For this B2B tech PR expert, building a story is key to getting noticed
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
In the latest episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, I was joined by Mike Maynard from Chichester, England. He is the founder and owner of a business-to-business (B2B) public relations (PR) firm called Napier.
During the show, he talked about how he helps big, technical companies get noticed. He also shared some tips for an entrepreneur who got their own business and canât afford an agency like Napier but would love to know how to get noticed.
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The Freedom that Business Owners Have
One of the things Mike says to people who are running great businesses is that they have a fantastic opportunity. Because, for him, once you get to a situation wherein youâre in this big, global enterprise, it becomes very difficult to actually do things that get noticed. You become very conservative. You want to do things that, basically, youâve done before because you know that theyâve worked. It will be easy for you to start producing campaigns and content that can be a little bit boring as you get bigger.
One of the challenges that a lot of his clients have is that they want to do something new and different; they want to do something creative. But because theyâre in such a large organisation â and they tend to be more risk-averse â they find it quite hard to do what they wanted.
This is why for him, entrepreneurs who own and run a business have a lot more freedom. Itâs almost not necessary for you to look at big enterprises and say, âTheyâre amazing. Iâve got to be as good as them.â In reality, you can do things that are better and more attention-grabbing.
How Napier Helps
Asked about where he starts when a client asks for help, Mike said that it depends a little bit on where the entrepreneur is. Typically, one of the things that he advises clients is to sit down and have a bit of thinking about what theyâre trying to achieve and how theyâre going to achieve it.
At his agency, Napier, they have a four-step process, which is designed to develop really good campaigns. The secret to it is that it makes people think before they do anything.
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Entrepreneurs are usually time-pressed. Theyâve got so many different demands. Itâs very easy to go rushing into a campaign and start on that âdoingâ stage. According to him, one real advantage that enterprises have is that they have large teams. They can sit and think about what theyâre doing and plan well. Meanwhile, one risk that entrepreneurs have is running crazily into doing rather than actually thinking and planning. Hence, the first step is to take a breath and think about what it is that you want to try and achieve.
Some people start at different stages. At Napier, they tend to start by simply trying to understand the environment. Itâs a situation analysis wherein you try and see where you are as a company, what your strengths are, and what the competitors are doing. You try to understand how you position yourself in the market.
After that, the next place that youâll go to is the audience. Most entrepreneurs actually have a clear vision of what theyâre trying to achieve so the situation analysis is pretty quick. Theyâre building a company because they believe in a particular thing, they want to achieve something, and they also have an idea that is different. They have a huge advantage over the competition and they know what that is. So the next step is to look at the messaging for the audience.
As Mike emphasised, itâs important to really understand your audience.
A friend of his says this on her LinkedIn: Itâs not about creating target audiences and doing analyses. Itâs about understanding who you want to talk to and working out how you can help them. This, very simply, is what youâve got to try to do. You need to understand who matters in terms of whoâs going to decide to buy your service or product â and how you can help them.
Many marketing professionals are having complex discussions around positioning a message. But, fundamentally, messaging is about giving your audience a clear reason why working with you is going to make their life better.
The Challenge of Getting B2Bs Noticed
When youâre selling to another business, very rarely youâre selling to a person. If youâre selling to consumers, youâre almost certainly selling to a single person. Youâre almost certainly selling to women because they make most of the purchasing decisions in the consumer world. Itâs pretty direct: Youâve got to try to commit to one person whoâs got particular goals.
If you look at B2B, a lot of people are involved.
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If youâre asking someone to make a major investment, for example, in some IT infrastructure or technology, youâve obviously got a technical specialist that youâre selling to (At Napier, they do a lot of work in terms of selling to technical people). However, there are also other people involved. That technical person has to go and get a budget. They might go to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and get money. Their Chief Executive Officer (CEO) might want to be involved if a lot of money will be spent. Also, youâve got users who are going to use the infrastructure or technology. Even the technical person needs to think about these relatively non-technical users.
