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Just 31 percent of C-suite officers rate content created by professional firms as “very good,” and 38 percent find it “barely satisfactory,” according to Greentarget’s 2018 State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey – Professional Services edition.

Those are disappointing figures – and improving upon on them should be a goal of most PR marketers in the B2B space. That’s why the topics covered at the Legal & Professional Services Council (LPSC) NextGen’s annual Writing with Impact workshop earlier this month struck a chord.

The panel, which included Greentarget’s own Megan Turchi, offered tangible advice on how to improve overall quality of content, with a focus on the written word. The presenters shared best practices and tips on how PR, marketing and communications professionals can make an impact with their writing and (we hope) improve on the percentages mentioned above.

1. Know and Empathize With Your Audience.

Stephanie Reid, marketing and communications senior manager for legal recruiting and development at Kirkland & Ellis, stressed the importance of knowing your audience. We talk about this all the time. Whether you’re writing an email, a tweet, a LinkedIn post, a blog post or really anything at all, you have to stop and think about what matters to the people you’re trying to reach. It should be the first step before writing a word, even before having a prep call. Empathizing with your audience makes it possible to determine the right tone and language and decide which points to emphasize and prioritize.

2. Do Your Homework

Research. Research. Research. It’s important to be prepared before talking to anyone about a new project, a thought leadership campaign, a story mining call, etc. At Greentarget, we often talk to clients who are at the top of their fields or are known experts on particular subjects. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever achieve that level of knowledge ourselves, but doing homework ahead of time can lead to a fulfilling, productive conversation – rather than one that leaves both parties feeling like the call was a waste of time.

3. Pay Attention to Daily Communication

It might be tedious to review emails several times before hitting send, but what seems like a menial task can quickly become a missed opportunity to establish credibility. It’s important to consider a few factors: Does the individual you are working with prefer to communicate in a professional manner or are they more informal (think about their manner on calls)? How do they format their own emails and other communications? Paying attention and mirroring their methods will show not only that you are good at what you do but that you understand the importance of empathy.

4. Establish a Structured Approach

It can be difficult to gather the information necessary to craft key pieces of content – pitches, proposals, client alerts, press releases, social media posts, event invitations, etc. – but having a content hierarchy makes a big difference. That’s according to Kevin Blasko, global head of communications for McKinsey & Company’s Transformation practice. He suggested structuring your everyday communication in a way that explicitly outlines what you need. For example, in an email about a problem you to need weigh in on, bullet out the situation, complication and proposed resolution so that the recipient can easily identify what it is you are asking for so you can ultimately get the input you are seeking.

5. Be Open to Feedback

Crafting content on behalf of others is challenging, especially when it comes to capturing the right tone. Sometimes, no matter how much due diligence you did, your first draft may still get hacked nearly to death by the author. It’s important to remember that no matter how much time you put into a piece, it still has the author’s name on it. Everyone has their own style and tone – and edits are part of the process. Never take them personally, and make sure to review the feedback, incorporate it into future pieces of content and consider asking colleagues or mentors for a second review.

By taking these simple steps, professional services marketers can improve their writing and build credibility. Even the most seasoned writer should constantly be seeking ways to improve and ensure their content is relevant, engaging and compelling – so it’s important to keep these tips in mind as you’re drafting your next email or writing your next article.

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The tech industry stands at a critical juncture. The consequences of the fake it till you make it culture have come home to roost, opening a yawning trust gap between companies, their customers and the society they so earnestly promised to uplift.

In this environment, enterprise tech thought leaders must take up their responsibility to contribute to a smarter conversation — by providing valuable information and intelligence to the audiences they want to influence. Of course, they’re busy building businesses, leaving it to their marketing directors to find creative new avenues to break through the noise in an information-saturated world.

In our work with clients at the growth stage and enterprise level, we’ve sniffed out a few of those paths. Here are six ways to build a holistic thought leadership program that will resonate with enterprise technology buyers.

1. Understand Your Audience by Mapping Personas and Journeys
Before developing a PR and marketing plan, it’s critical to develop a stronger understanding of your best customers, where they’re coming from and the journey that will lead them to you:

  • Interview customers and the sales team to develop what we call an audience proto persona — a brief tactical snapshot that helps you get aligned more nimbly so you can better anticipate what customers need and how to reach them efficiently in ways that matter.
  • Perform market intelligence to ensure your approach and message deliver something exceptional to the people you want to reach.
  • Develop a journey map to help you reach your customers in the awareness, consideration, nurturing and conversion stages.

