Media relations

Australian-focused web sites a PR key for B2B and hi-tech marketers

published 2008

In this digital age, Australian B2B and technology companies seeking to use PR to raise their corporate awareness, or promote their products or services with mainstream and key vertical media, often overlook the one tool that says more about their standing and credibility than anything else - their web site.

What business-to-business and hi-tech marketers using public relations as a business or marketing tool need to understand is that today most media rely heavily on the Internet to search for, and verify, information about companies, their products and services.

If a journalist receives a media release from a new company, or one they haven’t heard about for a while, one of the first things they will do is go to their web site.

In fact a 2007 US study by Arketi Group  a hi-tech business-to-business marketing and PR firm found that 60 percent of US business media spend more than 20 hours a week on the Internet, reading news, reading publications online and finding news sources etc.

If you’re in a marketing, communication or public relations role for a B2B or technology company and using PR to obtain publicity in specialist technology media, or in the technology sections of mainstream media, then ask yourself these questions:

Do we have a local URL?

If the answer is no, then unless you are a very large and respected Multinational Company (MNC), the future is dim.  Anyone visiting a site with a .com/.uk/.fr type URL will have the immediate (and probably correct) impression that all information and access to information is held at Head Office, and that to try and find local (Australian) information on this site will be a nightmare.

If, on the other hand, you are a large and respected MNC, then you will still have to find a means of guiding digital (or online) audiences to relevant parts of your site.

Do we have a local NEWS section?

Even many organisations that do make available local URLs, present a thin veneer of localisation.  Whilst the home page may give some local contact details, as soon as you click on a navigation bar such as ‘News’ or ‘About Us’ you find yourself redirected to the corporate head office site and any relevance to local news or customers evaporates.

For those companies that do have a local ‘News’ section, the majority of the media releases posted there are often corporate announcements datelined thousands of kilometres away.

Do we have local media contacts?

Journalists want to speak to internal (or external public relations agency) people in Australia, not in Atlanta, or Santa Cara, or London.  They are busy people.  They do not wish to be making exploratory calls to foreign nationals at 3.00am.  Or, worse still, waking them up by phoning their mobile on the east coast of the USA from Sydney at 5.00pm on a Monday.

A lack of local contact people is yet one more roadblock to having your organisation included in a local industry story.

Do we feature local management?

If I am a local journalist, I do not want to be discussing the latest trends in Australian Government IT procurement policies with President J Arthur Spatchcock in Cleveland Ohio.  Nor do I wish to know how the esteemed J Arthur invented the Ethernet Inverter Nodule (EIN).  What I DO want to talk about however is how that is being used by Australian companies. 

As a journalist I would also like to know the background of the local country manager, his or her vision for the company HERE, and what local management is doing to counter imports of cheap copies of the EIN from Asia

Do we list local customers?
Good PR is not about what you say about yourself.  It is about what others say about you.  And that is why a journalist or a prospective customer will want to find local reference customers on your Australian site.

There is a danger here, in that many companies like to show how happy their customers are with their products and services by publishing case studies on how they have worked together.  Whilst this is natural, if a journalist sees a case study posted on a web site they will consider it to have already been published (it is in fact in the public domain) and quite rightly decide that it cannot be published again via editorial space in their publication.

PR people with organisations need to be working with their sales pipeline to see what is available, ‘cherry-picking’ the best on offer, and pitching these to media before writing up as web and sales collateral.

Does the site reflect our key verticals?

Often a company’s head office in, say, North America, has quite different key vertical markets than its regional offices.  For example, Logistics is often a major sector in the US, but, due to the size of the logistics industry, another vertical such as Health may be the dominant sector here.

If the corporate web site is basically replicated with a localised URL, then your company’s products and services may not be placed in the right light here.

You will need to seriously address this with your Head Office counterparts to try and gain at the very least, a localised version of the corporate home page that reflects local realities.

Is it easy to understand what we actually do?

Implementations of technology in Australia can be significantly less broad than they are in larger markets such as the US and Europe.  For example, email marketing and personalised loyalty program direct mail is quite different there to what it is here.

Yet the whole language, marketing-speak and thrust of a corporate home page, whilst understood in ‘home’ markets, may be confusing at best, or simply wrong at worst in regional areas of operation.

Once again, if you want media and prospects to truly and easily understand just what you do, you may have to fight for localisation of regional home pages of corporate web sites.

The bottom line for marketing and communication professionals here, is that you may well have to be forceful with Head Office over your web site if you wish to implement any digital or online PR strategies and activities.

Without timely access to your own set of local pages, it will be impossible to effectively offer rss feeds to journalists, do electronic direct mail (EDM) campaigns to prospects that link back to local web collateral, or indeed be seen as actually having any real relevance to the Australian market other than as a sales outpost of a global company.

Note: The author of this article is a Sydney based senior independent corporate PR consultant who works exclusively with PR Managers helping them with management of the PR Department or their relationship with their PR agency. In addition he provides specialist corporate PR and communications advice where issues or change are impacting on an organisation. He also blogs regularly on PR and communications topics similar to those in this article.