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hi i'm arthy shaw executive editor for provoke media and host for today's episode so over many years of judging pr campaign awards the metric that seems to resonate most strongly with judges is did this campaign change behavior and it seems the most powerful way to say yes it did is to show that the pr campaign somehow contributed to revenue generation so on today's episode we're going to look specifically at one component of revenue generation and that's lead generation we're going to look at five ways that pierre can and arguably should be involved in lead generation specifically for b2b companies so this is part of a bigger series which i'll link to in the show notes that we did in partnership with pan communications called rebuilding a new future for b2b pr and marketing so to have this conversation we have two fantastic thinkers and speakers we have susan o'brien who is vp of marketing and communications at thousand eyes which is part of cisco and nikki festa o'brien who is svp at pan communications and i should say there is no relation between susan and nikki even though they have the same even though they're both o'brien's welcome susan and nikki thank you thank you yeah so so the way that that we'll have this conversation and just for our listeners as well i will set things up by giving a reason that pr should be involved in lead generation and you all tell me if you agree or disagree and and either way just feel free to elaborate um on your on your response this is to feel a little bit like a game show okay well then brian versus o'brien oh brian bryant listener should be keeping score um okay all right so we'll just to to kick things off but let's let's let's talk about the world that we're living in and how changed it is 2020 changed the game all you know obviously conferences in-person activations they were canceled for 2020 so many of them are getting canceled for 2021 now um and this sort of shifted the focus and and did open up an opportunity for pierre to be involved in lead gen susan i'll start with you agree disagree i mean how can i disagree that 2020 changed the game i mean wow i mean i think first thing that i gotta i have to put out there on this topic is that i really believe that we're all in service of sales right we wouldn't exist as a company if we weren't trying to sell our product right and so we have to be in alignment with the demand generation team the sales team ultimately and we have to be doing our part to all be rowing our boats in the same direction right and i think one of the best things a pr person can do in their career is to understand demand generation and even the sales cycle right because once you understand it you can lend every single planning decision through it so when we look at what happened in 2020 wow in-person events being gone was a huge blow like the percentage of plan lead capture that usually comes from in-person events is massive and so this was really a time for pr to shine actually this was a time when we could start to think like how do we get all hands on deck what gated content can we repurpose into contributed articles that could drive to a full download how can we connect timely news lines to existing access or do we need to work with dg to create new assets to kind of to get to that win-win sort of thing the one thing i will say is that scale was the hardest thing to replace here right a in-person event could drive anywhere from you know 50 leads to 5 000 leads depending on the show that you are at so i think really the only way that we can get to pr helping address that scale gap that we had there is is with integrated communications and i know we're going to talk about that in a little bit as well i have one follow-up question for you on this um to your point about scale with you know moving things online could you at least increase the quality of leads that you were getting even if the quantity wasn't comparable to in person that's a great question i mean it depends if you're hitting the right places for your audience need to be right you know i think that when you think about things like putting contributed articles out there yes of course you can measure umvs and all that kind of stuff but is it the publications that your target audience are are reading and ultimately are you compelling them to head over to your website and download that asset and actually fill a form that's where it's a lot more difficult than you know what you would get an in-person event nikki nikki what are your thoughts on on whether 2020 changed changed the yeah you know in so many ways this time period while i would never want it to have happened this way or nor could we have ever predicted it it was kind of validating um for us as an agency and you know as you know as a as a team because this is a cautionary tale we've been telling for a really really long time which is if you don't have the right infrastructure for lead capture in more than one channel and across and in more than one way this will happen and this was that moment where you know people felt like oh you know that's for a rainy day or you know you're kind of being dramatic or whatever the case may be it there was there was that moment where um you know the load time on their website mattered um the lack of content quality content on their website mattered the lack of ctas mattered um because they you know they have leaned on this crutch for so long these events and the ability to scale and quickly and easily kind of capture what they need so um i definitely agree and uh it was it was the pr agencies that these companies turned to when they couldn't get there so we know that it's a part of it because because that's who they went to exactly they said okay well now what do i do and you've been telling me about this for a while well put your money where your mouth is and let's see what happens when you do something different and it really separated um the brands into leaders and laggards like immediately it was just a complete and total divide i needed to set up that infrastructure yeah yeah you touched a little bit on kind of a couple of the other points i don't know i want to raise so let's i'll move on to point number two and okay you can start with this one um earned media and quality content boosts seo to lead generating assets yes i do believe that our media um and quality content boots seo and lead generate assets i repeated that because your audio cut out um and i think it's about you know if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it didn't fall it's the same principle here um if you you could create the most compelling piece of content you can even market it really well but if you're marketing to the exact same group of people all the time or uh without the education and what the brand does or why whatever this piece of content or whatever you're trying to market is useful you know it's gonna get really lonely uh it's going to be that lonely tree in the forest that fell and nobody saw it um so so many clients they took the time during this past you know year year and a half to work on things like their website their company messaging their branding their content marketing strategy and rightfully so um you know what is the point of a pretty well spoken