2. Define and Develop a Signature POV

  • Once you gain a strong understanding of your different audiences and can prioritize them, it’s time to develop a narrative for your company through a signature point of view that explains why you’re doing what you’re doing to the people that matter.
  • Write out and share your vision, informed by the conversations you’ve had with your community of customers.
  • We like Simon Sinek’s Start With Why framework as a guide.

3. Launch and Sustain Public Relations

  • Once your customer journey and narrative are developed, your marketing team can incorporate your vision into planning and structuring milestone announcements including product launches, pivots, M&A activity and important new hires.
  • The complexity of the business drives how much is required here, so prioritize where you’re going to start before allowing the planning process to get too big. We expect and like a high degree of iteration in this process.

4. Plan and Execute Proactive Media Relations

  • Reach out to journalists whose work you, your network and your best customers like and respect; offer them meaningful interactions with your leadership team, and R&D team if appropriate. It’s important to play the long game here. You are not looking for coverage out of the gate, so much as for relationships that are useful to journalists (which in turn must be useful to their readers and, only then, to you).
  • For a client who leads an international network of startup accelerators, we invited several journalists to come check out the flagship accelerator in New York. The next day a few reporters posted pieces based on things they heard; others came back to the subject after a few weeks. But the most powerful story came from a journalist who did not return to the subject for many months and seemed for a long time like she would never write about the accelerator. She was not going to risk her very considerable credibility sharing how unique the accelerator was until she knew its ins and outs, had independently corroborated what she saw and heard, had seen the character of our client. And, most importantly, not until the story was relevant to her readers. Expecting a transactional sequence — “come see us, then write about us” — would have been shortsighted.

5. Develop a Content Strategy
One of the biggest challenges many of our tech clients face is establishing a content strategy. There are several effective ways to implement a customer-centric approach to focus your narrative and plan its execution.

  • Host a summit with key stakeholders to hash out and agree on your key messages and points of differentiation
  • Articulate a content strategy, which is really a plan for consistent storytelling and sharing ideas, and set an editorial calendar for publishing.

6. Promote Your Leaders for Executive Visibility

  • As one of our most successful founder-clients likes to say, even in big-ticket enterprise sales, people buy people, not technology.
  • Continue to refine the conversation tested through the work described above and build it out through the presence of leadership and partners so that a beneficial cycle takes root in which the thought leadership the business shares and develops through its community continues to serve as a reference in the marketplace, where it can be tested with other thought leaders.

These six steps can lay the foundation for a strong thought leadership program. If you want to differentiate your organization, your aim as a marketer is to contribute skillfully to the conversations that matter to your customers, as well as your investors. In an era of rampant noise, ideas that serve your audience and perspectives that help them comprehend and thrive in an era of unpredictability and mistrust deserve to be heard.

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As we enter the time of year where the temptation to reflect overwhelms our entrepreneurial instinct to look forward, a seminal moment in our history comes to mind. Perhaps even more important than the beers we shared in a grocery store parking lot 14 years ago.

Just over a decade ago, we sat in a conference room and watched a demo of new software that empowered organizations like Greentarget to run quantitative research campaigns. Today, many of these platforms are household names. But, at the time, this was a novel idea within an emerging segment of the SAAS industry. Our reaction to the demo was along the lines of: “We can do this.” Which quickly morphed into “We have no business trying to do this.”

True to form, we jumped in head first, another leap of faith, and discovered that our professional services clients immediately understood the marketing-communications value of data-driven insights. Since that time, we’ve run countless research-based campaigns that have uncovered points of view on everything from autonomous vehicles and tax reform to global bribery and cyber risk. We’re immensely proud of how strong the thread of research-based insights runs through Greentarget.

Fast forward 10 years to last March when the Holmes Report awarded Greentarget its Diamond SABRE award for “Superior Achievement in Research and Planning.” The award, based on our work for our client, Duff & Phelps, was a proud achievement for sure but also a reminder of the responsibility we embrace at Greentarget to direct a smarter conversation.

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We believe that industry dialog benefits from the skillful participation of our best and smartest thinkers. We are forever grateful for that seminar 10 years ago; it put us firmly on the road to mastering data-driven thought leadership campaigns. It’s a key element to fulfilling our mission of directing a smarter conversation.

