Three things you must know before investing in B2B PR

Written by Simpatico PR

Posted on 2025-03-12

You may be investing in B2B PR already and are questioning whether it’s value for money. You may have allocated a budget and be wondering how to spend it wisely. Or you may be wondering how your competitors manage to get more coverage and grow faster than you.

Either way there are some fundamental truths that determine you current or future success or failure. 

Some of these depend directly on the type of agency you choose and their team’s skills. Some depend on you – your knowledge of how PR works and what you are prepared to do to make it work.

There are three areas you must understand before spending a slice of your B2B marketing budget on PR.

1. Your B2B PR agency cannot sell what you do

Let’s get this straight from the off. PR is not a direct sales tool. It is a brand building discipline. But, B2B PR can be far more powerful than advertising, SEO, social, influencers, or even face-to-face conversations.

PR starts wars, changes governments, starts social movements. Other forms of marketing can’t do any of those things. It is by far the most powerful form of marketing in the playbook – it’s just tricky to get right.

If you can crack it, it will add huge monetary value to your business in terms of indirect sales success and brand fame both of which will make your business worth more.

So don’t ask your B2B PR agency whether it can generate leads. It can’t. But it can enable other channels to generate leads more effectively.

How? The answer boils down content. PR whether its aiming to achieve media coverage or get you more social likes or onto speaker platforms is all about content.

There are three basic forms.

Thought leadership and insight.

News.

Business culture, people and leadership.

Some business will be rich in all three. But many won’t. However, the one that almost every business can do – because you will be an expert in what you sell – is thought leadership and insight.

Thought leadership enables you to position your business as an authority. It is the most powerful aspect of business communications.

And if you do that well, it will help you sell.

2. Recruit your agency like you would your team

People by people. But do they buy people well? When you recruit an employee, you are probably assessing a mixture of three key needs.

• Will this person be able to fulfil the role effectively now?

• Will this person be able to progress and increase the value they add over time?

• How well do they fit with the team, culture, image of the organisation?

• You may also ask yourself whether you like them.

Recruiting a B2B PR agency should be no different. But it is not a single person you are recruiting. It is a team. And the person you speak to about the relationship, or that leads a pitch to you may represent just a fraction of the team that ends up working with you.

This is where mistakes are made, resulting in B2B PR failure.

A key challenge is to assess the skills of the group that you will be paying for. Key questions to ask are:

• How much of each person are you buying?

• What are they capable of?

• Does this capability mix fit what I need?

If you are a large organisation with a high volume of news and in-bound media relations requests or opportunities a larger, lower skilled team may actually work well so long as there is some access to experience.

If on the other hand, you need to work hard to create media opportunities, a small, highly experienced team capable of creating content of a higher quality, will most likely achieve far more for you. This is particularly true of a company that has no news. Customer sensitivities may for example prevent you from issuing press releases about contract wins and work.

Automation and AI is starting to transform how PR agencies operate just like every other industry. But proactive, high quality thought leadership creation requires human experience and a higher skill level.

3. Your B2B PR ROI depends on you as much as them

Your B2B PR agency will be judging you. Whether this is an uncomfortable thought or not, you will be assessed on your PR performance.

Why?

Because, as mentioned above PR is a content game. That content must come at least in part from you.

There are several ways to make sure you achieve ROI from your B2B PR agency relationship:

• Work with them to assess and understand how PR content can support your business objectives, your key sales and proposition messages and your communications goals. In short how can you tell your story/s to support sales.

• Facilitate access to content. Assess what content you have to play with. Create a pipeline of possible information to work with and align that schedule with PR, socials, other marketing and business development out-reach.

• Identify the talent and expertise that can work with your B2B PR agency to create content. Make that talent accessible and get the people involved on-board with the need or rationale for doing PR.

• Look at your insight data or ability to commission or source data that will create powerful content.

• Ask your agency how they will create thought leadership. Do they have a process that will create material that will work in the media? Can they do it consistently?

If you plan for PR success your agency will love you. Because at the end of the day, your success in B2B PR is their success. You are their next case study in the making and their future sales may depend on you.

Find out more at www.simpaticopr.co.uk