website if there's no traffic going to it and that's what pr can do it can bring new eyeballs to the same old content or new content to the website and you know it's so important that as you go through that funnel that you're taking them on a journey once they get there so it's it's so intrinsically linked i can't even imagine a conversation where i'm only talking about the byline or the or the media opportunity without talking about where are they going what's the point of that and what does is there a red thread message that runs through it all so that they understand at the end of the day what they're buying and why they should be buying it yeah i wanted to add something you made a really good point there nikki and i think um an adjacent point i would make to this to this one is that you cannot underestimate or undervalue seo right you should have a very good relationship with your seo lead to make sure that you are ranking on the keywords that you need and want to be found for and you need to understand google is a source for journalists right twitter is a source for journalists if you want to be found to be an expert on you know point x you need to have that content on your website you need to have thoughtful blogs about it and this is huge win-win for you because this gets you to a point where journalists find you where they don't even have to talk to you they don't have to pick up the phone they can hyperlink your article they can you know use you as a source and you can find it in your google alerts the next day because you did a good job at laying the digital breadcrumbs to be findable by journalists all right so i'm gonna i'm gonna move us on to number three i think you both made some very excellent points there um so we're now living in a channel neutral world right so pr can and should play at any stage of the funnel uh the idea being that pr um can use all of the tools that we consider to be part of the marketing mix to reach and persuade all stakeholder groups that includes um including customers right um so i'll leave it there and susan i'll let you jump in yeah no i couldn't agree more i mean tofu isn't enough right thought leadership isn't enough just those thought leadership bylines just talking about the narrative at a really high conceptual level isn't going to do much to drive you down to lead gen right the whole point of this conversation here you have to think about how do you get to that middle of funnel content how do you get to that bottom of funnel content and how do you connect the dots here right so let me give you an example you know last year around the time when the pandemic was starting to um take hold we were doing some research about what is driving traffic to our free trial which is you know a high intent bottom bottom of funnel offer that we have here and we really quickly found that there was this concept that we have called the share link and it allows you to get into our product and see what's happening on the internet you know when twitter goes down say or when you're your google goes down your gmail goes down etc kind of thing why is this breaking and what we thought really quickly was hey we should really put together a podcast about this right where every week we talk about what's breaking on the internet and why and we walk through these share links that we have and we use that we put it in social media in the blog post about the podcast etc and very quickly we would see that you know we would point journalists toward this right we would share it with uh them our customers it would go email it to our database sort of thing but look i mean that came out of a comms initiative of how do we connect the dots between pr coms you know and uh owned media right and and bottle of fun bottom of funnel type offers so that's that's a quick example i can show that yeah it's a great example too because it's all about the source of of that information right the source where's you know where's this data coming from where is it originating and you know being able to like you said the breadcrumbs retrace your steps and say okay so this person started here how do i make the most of that and um i have a similar example uh one of the clients that we work with in the devops space we always start our programs off with a digital visibility audit you know what what are all the numbers that we need to know that we need to impact and let's benchmark them now so this is where you started and now in six months and a year we're going to revisit these numbers and we're going to show improvement but i never understand you know why people wouldn't think about pr in the same data driven way they would think about anything else what would be the point in starting to get media coverage on topics without looking at what topics are going to make an impact for that company and where it should be placed so when we did that we actually found we did find the media sources that seem to be driving it at least to date but we also found a couple channels that were really interesting and one of them was youtube and it was it kept coming up it was number one the devops community i'm sure you see that cisco as well and when we when we looked even deeper into it the youtube page like wasn't good it you know these are videos that were six seven years old but they had thousands of views because of the quality of that content and what that community that devops community was looking for so the first thing we did is we scrapped the comms plan that they were asking us to create for them we actually created a comms plan that we thought would move the needle for the data that we just benchmarked and that was an aha moment i think for everybody at the table that you know that the playbook has to be really custom really different depending on the information and depending on the data that you're able to attain and that you know will work based on the the customer behavior right right what excellent uh examples from from both of you um which uh so my first point will be um customer stories drive sales nikki so i think what what is sales tell you and it's all about meeting your customer where they are right what problem they're looking to solve what product do they admire what meal can they simply not live without um having when they're at a restaurant whatever it is it doesn't you know we we both susan and i work in a b to b space um but that doesn't mean that b2c concepts don't apply and at the end of the day you need to show a reflection of your buyer um and why it's a solution that would work for them and customer stories and a wide swath of customer stories does that in the best possible way and also finding sort of interesting lessons that you can teach them from other industries one of the best keynotes i ever saw is they gave this whole example about um a train conductor and something that you know a challenge he had on sort of train times and picking people up and it was a really interesting story that had absolutely nothing to do with anybody in the audience but he walked through what he learned from that challenge in such an interesting way and he turned out to be a customer of the brand that was putting on the event and i thought wow they had to dig really deep for that customer story and it was one that resonated with everybody in the room