These are four different groups of people and theyâve got four very different requirements.
The technical person probably cares a lot about the product â its functionality and features. However, the other three donât care about these; they just want to know whatâs the benefit â How is it going to help us? The CFO is looking at how much money are they going to spend, what is the speed of return, and how long is the lifetime of the asset.
What this shows is that youâve got to look at the purchase from different perspectives.
For Mike, one of the things that entrepreneurs make the mistake of doing is they think that the person they talk to in a sales conversation is their only audience. Typically, thatâs the technical person. What you could do much better is to think about this decision-making unit and try to understand not only how you talk to these people (i.e. your messaging, the words you use) but also how you reach them â because they may be reading different publications or websites to the technical person.
Creating Personas and Buying Journeys
To help entrepreneurs take various elements of their proposition and package them as being relevant to the different stakeholders in the buying unit, Mike said that they create personas and buying journeys.
A persona is sometimes called an ideal customer profile. Itâs basically a description of the person that youâre trying to reach. It could be a description of the technical person or of the non-technical influencers. If you look at the CFO, in terms of their persona, theyâre probably not interested in technology; theyâre very interested in the return on investment (ROI), the total initial cost, and the operating costs â any ongoing costs involved. That CFO has very specific interests.
If theyâre the one signing off on the purchase, what the CEO might care about is that they donât want it to go wrong. They donât want to have a situation wherein the CEO is associated with a big technical investment thatâs gone wrong. It would be embarrassing for them. Whether itâs the employees or customers or shareholders (if theyâre a larger company), theyâd know that the CEO has made a bad decision. So they can be very risk-averse.
At Napier, they help clients build these personas that describe what drives each individual involved and, in particular, what makes them look good or bad within their organisation.
This is very different from a consumer persona because consumers are much more about what interests them. Quite often, in B2B, itâs about what theyâre afraid of and what risks they need to mitigate.
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After creating personas, they next look at the process that these personas go through when they buy. And this is called the buying journey. They basically build a model of the kind of steps that they might walk through before they agree to purchase a particular product or service.
There are different tools available to build personas and Mike shared that HubSpot has quite a good persona tool, although itâs a little bit skewed towards consumers. There are also tools for buying journeys. For their firm, they typically use Word for persona creation and PowerPoint to share the buying journey.
The reason for this is that these tools enable them to build personas and buying journeys specifically around a particular client. Some clients may have special problems that are involved. For instance, they work with a client that makes sense as a guide to food manufacturers. Though there are a lot of surrounding issues, safety might be a key issue for that particular client. For other clients, their product isn't really safety-critical.
Using such tools is also great if you're looking for inspiration because they can give you some ideas of things like the questions to ask; they give some kind of structure.
Why Building Stories is Important
The challenge that most small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) have is that they're not big enough yet to attract the attention of publishers. But an interesting thing that Mike pointed out is that even big clients struggle to get into the publications that they want to get into. They still get told that their story isnât interesting enough.
For him, the important thing to understand is that whatever youâre doing, youâve got to think about who youâre trying to reach and why itâs going to be interesting to the readers of a particular publication or viewers of a TV show. What you need to avoid doing is thinking about the people you talk to every day. Because when youâre an entrepreneur, youâre typically talking to people who are about to buy; youâre trying to close that deal and make them buy. At the start of the buying journey, they may have never heard of you. They may not even have known that they need a product like yours or a problem exists. Then, they move through the buying journey.
Typically, if you look at things like PR, itâs about reaching people at the top of that journey. Itâs about reaching people who, maybe, donât have a problem.
Mike shared that the secret is to build stories that are interesting to people at the start of that journey. Itâs explaining where there are problems that perhaps people donât realise â the unnoticed problems. Itâs about talking about how people have used the product to actually become more successful. That would be a case study. These sorts of stories work really well.
Stories like âIâve got a product, itâs amazing. Itâs 25% faster than anything else in the worldâ are fairly boring when you read that in a publication or see it on the news broadcast. What you want to do is really think about the type of content you create and understand that youâre not talking to your potential customers who are ready to buy â youâre talking to potential customers who havenât heard of you.
