At Skout PR we get a buzz from turning clients’ B2B products and services – oft unseen organisational ‘workhorses’ – into mainstream PR stories. Whatever the client’s leading widget, bespoke service or tailored solution is, scratch beneath the surface and there’s (usually) a consumer benefiting from it one way or another.
While the bread and butter of B2B PR 
is direct communication to the target market, the icing on the cake is understanding that everyone, even people in tech, are also consumers. Visibility in consumer circles is important to these brands too.
Propelling a lesser known B2B brand into the headlines of mainstream media is what has always defined the leaders of the PR pack. A decent news story or strong opinion backed by a name everyone knows doesn’t quite cut it. A rarer talent is needed and that is ‘applied creativity’ – the matching of good lateral thinking and a genuine sense of what will work with specific journalists.
As this recent result for our client vielife from the front page of last Saturday’s Guardian Work illustrates, many B2B brands can succeed in consumer arena with some decent creative planning and engagement.
There’s usually a chain reaction of events between a B2B product’s impact on an organisation and a service provided or experienced by consumers. Understand that relationship and you are half way to seeing the light of a mainstream story. How does it make a difference to people?
While many B2B products are hard to demonstrate or illustrate a great deal can be drawn from understanding how the experience your client’s product or service experience can be integral to your pitch. Seeing and feeling is believing and the consumer connection is much easier to for the media to make if they can get their hands on it.
Engaging journalists personally in the use of a client’s product or service can also create a uniquely emotive reaction. While there might be a higher degree of risk as to the positivity of the PR results when exposing your product to this depth (tip: make sure product works!) the rewards can add more volume than a Cheryl Cole hairdo.
And finally… Proof that consumer results do go full circle for B2B brands came this week when vielife’s head of marketing said that a constant stream of visitors at a trade show remembered them from this very article.
