For any business investing in PR, it’s important to make sure you reach out to all your target audiences irrespective of where they’re based. So, if you’re an international business, that’s likely to mean you need to invest in PR overseas too. Opportunities with the press, content and digital marketing in other territories are there for the taking, so have you considered mirroring your PR activity in the other countries you have a presence in?
It might sound like a challenge managing PR agencies or freelancers dotted around the globe, but with effective management processes in place, it’s not as big a task as you might first think, especially if you ask your UK PR agency to act as the lead hub for all international PR activity. For example, we manage an international PR programme on behalf of our client Sana, an e-commerce solution provider. Already providing Sana with a successful UK PR programme, Skout replicated the PR programme, including brand building and boosting its digital presence, in the other business territories it operates and sells in: DACH, Benelux and the US. The first job was to find PR pros in each territory who not only had a proven track record in business technology PR, but had relationships with Sana’s key media.
On behalf of Sana, we researched the PR market in each of Sana’s business territories and appointed either PR freelancers or people from small agencies in those locations. Now, with an international PR team in place, we are now able to achieve press coverage and contribute to Sana’s digital marketing objectives outside of the UK. For example, in the UK we were working on a campaign which saw us examine global businesses and their use of digital transformation. Skout was ‘the hub’ for this campaign and led the way by commissioning the research and devising and creating the content based on the research findings. Sana’s headquarters in Rotterdam then translated the content so that each PR team could pitch it in their own territory. As the hub, we tracked the global press coverage that came from the campaign and reported the results back to Sana.
The PR programme we run for Teneo, a specialist technology integrator, also takes an international approach. Teneo’s headquarters are in Reading, but it has offices in the US, France and Australia. It wanted to build on its presence in US media and needed a US PR professional to help achieve this. We worked with Teneo to find a US-based freelancer that could work with us and Teneo to achieve similar results to those being achieved in the UK. Similar to our work with Sana, we act as the hub, directing all PR activity and working with our US colleague to understand her country’s specific needs for PR. This makes it much easier for our clients as they only have to liaise with one PR team, instead of a full network of people in different countries and time zones.
Campaigns that we have worked on with Teneo include a ‘CIO’ campaign, in which we uncovered attitudes towards technology-related issues among both UK and US CIOs. We then used the findings to create PR materials and generate media coverage and content. Our US PR was able to use the results which applied to her region to target her key media.
Taking your PR global might sound like a scary prospect for some, not least due to the language barrier and finding an agency or freelancer in different countries, but we are able to help our clients overcome these challenges and manage the whole process on their behalf. There are plenty of ways Skout can help marketing teams with many of their B2B marketing challenges. Keep reading the Skout blog to find out more about the variety of services we offer.
Alex Brown enjoys being one of the Skout blog’s most regular contributors.
