Have you ever found yourself in a company obsessed with doing it all?
All the social media. All of the time.
All the media relations. All of the time.
All the events. All of the time.
All the stakeholder engagement. All of the time.
From the largest multinationals to the smallest startups, it’s a familiar scene.
Often the result is teams spinning wheels, KPIs that resemble the chalkboard in Good Will Hunting and stressed-out people doing a little bit of everything but never enough of anything.
Zone and Own
In a large enterprise there’ll often be many stakeholders vying for attention and support. Kitchen lobbying aplenty. Jostling for position and internal resource.
Questions to ask when deciding where to focus the most time and effort:
- Which groups, products, services and issues are most core to the business plan?
- Which areas need the most focus from a brand and reputation perspective? This means in terms of commercial and reputation opportunity (Sales! Partnerships! Profile!) but also which areas present risk and need attention
- Where is the blue ocean? This is the unchartered space that presents significant growth potential, where competitors either aren’t swimming or haven’t established themselves yet, giving your brand room to offer something genuinely different
Bring the executive team, SLT or C-suite into the conversation early so the outcome genuinely reflects where the organisation needs to go. From there, choose the levers that matter most. Those that reach your most important stakeholders.
If you’re a B2B outfit, this may mean LinkedIn over Instagram and TikTok.
If your main channel is commercial and distributor-driven, support the relevant media and focus your pitching here. Many executives will push to pitch to the mainstream mastheads. The counterpoint is, “Is our stakeholder making decisions based on these? Or are they looking to vertical media, enterprise social chatter and trade events for their education and decision-making insights?
Hitting the mark
Here’s a prime example.
A couple of years ago we worked on a mainstream sponsored content piece for a fast-growing scale-up.
At the same time we ran a sponsored content strategy with a magazine and online news site focused on cafes.
The café piece went live in the lead-up to and during an industry event.
The print magazine was distributed at the event.
An online piece followed the event.
A year later the company was still receiving leads attributed to this activity at a fraction of the cost of the mainstream piece.
Why?
It hit the exact audience the company wanted.
The timing aligned with other marketing activity.
There was a sustained presence.
The content reflected the readership’s challenges.
This didn’t mean the mainstream piece was wasted. It meant the vertical piece hit the right audience at the right time.
While not a unique approach, this is a framework that can be rolled out across countless industries, for businesses with the deepest of pockets to the leanest of budgets.
You’ll also find this approach is increasingly rewarded in the AI era. LLMs look for credible, attributable and consistent signals about what your organisation is known for.
The clearer your lane, the easier it becomes for journalists, other stakeholders and AI to associate you with it.