INBOUND ACCELERATOR

Earning media coverage and placement of thought leadership articles with trusted third-party outlets and industry media is not an easy task.

There is an old nursery rhyme that includes the line “when she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid.”

Thought leadership may be a more powerful tool in your marketing arsenal than you realize, and it pays to ensure the quality of the bylined contributed articles you create is the best reflection possible of your company.

Sometimes, the best approach to take in B2B marketing is to think about your customer’s customer.

Contributed or bylined articles have long been a staple of public relations strategies in B2B marketing, used to increase awareness and establish the thought leadership authority of a brand or company leaders. They can also be used effectively as an additional channel in content marketing, still maintaining the trust provided by non-promotional content in a third-party publication, but also serving as a link for lead generation.

With the realms of marketing and public relations continually meeting, meshing and intertwining, using contributed articles as part of an integrated campaign is the perfect way to reach thousands of prospects with top-of-the-funnel content that establishes you brand as an industry authority.

But you aren’t the only one seeking editorial space from related blogs and industry media. As PointVisible points out in this infographic, many editors get at least 6-10 pitches every day, and 20 percent of those editors say 9 out of 10 pitches are so bad, they don’t even bother to read them properly.

Ouch.

Integrated marketing and public relations rely on balancing a content triad — using earned, owned, and shared content to reach audiences and drive awareness, lead generation and sales. So how do you maximize the “earned” component to access audiences without spending money on advertising?

For B2B businesses, particularly in information-, knowledge- and technology-heavy industries, the answer is in high quality thought leadership articles placed with trusted industry media. That is the approach JONES and QPS took to gain the global CRO (contract research organization) valuable exposure without a huge investment in paid advertising.

As an agency offering integrated public relations and marketing solutions, we only succeed if our clients succeed. And that is why I love sharing success stories, something I plan to start doing regularly here on the Inbound Accelerator. I know there are things my readers can learn from hearing about what has worked well — in some cases, extremely well — for our clients.

Every industry has individual nuances in marketing tactics, techniques and needs. And while nearly every B2B market is also filled with industry-specific knowledge and vocabulary that marketers must understand in order to create credible content, when it comes to businesses in the life sciences sphere, the need for expertise and immersion in the field is even greater.

Life sciences, as a field, encompasses a wide range of businesses, most of which support the infrastructure that enables the healthcare system, from medical device manufacturers, to pharmaceutical companies, DNA research, and the contract research organizations that take on drug discovery, pre-clinical and clinical trial research for pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

There was a day when a key part of a financial company’s branding strategy was based on a physical portrayal of its stability: the building itself. Large, solid, imposing structures, bank buildings have long been emblematic of the way the institutions want their customers to perceive them.

But with the rapid and nearly complete shift of financial services to digital and largely invisible infrastructures in the last 25 years, the need to build a brand identify of stability, authority and trust can no longer be met with a concrete structure. Particularly in the B2B financial technology arena, that brand identity must be built through careful curation of thought leadership, content and analyst relationships.