Speaking of data, as we close out another year of striving to cultivate a destination for the public relations industry’s top talent, here are a few statistics that make us smile:

  • Our team welcomed four new babies this year – with one more to come in early 2019.
  • An astounding 23 young professionals completed our internship program this year, including the three who graduated to full-time employment. Great things are coming from our newest junior associates: Taylor Craddock, Briana Chernak and Nathan Kamradt. It’s a privilege for us to play a small role in the careers of so many young professionals.
  • In a major expansion of our repertoire, we welcomed John Matthew (JM) Upton as Greentarget’s first Director of Digital, responsible for expanding Greentarget’s digital capabilities into a full-service offering.
  • Further deepening our bench strength, Sonja Elmquist and Megan Turchi joined to support our content and editorial capability, while Annie Keller and Sarah Bauman joined our account teams as Account Supervisor and Associate, respectively. All four can already tell you exactly what time the groceries arrive on Mondays and within an hour when there’ll be nothing left but baked rice cakes.
  • If you didn’t make it to our offices in Chicago this year, you might’ve found us at the Legal Marketing Association national conference in New Orleans. Or at GroPro, an event in New York focused on bringing professional service firms and individuals together to exchange industry best practices and ideas. We also spoke at LMA Tech Midwest, Legal & Professional Services Council, RelativityFest and facilitated a session on artificial intelligence at the PR Council’s Critical Issues Forum in Chicago.
  • Greentarget’s 7th annual State of Digital and Content Marketing report dropped this June. And for the first time, we expanded our research to include C-suite officers beyond the general counsel. The resulting reports revealed that, while CEOs, CMOs and others differ from legal executives in some respects (they consume more video, read fewer email alerts and are less obnoxious about explaining the flaws in “Law & Order” storylines), both groups of decision-makers are hungry for better, more timely and more thoughtfully curated content.

We would like to wish you and yours a joyous holiday season filled with ample opportunity to reflect and celebrate what’s most important to you. With deep gratitude for all that was and what is yet to come.

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Humanity Rising needed a hand. The nonprofit group, which gives Chicago-area students scholarships for self-directed volunteer service projects, wasn’t telling its story in ways that resonated. Debbie Ferruzzi, Humanity Rising’s founder and CEO, came to Greentarget for help.

In the course of six months, our team not only revamped Humanity Rising’s messaging but also helped Debbie and her team develop and execute on comprehensive marketing and communications plans. In all we spent nearly 200 hours, all delivered pro bono, on Humanity Rising – an investment in time that easily paid for itself in inspiration and gratitude for our team. Here’s how it happened.

Capturing Our Imagination

In 2017, Greentarget launched its first-ever GT Cares Grant to expand our pro bono reach and build a deep connection with an organization that truly aligned with our service offerings, our background and the collective passion of our team. Each member of the Greentarget staff sought nominations through personal and social media networks, casting a wide net to find organizations that would match our strengths and push us to stretch our comfort zone. Our Pro Bono and Community Investment Committee carefully winnowed the group to five candidates to take to the full staff for a vote. While each of the candidates was deserving, and each would have been an exciting challenge, one in particular captured our imaginations.

Humanity Rising is a movement to create a better world through volunteer service. By enabling students to choose a cause they feel passionately about, Humanity Rising helps bring awareness to dozens of worthy causes – making it a perfect fit for our team, which has a broad range of philanthropic passions.

Throughout our six-month engagement with Humanity Rising, we assisted with messaging, media relations, event support and digital and social strategy. All of this work came together in a comprehensive PR and communications plan, which included sets of strategic messages tailored to Humanity Rising’s stakeholders: students, individual donors and corporate sponsors. It was important to define a clear message for each group, and we produced versatile messages to be molded and iterated across different types of marketing materials and external communications as Humanity Rising continues to grow. The plan also included in-depth media and influencer lists tailored to the organization’s audiences.

In addition to this plan, we provided press release and media advisory templates, content for sponsorship brochures, a social media plan, draft social posts and strategic guidance on Google Ads and website structure. We also gave support and guidance on follow-up for a conference Humanity Rising attended and developed a job description that led to the employment of a new intern to help support PR and marketing initiatives into the future.

Purpose-Driven Work – At Work

In the end, we left Humanity Rising equipped to more strategically and effectively communicate its mission. They’re poised to execute a media relations plan and develop savvy content. We’re looking forward to seeing what’s next for them.

At Greentarget, doing purpose-driven work isn’t a requirement; it’s a benefit for our team. And from an organization standpoint, we are lucky to contribute to causes we believe in while offering our colleagues unique experiences in both public relations and life. From the United Way of Metro Chicago and Heartland Alliance to the Domestic Violence Legal Clinic and the Cameron Kravitt Foundation to Culinary Care and Barrel of Monkeys, Greentarget has committed hundreds of hours to a broad spectrum of organizations that are working tirelessly to improve the lives of thousands of individuals and their families.

