There are a variety of reasons you might be considering a fresh face for your business. Perhaps you’ve been a fairly small, word of mouth company, and you’re realizing that there’s more out there for you if you can just make your company feel a little more engaged. Maybe your business growth has stagnated, and you feel that you need to take things in a new direction. Or possibly, your branding got off to a somewhat haphazard start, and it’s time to regroup and move forward. What do you do? How do you get started?
Make the most of what you have
Before you decide to rebrand your B2B company, take solid stock of what you already do in terms of content marketing, location, and thought leadership. Have you tried all the tips offered over at Huffington Post for making trade shows more interesting?
The point here is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as the saying goes. You may need a fresh start, but you may just need to do what you’re already doing, only do it better.
Adam Torkildson at Search Engine Journal has written about how, when he begins working on fresh public relations with a new company, he often commits to spending at least a few hours helping them learn to use what he’s building for them. In our digital age, there’s no such thing as being done with PR. A specialized consultant can help you get the bones of your PR strategy in place, but it’s a living, breathing thing that you will need to tend every day to keep your business growing and successful.
Consider outsourcing
Even if you have someone on your team who is absolute aces at content creation and social media, it can still be helpful to bring in an outside consultant to at least start your PR rebrand. The Epoch Times points out several reasons why this often works out better for many companies.
•Finding everything you need in one person can be difficult. For a truly successful marketing department, you need people who understand older forms of PR, like press releases and conference calls, as well as new forms, like vlogs and social media. Finding someone who stays up to date on the latest SEO trends but can also bust out a perfectly formatted press release in an hour can be challenging. For smaller companies, it can be especially difficult finding one person that they can afford who can do all of this. Going with an entry level person can be more affordable, but might not garner the kind of experience that will land a company with top-notch search results.
•Agencies vet their people well, and can offer allow people to better specialize. When you go with a PR agency, you know that they’ve spent the necessary time getting the best content creators, PR people, and marketing gurus together that they can. By letting them assign your content to the right people as appropriate, you’re maximizing the dollar you’re spending as much as possible.
•Save time and money by letting someone else handle the HR. When you use an agency, you don’t have to worry about things like “what if this person doesn’t work out, and I have to retrain someone,” or the cost of benefits for them, or where to put their desk. Most agencies do the vast majority of their work over the Internet these days, and by contracting your marketing work out, you’re making your own life easier, and letting yourself get back to the field in which you excel.
Manage a team through remote tools
Whether you decide to use freelancers or create your own in house marketing team, it’s important to know that collaboration on documents and projects has come a long way in even the last five years. Gone are the days where we emailed out a document for everyone in the office to comment on. As Chris Grasso laid out in Social Media Today, by using project management and online collaboration tools, you can minimize misunderstandings and maximize collaboration between your team. Many of these tools are either free, or available for a low fee.
The world of PR has changed dramatically in the last few years. While it used to be that a company could hire someone to create a logo and a sign and call the matter settled, companies that really want to excel in the new digital marketplace need to commit to their branding. A brand is what sets a company apart from the competition. It speaks to a client’s trust, interest, and faith in the company itself. A brand can be incredibly simple, but don’t ever make the mistake of believing it to be unimportant.
