Ensuring a consistent pipeline of customer wins, product upgrades and news announcements is a powerful tactic for building and maintaining the public profile of your B2B brand, says Account Director Joshua Allsopp “It would be so much easier if we were selling shoes and not software,” one start-up founder told me recently, only half-joking. She was the head of a fast-growing B2B tech company and had just secured series B funding to fuel the next stage of growth. Business was booming by all accounts. She was hopeful and excited, but also anxious about maintaining the public profile of the brand that she had worked hard to build. And rightly so. She’d also just been shoe shopping. It’s not the first time I’d heard someone in the world of SaaS and B2B tech lament the nature of their business in such a way. After all, when the product you’re selling can’t be held, worn, touched or tasted it’s a challenge to bring your brand to life and tell its story. What’s more, a corporate audience can be a fickle bunch. Brands must constantly remind the market that they exist and vie for their fair share of attention. Go quiet and you risk appearing irrelevant, obsolete or – even worse - being forgotten altogether. Ever heard of ‘recency bias’? It’s the tendency to be disproportionately influenced by recent events and experiences when making a decision. Chances are, the next time you go shoe shopping (for example), you’re more likely to purchase the sneakers you just saw advertised on the subway on your way downtown, than the pair you read a rave review about in last month’s issue of GQ. The more opportunities to expose potential customers to your product – and ideally across multiple touch points - the better. But B2B tech companies can’t exactly wheel out their enterprise software on stage at Fashion Week or pose with their digital payments platform for the cover of Vogue. So, how do you build and maintain a consistent public profile when you’re marketing software? The answer is product PR.

Maximising exposure and standing out in the crowd

Product PR essentially means finding ways to maximize exposure for your brand on an ongoing basis. A new product launch generates excitement and gets you noticed in the short term, but once that dies down and attention moves elsewhere, the market needs constant reminders of what your product can do. It requires a long-term approach. Seizing any ‘news hooks’ that arise from stories in the press or reacting with your take on relevant issues or trends – particularly those which align with the customer pain points your product addresses - is massively effective for developing a profile for your brand. But opportunities to do so can be sporadic, and are often completely outside your control. Therefore, proactively generating your own news flow with a regular cadence of new win announcements or product upgrades should be an essential part of your PR strategy. This ensures your brand not only stays visible but stands out in a crowded market. There are several tactics B2B tech companies can deploy to achieve this:

• Embrace solution evolution: Tech businesses, especially SaaS providers, should lean into the fact that their solutions never stand still. Since products are always advancing with the release of new features or upgraded functionality, this is a chance to shout about what’s new and improved each and every time there are significant updates to the tech. As well as keeping your brand prominent, this will show your commitment to innovation and demonstrate the value your products offer. Businesses need solutions that evolve alongside them and that can meet the new and emerging challenges they face now and in the future.

• Celebrate the wins: Where possible, announce major new customer wins as they happen, and/or celebrate milestones such as when your customer base reaches a significant number. Being aware that well-known brands or competitors have chosen your products is a ringing endorsement to other potential customers and could lead to FOMO (fear of missing out) while also playing into ‘affinity bias’. If your target customer sees someone like them is using your product, they’ll be much more inclined to take it up themselves. Additionally, knowing that hundreds or thousands of other companies are relying on your solutions builds trust in your brand, a valuable commodity in the high-stakes B2B space. It reduces perceived risk and creates customer confidence that their business-critical processes or sensitive data will be safe on your platform.

• • Go for third-party recognition: Winning or being shortlisted for industry awards is a great way to demonstrate that your product is a leader in the field or is pushing the boundaries of excellence or innovation. As well as being announced by the organization holding the awards, this presents ample opportunity for you to promote yourself, both at the time of the awards ceremony and for some time afterwards. For example, this recognition could be mentioned in subsequent press announcements about other news. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

 

• Draw on your data: Tech companies are blessed with an abundance of data, but deploying it for creative storytelling is often a missed opportunity. Crafting a data story based on customer demographics, for example, can reveal interesting trends within target industries. Meanwhile, (anonymized and aggregated) data about product use can shine a spotlight on the emerging priorities and potential risks that customers are managing. All of this can be fruitful marketing and PR fodder.

Yes, press releases are still a thing – and for good reason

When it comes to product PR, don’t underestimate a good old-fashioned press release, especially in the age of AI. For many years now, certain voices in the industry have been decrying the death of the press release. But the advent of generative search has given it a new lease of life. By landing press coverage in trusted media outlets or even simply by posting press releases regularly on your own channels, such as digital press rooms or on social media, AI models are more likely to use your content to inform search results.  Importantly, AI search functions like Microsoft Azure can track entities and concepts over time. So it’s possible for a brand and its messaging to be retained in an AI model’s memory, particularly if the tone and content are presented consistently each time. This creates the potential for you to reappear in AI outputs across different search sessions time and again. B2B tech companies shouldn’t be afraid to think creatively when it comes to communication either. Sending out press releases is a fundamental part of the product PR toolkit, but it’s by no means the only option to keep your name in front of your target audiences. For instance, journalists often like real-life examples to show a news story in action, so consider highlighting any insights gleaned from user data or spotlighting the customer experience through case studies. Even better if you can leverage multimedia like video, podcasts, and motion graphics – all of which outperform static text on social. Put your own comms channels to work too, such as email newsletters, website blogs and social media to really amplify your messages.

Finding the sweet spot

It's important to approach all this with a ‘customer-first’ mindset. The reality is that there’s a sweet spot between what you want to say about your brand, what prospective customers are actually going to be interested in, and what makes product stories compelling to reporters. The key here is to try to avoid too much technical detail or jargon. Most customers don’t care about the coding, the back end or APIs. They want to see how your product understands and solves their everyday challenges, and can make a meaningful impact on a business’s bottom line. The same goes for reporters. Focus instead on the tangible benefits it delivers and bring the story to life as much as possible with glowing testimonials, colourful examples or hard data. Ultimately, product-led PR is a means of keeping your brand in the spotlight with a steady pipeline of news, upgrades and updates that wins (and holds) the attention of your target audience. So, if your B2B tech isn’t getting the love it deserves, instead of considering a career change and packing it all in to sell shoes, it might be time to embrace the power of product PR.