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New relationships underscore increasing demand in agency’s services across earned media, research, content and digital.

CHICAGO, December 13, 2018— Greentarget Global Group, a leading business-to-business public relations firm, today announced the addition of several new clients in the third quarter of 2018. Greentarget will be providing PR services ranging from research projects, thought leadership initiatives, and media relations programs.

Greentarget’s new clients include:

  • Brown Rudnick, a law firm with offices in the United States and Europe that represents clients from around the world in high-stakes litigation and business transactions.
  • Carbon Black (NASDAQ: CBLK) is a leading provider of next-generation endpoint security delivered via the cloud.
  • TransMed Systems, a leading provider of intelligence, technology, and expertise to dramatically improve the process of developing, identifying and matching eligible patients to clinical trials.

About Greentarget

Greentarget is a strategic public relations firm focused exclusively on the communications needs of highly competitive business-to-business organizations. The firm was founded in 2005 to focus on the specific communications issues facing sophisticated organizations that compete on expertise, service and reputation. Today, Greentarget delivers a unique mix of earned media, content, research, digital, analytics and special situations counsel to help clients communicate and influence through normal business cycles and in times of crisis. The agency’s success is due to carefully cultivated talent, specialized capabilities and strict adherence to a client service process called The Greentarget Way. Greentarget’s team of 60+ employees, located in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, offer the entrepreneurial spirit, geographic breadth and depth of experience required to serve leading business-to-business organizations. For more information, visit www.greentarget.com.

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In an ever-evolving digital world, it can be difficult to identify the newest and most effective public relations tools to keep your business relevant and your ideas fresh. Last month, Greentarget attended PRWeek’s PRDecoded conference in Chicago, which focused on how communicators can use these tools to thrive in a digital world. Marketers from technology, consumer goods, travel and hospitality brands presented alongside agency leaders to discuss the latest PR and digital trends.

What our team learned at the conference is that when it comes to navigating this fast-paced environment and staying relevant, it really comes back to one thing: cultivating relationships. To understand the newest digital platforms, what they measure and how they can impact business, it is crucial to remember that the end user of all these platforms is a person. PR professionals have a natural edge here. We talk a lot at Greentarget about how PR professionals are the “keepers of the lost art of media relations.” Public relations professionals are by definition relationship people. Here are some ways that focusing on relationships gives us an edge in the digital landscape and equips us to keep up.

Reinvention

In the conference’s opening session, “The Leading Disruptor,” Matt Maloney, founder and CEO of GrubHub, stressed the importance of being open to change, revisiting your business plans at least every six months and encouraging your team to keep up with new tools and trends. Accurately defining your company narrative and remaining aligned with your vision will give your team the room they need to push the envelope and grow with the business.

Storytelling

It’s no surprise that the words “content” and “narrative” were thrown around repeatedly across all sessions. The problem has become that there is so much content to consume and even more ways to consume it. We ourselves took aim squarely at the problem in Greentarget’s annual State of Digital and Content Survey, highlighting the issue of information overload. DeLu Jackson of Conagra challenged us to spend more time listening to, monitoring and engaging customers and clients to craft more meaningful content to answer the question “What are we solving for?” in his session titled “Producing for Your Customers.”

Attention

How do you attract someone’s attention and get them to “lean in” to your narrative?

“When content is abundant, attention is finite,” Charlie Hart of RXBar said in his session titled “The Price of Attention in a Digital Age.” Hart showed how the mechanics of the human brain discern what information is worth our attention: be clever, mysterious and seductive. Challenging your audience to think is the best way to earn, and keep, their attention.

Sandra Stahl of Jacobstahl Marketing Communications used the example of Wendy’s in her session, “Relationships Remain the Center of Digital Communications.” She offered one of the company’s most recent campaigns, creating a menu item from a fan’s tweet, to show how the company has succeeded by noticing—and monetizing—their users’ attention.

Humanity

At the core of any digital strategy is understanding and building a relationship with your target audience. While one of the biggest challenges that marketers face is keeping up with the rate of evolution and change in technology, no matter the new digital platform, people remain the constant in this changing landscape, Stahl said. People are looking for the same thing from digital marketing and communications that they want from any other interaction: a relationship.

The PRDecoded conference validated the notion that building and maintaining relationships remains the most important component of our job as communications professionals, while providing an exciting, fresh look at how PR is evolving in the digital age. Building trust across multiple platforms and adapting to change daily is no small feat. But it’s also what we do best. Being in the center of the digital age allows us even more opportunity to showcase those skills.

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