media training can be hugely beneficial in helping people practice getting the right message across. And as most media training is done by journalists it's a good way to uncover any issues you've overlooked, and prepare answers to those tricky questions lurking in the background.