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Tuesday 16th April 2019

The power of earned media on the technology sales cycle

By Richard Cook,

The B2B technology sales cycle seems to get more complicated by the day. In its report ‘What Sales Should Know About B2B Buyers in 2019’, Gartner says: “The days of simply winning over a senior decision maker are long over, but it may be surprising how functionally diverse buying groups have become. Buying today is complicated by complex solutions, financial instability and data security concerns.”

In an effort to combat these additional complexities, the report suggests that B2B buyers are responding “by adding more and different types of stakeholders to their buying groups…. Each new stakeholder brings individual diverse concerns, priorities and opinions to the table, making the buying process extremely difficult as they struggle to come to consensus over the solution — or even the problem — that works for everyone”.

This is where earned media – by which I mean free media coverage such as a news story or opinion piece – can be a particularly powerful tool to support the sales cycle; by helping to get your brands message across to this new and extended audience of decision makers.

The problem for earned media is in getting buy-in from those controlling the marketing budget, a problem highlighted in a recent report from Cision: “As marketing budgets grow, much focus has been on digital marketing for owned and paid media. Whether it be a because of a focus on mobile and e-commerce experiences, or more investment in search and display advertising, earned media has often been third in line in the overall marketing mix.”

But the report goes on to suggest that this is a mistake, highlighting how as buyers “become fatigued with advertising and brands discover massive areas of waste in their spend, the time is ripe for communications teams to expand marketing’s focus on earned media.

Earned media can have a positive impact across the entire B2B sales process and should be deployed accordingly. We see there are five distinct goals that need to be considered when developing an earned media strategy for a B2B tech brand in search of business growth:

1: Increasing the number of leads

A short sighted and misleading, yet conventional view of earned media can be found in HubSpot’s blog: “There's nothing more valuable to a client than seeing his or her company's name appear in an article, news report, or blog post. This third-party credibility and the ability to gain the attention of decision-makers is key to building a brand.” (20 PR Tools for Monitoring & Managing Media Relations in 2019)

This approach reduces the function of earned media to the ‘attract’ stage of a lead generation programme. When looking at the potential of earned media, this misconception is perhaps the most dangerous as it mis-characterises the role of earned media as being noise, air cover, spin etc. As such, this limited view has driven more marketing dollars into digital marketing and away from PR.

The irony is that whilst earned media is perhaps most commonly associated with the top of the funnel activity (also known as the attract or awareness stage), this is actually one of the areas where it is weakest from a B2B sense.

In fairness this has not always been the case, but the decline comes from the increasing reluctance of media owners to publish back links to a brands site as part of their editorial.

Earned media does still have a crucial role to play in top of the funnel activity.

For instance, LinkedIn which has perhaps a more contemporary view on lead generation in the B2B tech space, points out that a B2B prospect is 3.5 times more likely to click on a link in an email if that prospect has read about or heard of the brand already – a feat achieved from earned media.

However, for earned media to work properly as a lead generation tool it needs to be integrated with owned (e.g. website) and paid (e.g. paid search, display) media and (shared) social media.

By marrying sustained earned media with advertising and lead generation, it is possible to develop an integrated marketing and sales strategy that will keep a pipeline perpetually full.

2: Increasing conversion rates

When a company gets positive media coverage, sales teams need to share it with their prospects. It gives them the authority to re-engage with decision makers that may be on the fence and can re-activate opportunities that would have otherwise fallen by the wayside.

The sales relationship is all about communicating to a prospect how a product or service will provide value for them over offers from competitors. The most effective way to do this is through credible third-party endorsement. For instance, research from Marketing Blender found that 80% of business-decision makers prefer to get information about a product or service from a series of articles over advertisements.

Nowadays however, third-party endorsement extends beyond traditional earned media from major journalistic outposts like the NY Times, Forbes, or the Wall Street Journal, to include new forms of recommendation and insight, such as influencers.

As Personal Branding Consultant at Waller & Company writes: “92% of people trust recommendations from other people, including brand ambassadors, advocates, thought leaders, and journalists... more than paid media. Organic media can be used to prove the validity of paid media.”

Combining earned media with advertising means that audiences can be more receptive to advertising and help to close leads, a point summarised by Sandra Rand, VP of Marketing at advertising agency OrionCKB: “organic marketing efforts... add a layer of credibility — particularly earned media — when third parties position them in a positive light or give them a platform for thought leadership. So, when audiences see an ad for something, they may have seen on the Today Show or read about in Wired, they're a bit more primed to pay attention to the ad than they may have been otherwise”.

