PART 1: Moving forward by looking back

By Clare Porter

The end of one year, the beginning of the next. A time when you would traditionally employ your ‘out with the old and in with the new’ approach to resolutions, diets, wardrobes and general attitude to life.

However, this year, The Bespoke Group is exercising a different tactic. We’re going to hold on to our top 10 most-loved PR and marketing strategies and no, not because we’re a sentimental old bunch, but because these 10 PR and marketing skills, strategies and insights made 2017 the hugely success year it was for our clients.

They worked wonders for clients large and small, across the globe and in a wide range of industry sectors, and we know that they’ll continue to deliver the high-impact results we’re looking to achieve in 2018.

1. Integrated PR and Social Media Campaigns – Social Media has become such a powerful tool when integrated into PR campaigns and, in some cases, it’s the only medium that generates the amount of buzz, news coverage and share of voice we need to achieve. Take our clients, Ripples, Tonejet and Xjet. Three clients that could not be more different when it comes to target markets and product offerings! However, all three attended relevant market-sector trade shows in 2017 and in the build up to these shows and during the event itself, social media was the platform where we were able to generate high volumes of instant, positive coverage.

2. Driving Visitors to a Sales Environment – Being focused on the end result is always top of mind. Generally, that’s in supporting client sales and ensuring that we work in perfect alignment with all other marketing activities to drive prospects to our clients’ sales environments/website. For example, for Stratasys, we put particular emphasis on SEO this year, embedding key words into weblinks and ensuring consistent messaging across different communication platforms. Through this and repurposed content used for social media, blogs and content marketing, the company saw a big increase in their SEO and resulting sales.

3. Media Monitoring and Reporting – With social media and digital content being such a big part of our clients’ communications plans, news coverage is often instant and widespread. As such, capturing the coverage across the different platforms as soon as it’s published can seem like a daunting task. But thanks to our market leading and automated media monitoring services, we were able to provide clients with almost instant market response and sentiment, delivered in an easy-to-digest and share report.

4. Thought Leadership Increases Sales Enquiries – The trade media is one of the key methods by which our customers communicate with the market. Demonstrating our clients’ leadership and expertise via opinion pieces and features proved once more to be an excellent vehicle to build brand awareness. In addition, and as in the case of our client GenCell, one of those features led to a sales enquiry from a market-leading blue-chip North American enterprise.

5. Customer Endorsements – Our customers’ customers remain the best brand ambassadors we can get as they come with considerable integrity and trust. Using their testimonies in a case study on the company website is just common sense. However, we worked hard in 2017 to ensure that those endorsements were utilised in as many ways as we could – maximising both the news and client budgets. For instance, endorsements provided as a case study or press release to the media were repurposed as sales collateral for events and tradeshows. The customers themselves were asked to be speakers at open houses or in webinars shared with media and the market.

Look out for Part 2 of Moving forward by looking back in the New Year. In the meantime, if you would like to implement any of the PR and marketing services mentioned above in 2018, please contact us now.