How to get razor-sharp attention

You think of PR, and you think of national news stories. On the surface, that’s what makes a great campaign – widespread recognition and big numbers talking about your story. But dig a little deeper and under every campaign plan is the need to get a precise audience looking at you.

For most product or service-led organisations, there will be publications specific to that trade. And when we implement PR to target them, we get razor-sharp attention.

Any PR will tell you the power of PR is identifying and reaching a target audience. National and local news will incorporate this target audience, but in a broader way. Social media is able to reach an incredibly niche, targeted audience in high numbers, but doesn’t hold its attention for long. When we look at trade press, however, we get that target audience in concentrated form. And that’s why we love it.

Let’s take a closer look at why trade publications work so well in PR.

Industry professionals, colleagues and peers

When we achieve coverage in trade press, we don’t just get a consumer audience looking at your organisation, we get the professionals in that trade too. This means we not only get the opportunity to promote our product or service, but communicate our credibility. i.e. If you’re being talked about in trade press and your competition isn’t, who looks better?

Beyond this we have opportunities for building stakeholder and employee relations, and building the profile of an organisation that its peers want to be a part of. In turn, this boosts moral, makes your clients proud to be involved with you and keeps that industry profile topped up with potential clients.

Share of voice

One of the things we measure in our PR campaigns is share of voice. We’ll look at the total amount of press coverage your sector achieves at any one time, and analyse what percentage of that is coverage directly mentioning you, or attributing a piece of coverage to your organisation. The higher this is, the stronger your profile, and the lower your competitors’. When we target trade publications to achieve this higher %, we look at gaining the advantage.

Thought leadership in trade publications

In a world of fake news, the first thing audiences look for in a news outlet is credibility. Can we trust what we’re reading? Often in trade publications, it’s easy for this trust to be higher due to its dedication to one industry and less opportunity to feature quick news stories without checking out the background and facts first. When we then put your name in that coverage, opportunities to be taken seriously present themselves.

Trade publications cover interviews, opinion pieces, and articles pitched directly with full ownership over what your content looks like. Doing this can provide opportunities for long-form pieces, taking up more content space which again proves your worth.

Amongst this is thought leadership – opinion pieces that directly talk about the thing you want your campaign to highlight, all while directly attaching your name to it. While thought leadership is possible to achieve in other outlets or social media, the attention and dedication to reading in full is likely to be higher in trade press due to our learned attention spans giving us more time to focus on this kind of content.

Improving SEO with trade publications

We’ve mentioned reputation and relevance already, but when it comes to SEO, these two things are king. Backlinks to your website provided by trade publications could be worth more than links from other sources due to the relevancy, credibility and direct target audience they provide. What you get as a result is powerful SEO that boosts your PR even higher.

Networking and events

Does your organisation benefit from getting out there, face to face? Networking can be a bit of a marmite topic for some, but when you feel confident in the quality of that network, opportunities to meet people leap up the ‘pro’ column. When you’re featured in trade press, and this forms part of your pathway to networking opportunities or promoting your events, knowing those you’re reaching are your target audience automatically makes it worthwhile. On the flip side, consider the possible difference in outcome if you sourced your networking opportunities from broad-range media.

If you’d like to know more about how we generate successful trade PR, and what we could do for you, get in touch for a chat today. We’re always on the hunt for the next story to tell.