The overall impact is integrated media strategy that helps to increase your conversion rate; research has shown that traditional media efforts yield a conversion rate of 1%, whereas leveraging earned media in conjunction with such techniques increases this conversion rate to 5% a percentage increase that can’t be overlooked.

3: Increasing sales velocity

Sales velocity measures how fast a business is making money. It looks at how fast leads move through a sales pipeline, and how much value new customers are providing. Thus, it is surprising that it is an often-overlooked metric when businesses are analysing their performance.

As Emily Bauer puts it when writing for Marketo: “Sales velocity plays a huge role in your business’ ability to thrive and grow. The less time it takes for prospects to move through your pipeline, the faster you can close more deals. So, a higher sales velocity means you’re bringing in more revenue in less time.”

Done properly, earned media can act as an accelerator of sales velocity by enabling a business to hasten prospects through a sales pipeline. Research from CMO Council has found that 9 out of 10 B2B buyers say that online content has a major effect on their purchasing decisions, thus a positive article is bound to have a positive impact on prospects. Using such content as a point of reference in sales conversations can therefore empower sales teams and push their prospects through their pipeline at a greater velocity.

In order to truly determine the value of earned media as an accelerator of sales velocity, it is vital that to measure earned media campaigns correctly.

A great way of validating the impact of earned media on sales is to survey prospects, customers and sales executives. It may not be possible to survey each and every one of the sales teams, in which case, an indicative sample of each stake-holder group will provide a benchmark.

4: Increasing Price

A recent survey by Demand Gen Report, found that 61% of B2B marketers are allocating more of their budgets to earned media, as they are noticing the pay-out from paid and owned media campaigns are diminishing.

The advantage of earned media over paid, is that it provides a level of credibility and endorsement that traditional media and advertising can’t match. It has an emotional appeal on the way decision makers feel about brand, thus influencing their behaviours and buying decisions.

In 2017, Forrester Research outlined that attitudes towards brands are formed by three things:

  1. Emotion: This is 'the variety of emotions that consumers associate with the brand'. According to the report, emotion accounts for roughly three-quarters of brand connection in prospective customers.
  2. Salience: How top of mind is a brand?
  3. Fit: This examines whether a brand is “relevant to a business as well as how well it meets tangible needs.”

This model can easily be adapted to linking earned media to customer experience.

In the world of B2B tech, where so much is commoditised and there can be a race to the bottom driven by procurement, the ability of earned media to build appreciation and awareness for a brand can be very valuable. It is in this context that the credibility of earned media can really come into its own.

5: Increased Retention

As earlier mentioned, the buyer’s journey has been complicated by the emergence of disparate groups of decision makers forming businesses’ buying groups. At the same time, CEOs, particularly in the UK, are being given less time to make an impact.

A PWC report recently found that: “More than three-quarters (76%) of new UK CEOs who started in their roles last year have no previous experience as CEO of a public company, but they also have less time than ever before to make an impact. The average length of time the CEO of a large UK business spends in the job has hit a low of 4.8 years, dipping below the global average of five years for the first time, and down from a UK high of 8.3 years in 2010.”

And it isn’t just the CEO that is likely to be on the move. Research from XpertHR has found that employee resignations are also on the up, with 2016 marking a five year high of one in seven (15.5%) employees resigning from their job.

In order to combat this high turnover, and to ensure client vendor relationships are protected, vendors need to be continually selling into their key accounts and establishing new relationships.

Earned media can be deployed to help up-hold, validate and protect vendor/ client relationships through activity such as awards, events, speaking opportunities, and case studies - where the vendor enables the client to become the star of the story.

And, in an environment where new execs have come in and may not be receptive to a relationship with the vendor, third party media coverage which includes the client company is a way of maintaining visibility and upholding the relationship.

Conclusion

When deployed in the correct way, earned media is much more than noise or air cover and can have a direct and lasting impact on the bottom line.

It can have a drastic impact on every stage of the sales cycle – but in order to realise its true potential it must be closely interlinked with sales objectives, and that means building strong relationships between the PR team and the sales executives.

Earned media should be used as a tool to support sales executives progress their conversations and for this to work correctly PR teams need to be able to gain insight and feedback from sales executives on their conversations.

Richard Cook is Managing Director of Champion Communications.

Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash