Public Relations for Boosting B2B Sales

Public relations has many benefits for companies, with the biggest ones being raising brand awareness, building trust with the target audience, and receiving third-party validation. PR contributes to marketing efforts through content, digital ads, email marketing as well as leading the consumers through the buying journey. Meanwhile, sales tend to rely on marketing efforts, in terms of following up with the leads, as well as the existing consumers for repeat purchases.

However, the main way that public relations is able to contribute and boost sales, is through earned media. Public relations is able to work on its own too because it ensures the discoverability of a business while the prospects are researching products or services. Nevertheless, the best way for PR to boost sales for B2B companies is to create strong PR and sales strategies that work together.

Whenever a public relations team works closely with a sales team, the campaigns can be supported with targeted efforts and both sides can then contribute to each other’s wins.

Media Coverage and Outreach

Whenever there are any relevant or recent PR results in terms of media coverage, the company should be including all of them in its sales outreach. This is because third-party news is a great way for companies to promote themselves to cold outreach. That way, they’re able to avoid utilizing hard sales techniques, while also getting more credibility and attention in front of the consumers.

The best way to utilize media coverage in sales outreach efforts is to provide the leads with thought leadership articles from the company, any executive speaking events or corporate feature, or simply awards that the business has received.

Public Relations and Account-Based Marketing

Another way that public relations and sales can work together is to place the news stories in specific publications that are related to the industry. This way, the company can receive more relevant media coverage which is useful in sales outreach, follow-up as well as discovery calls.

The prospects will be able to relate to those articles more personally because they will be seeing the stories in publications they already trust. This positions the business as a market leader and as someone that’s worthy of consideration and trust. Any stories that feature customer success, the company’s solutions, that are similar to the lead’s own interests, or simply stories that talk about success with similar types of consumers are useful in this case.

Public Relations and Upsells

Finally, public relations is also extremely helpful when it comes to convincing the existing consumers to make another purchase. For example, whenever the company launches a new product and the company’s spokesperson has talked about how the product is going to have a big impact on the market, it’s useful to let the consumers know about it. This is because the existing consumers might not be familiar with the new product yet, and by letting them know, the company can utilize softer sales tactics.

For this goal, it’s best to send the existing consumers any news stories about the product launch, especially if the content has quotes from early adopters of the solution. It’s also a smart idea to send them any awards the product or service has received, or even third-party validation from analysts or other industry people.