because the the problems that he had was such an omnipresent issue of how do you know the right time in the right place and that always stuck with me because the customer stories should always be answering your number one two and three questions that every single prospect would come to your site to solve and then the telling the good story behind it that will sell it every single time it doesn't have to be you know the exact same problem it's about finding the exact right problem and then the exact right solution right right i think those universal stories are so key we always get back at our events that some of the best keynotes we have are from outside of the industry um because you can kind of learn some of the best practices from from other sectors um susan yeah no i mean who's going to argue this point right of course customer stories but i mean look if we think about it in the context of lead gen this is indirect right this is you know but you know it's something that when you land it sellers will share it right like this is the one type of content that they will actually go out of their way to proactively send an email make sure it goes to the right people gets in front of the right you know eyeballs but one other point i wanted to make on this is especially given you know 0.1 you made 2020 kind of game change the game here and and going back to the idea that we're all on the same team and we all want to row in the same direction there's a trade-off conversation to be had here i don't know about you but you know most companies um uh nikki i bet you would agree they struggle to get customer stories right it is not easy and one of the things that you know is a little hard to do when you you know come from pr and storytelling and you really just want to like keep that customer close to your heart a harder thing to do is to say well what's going to be best for the business what if i hand over this customer to the demand generation team and we we run a webinar off of them instead and we do a webinar interview with them and then i'm going to invite journalists to that and then i'm going to write derivative content on top of that i'm going to write a blog right i'm going to we're going to create infographics whatever sort of thing how do we do the slice and dice off of it and make it a win-win-win kind of scenario versus just kind of like let's keep it for me let me get my one you know little customer story hit and i get to check my box for my you know okr's for the year kind of thing right yeah right i mean just that the various teams need to speak to each other right because sometimes the the the pr back to the point about channel being channel neutral right i mean the the pr idea of what a traditional story is may not be applicable and it may not be most comfortable for the customer either um all right so so is is this just the natural okay this is this is point five i feel like i should build it up a little bit um is is this just the natural outcome of integrated communications susan i'll start with you i mean yeah uh you know in a car integrated comms is the dream right it's it's a lot harder to execute on especially the bigger the organization that you're in the harder it is to execute on right you may be lucky to get you know one or two really strong integrated coms campaigns in a year lucky you know but if if you take the time to do this and do it well nobody's going to ask for the roi on pr it's it's it's just self-evident there right like pr lifts up the narrative it drives the asset it keeps the drumbeat going after day one with derivative content derivative pitches and everybody is happy yes it has the natural outcome out of integrated comms nikki you know i i feel like our um our hands were forced though we're willing participants um to move in this direction uh at pan we have a robust integrated marketing department creative department a content department a media department and then there's the generalists right the pr practitioners that sit across all of it and we're driving this this integrated communications agency and we had to do it because that's what our customers our customers were asking us for right they didn't want um you know 10 hits and and send them over and kind of call it a day they were asking for more they were asking us questions you just simply couldn't answer unless you knew how to analyze the data that they got on their website which is nothing to do with pitching media right so you know you build on data analytics department you start building out all these different facets to start serving the needs of the customers you know we're also you know trying to sell uh our own services and products so um a really interesting example that we found that kind of i think proves the mission the integrated communications mission statement um which is we can't put a concept called the panpod and what we did is we grabbed someone from all those different disciplines and we bring them together at the beginning of a plan for for our clients so for example if susan would have come to me and say you know what these are the three objectives that i have for this year these are the kpis that we need to impact what are you going to do about it the first thing i do is grab my pod right i grab someone from creative some from integrated marketing data team someone from content somewhere from media and then you you know your general practitioners that sit on on susan's team and we'd say okay here it is guys and here's what they do what are we going to do about it and what the outcome is an end-to-end campaign and that's what you were touching on susan right there you get two to three of them a year but having them designed um as as your actual plan so that you're not getting media results you're getting media results that support this campaign which is driving towards this goal and this result and it's you know there's everyone has some sort of exit event or milestone moment within a year maybe it's funding maybe it's an acquisition maybe it's earnings maybe whatever it is maybe it's simply a product launch or a product update whatever it is that's that's the focus that's the center point and the campaign is what makes it really sing because it's not just about executing on that or fulfilling one of those needs it's about making it have an impact that in turn turns to sales right that's that lead gen that's the goal that's the from top and bottom doesn't matter it's not really a funnel anymore it's just all in and it's all out so um that's that's my spiel i guess for the pan pod but also for really bringing the disciplines to the table and that's what integrated communications is yes absolutely well and there you have it right you know five reasons if you have you had any doubts five reasons why pr should be involved in lead generation as well as some really compelling examples so thank you susan and thank you nikki for coming on and sort of you know bringing this to our to our listeners yeah thanks for having us it was fun yeah thanks so much ryan first of all brian out and versus oh well you know what in in the comments i want our listeners to tell us who won of course i think it was a tie i think you both were brilliant well thank you again and thank you to our listeners and we will be back soon with another episode