How Do You Build Your Story?
For Mike, entrepreneurs have a major advantage over large enterprises when it comes to building stories. Typically, itâs the entrepreneur who has a story. They started that business for a reason. And it could be because they had a problem, they want to fix it, and they built the solution for it. It could be something that they care about or theyâre interested in. If youâre a large company, itâs much harder to build a story.
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Some of Napierâs clients are companies that have been running for a hundred years. Theyâve got hundreds of thousands of employees. Itâs really hard to come up with a clear, cohesive story, particularly when that company could have a huge number of different business divisions.
When youâre focused and clear, youâve got this benefit that you know what your story is. However, according to Mike, there are a couple of things that entrepreneurs do that kind of hold them back. These include failing to be completely honest about what the story is and trying to be too corporate.
What you have to do is that you need to be very direct and open about why you started your business â the reasons for your business to be there and what itâs doing to customers. Then, do PR prior to going into sales. PR is not the thing you do when youâre trying to close a deal. Itâs very much trying to get people to start being interested in your company, go to your website, or start making enquiries. Itâs the top of that funnel.
Therefore, you have to tell your story to people who arenât wondering whether to buy your product or your competitorsâ. Tell the story to people who perhaps know that they got a problem but are not quite sure about what that is â or to people who know what their problem is but doesnât know how to solve it. Talk about these kinds of more generic problems and solutions rather than try to get specifically into your product. If you start doing that, youâll be seen as being the expert in your field. And that will be great PR because people want to come to you because they believe you understand them.
On Press Releases
Normally, the go-to content format for PR firms and people who want to do some media relations is a press release. But for Mike, what most entrepreneurs donât realise is that the press release isnât the end â itâs actually the beginning of the challenge. Because after that, you got to sell your story to the media. A release is merely a tool or a framework to sell a story to the media. It's not the thing that actually does it.
Mike advises entrepreneurs not to get hung up on writing press releases. At Napier, they work with an engineering sector and it's very technical. They have quite long and detailed press releases. If you go and look at the press releases for easyJet, for example, they look nothing like a formal press release. So for him, the first place where you should start is your story. How you communicate that is less important.
When they talk to clients â whether they're smaller companies or big enterprises â they don't really talk about tactics particularly. Theyâre not saying, "We're going to do a press releaseâ or âWe're going to do a case study." Theyâre talking more about concept generation and concept distribution.
What you've got to think about is what you can say that's interesting for someone; something thatâs particularly interesting to that person at the top of the funnel who doesn't know you or perhaps doesn't know that they got a problem. What are you going to say? Whatâs that thing you want to tell them to help them?
From that, you should look at what's the best way to tell it. It could be a press release, an article, an interview, a video, or an infographic. But you should really drive that from what you're trying to achieve rather than saying, "I need PR because PR is going to grow my business. I'm going to do a press release. And that will solve all of my problems.â
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Another challenge for entrepreneurs is that they donât have the money to make good content. However, Mike emphasised that good content doesn't necessarily cost money. Flashy content might cost money, but good content doesn't.
One of the amazing things about PR for entrepreneurs is that you can have a press release that is frankly substandard. But if you've got a great story, the journalist is going to cover that, and the journalist is going to make it look every bit as good as the competitor that's a thousand times bigger than you.
Trying to be too constricted by preconceived ideas of how you write a press release â what should be in a press release, what's the structure, what's the layout â is a bad thing. The most important thing that you want to do in PR is to communicate a story to people who could be your customers through journalists. You're not trying to create the world's best press release. You're not trying to have a particular format or get the world's greatest boilerplate. It's really about the story. This is why heâd always say to entrepreneurs to focus on the story.
To find out more about Mike and Napier, visit his LinkedIn page and their website, www.napierb2b.com. If you got questions, you can send him an email at mike@napierb2b.com.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by Bruce Mars on Unsplash
