Resource Topics: b2b saas pr agency

What the SVB Collapse Taught Us About Communication in a Crisis

The collapse of the tech institution Silicon Valley Bank rocked the SaaS ecosystem. Pundits will speculate for years to come on how the situation could have been avoided and who is at fault. Tech comms expert and CCO at Activision Blizzard, Lulu Cheng Meservey, believes the bank’s demise was partly due to a communication collapse.

Industry experts also pointed to the ill-timed and jargon-laden press release SVB issued about its strategy as a contributor to the bank’s demise.

For those leading communication for software companies, we’re looking at what we can learn about communicating effectively in a crisis. Clear, transparent and timely communication keeps stakeholders calm in a proverbial storm. Below are critical components of a crisis communication strategy.

Know your internal team and protocols.

Senior management, IT, legal, HR and PR should all understand their roles and responsibilities in a crisis. We can’t anticipate every possible situation, but teams should have a plan around problems that could cause concern for software companies, such as outages, layoffs and data breaches. In the case of the SVB collapse, we advised our clients to rally senior management, including the CFO, to help understand each client’s possible exposure to the bank failure and what it could mean for employees, customers, investors and partners.

Outline stakeholders and possible impact.

Every crisis plan should include key stakeholder groups and the most effective communication method for each. For example, know your customer base and how they best receive communication: is that through your customer success team, an email blast, Twitter or another medium? With SVB, lists of companies who bank with SVB started circulating over the weekend, so some of our clients proactively communicated with customers about their continuity plans. We also helped leaders with messages to their employees, ensuring they wouldn’t see an interruption in payroll, a possibility most tech workers were worried about Friday.

Monitor media coverage and social media.

Whether through a PR agency or an internal team, every SaaS company should have a system for media monitoring and social media management. Especially paramount in a crisis, media monitoring helps companies understand what the public is hearing about a situation and what the sentiment is in the market. As an agency, we are not only monitoring the SVB media coverage as it unfolds at a macro level, but we’re also tracking for mentions of our clients and flagging those in real-time.

The day SVB failed will be a day those of us in tech and communication will remember. While the demise of a key component of the tech ecosystem has been disheartening and scary, seeing the tech community rally around startups in exposed positions with capital and advice has been inspiring.

If you’re a software company needing assistance with your communication, contact Lindsey Groepper to chat about how BLASTmedia can help.

SaaS PR Agency: Onboarding & Expectations

POV: You know the importance of investing in brand, and you’re looking for a SaaS PR agency. Whether you are switching agencies or hiring your first one, there is likely a different onboarding process and expectations with each. 

Every agency does things slightly differently, but the fundamentals of building a strong PR program should be the same: research, planning, outreach and results. If you’re like most SaaS companies, you’re anxious to jump to the last stage and see results (aren’t we all?). But without a strong foundation and time to build pipeline, your media relations program is doomed to fail. 

So, what can you expect when you begin a new SaaS PR agency relationship? We believe in transparency through every step of the process, and we’re happy to share our onboarding process with you as a means of comparison:

Research

Every BLASTmedia program starts with a discovery call with the marketing team and, often, the CEO/founder. We tell you about our team and processes, and you tell us about your value proposition, competitive landscape, ICP, founder story and business goals. After this meeting, we get to work on our media landscape analysis and strategy foundation.

You want to work with a PR agency that understands your market. We work within the B2B SaaS industry, so we know the right questions to ask, who to speak to inside your organization, how to work with your customers and determine the most newsworthy stories from your execs. Even so, the media appetite for stories from HR tech companies vs. marketing tech companies is unique. That’s where our media landscape research comes into play. 

We dissect months of media coverage and releases from you and your competitors to determine the following and more: 

  • What narratives dominate your space? What isn’t being discussed? 
  • Which spokespeople are most commonly quoted from your competitors? What are their titles? 
  • Which media outlets most frequently cover your competitors? 
  • What is the average news cadence in your industry? 
  • Are there known thought leaders in the space? If so, what are their stances? 

The research phase concludes with two key elements: story-mining calls and a product demo. You can read more about our process for story mining with execs from our VP of content, but it’s exactly what it sounds like. We chat with your sales leader, chief people officer and other identified SMEs to dig out ideas we believe will make a solid thought leadership campaign. Next, we get to planning.

Planning

The two biggest deliverables during the first month with BLASTmedia are the strategy foundation deck (SFD) and our 60-day plan. The SFD includes the results of our media landscape analysis, along with our top recommendations on target media and reporters, talk tracks to reach your buyers and speak to their top pain points, a SWOT analysis, a competitor deep dive, ideal cadence of news and bylines, trending news to watch in your space and established benchmarks. 

With that research in hand, we set our sights on building your PR OKRs (objectives and key results). Based on the activity in the space and where you currently are in terms of output, what does “good” look like for you? What about “great?” And once we establish that objective, how will we get there? 

Enter: Your 60-day plan — I know you’ve been waiting for it! This is where you’ll see all of the research put into ideas, established OKRs and our plan for getting it done. In addition to three “pillar” thought leadership campaigns for the quarter, we lay out topics for reactive opportunities, competitors we monitor for share of voice measurement, trends to latch onto, any customers we can leverage in media relations and what company news we can support with outreach. Then it’s go time.

Outreach

PR isn’t like a faucet — you can’t turn it on and off. It can take months of building a pipeline (like in sales) to consistently realize the fruits of your labor. At the beginning of any client campaign, we focus on quick-turn opportunities where we can — we know it’s crucial to showcase early wins to your executive team. 

At the same time, we’re making introductions to key members of the media — those we already have relationships with and those we want to build relationships with on your behalf — to get that pipeline filled as quickly as possible. Every campaign is different, but in general, if you do not have news (a press release) in your first 90 days, you should expect to see the following: 

  • Between months 1 and 2, you should start seeing interview requests come in  
  • In month 2, you should get your first piece of contributed content for review 
  • In total, you should see around 10 pieces of coverage in a variety of trade, podcast and (yes, sometimes even) top-tier outlets (if you have news, this number will be significantly higher)

Results

After the first few months, we’re off to the races. We’re an anti-black-box agency, so I will share our actual client result averages with you. Each quarter I look at all-up coverage across our client roster and average it out. We hand this to our teams internally to use as a guideline for performance. We also share it with our prospects so they understand what to expect when running a PR program with us. 

After tracking KPIs and coverage types for 10,000+ pieces of coverage over multiple years, I am confident in sharing these numbers with just about anyone. And any PR agency that won’t (or can’t) do the same isn’t as data-driven as they might claim. 

Of course, there are exceptions to these numbers based on client participation, approvals and spokesperson availability. And, if you are a public company, these numbers could be wildly different. But, based on our data, here are the results you should expect from your SaaS PR agency each quarter: 

  • Around 25 pieces of coverage 
  • About half of all coverage should have a backlink to your website
  • The Domain Authority of the coverage you get should be around 60
  • 15 of those 25 articles should be driving traffic to your website
  • Quarterly coverage breakdown
    • 2 – 4 pieces of contributed content 
    • 1 – 2 podcast placements 
    • 2 – 3 quote inclusions 
    • 5 press release postings 
    • 3 – 5 features 
    • 5 – 10 other mentions or syndications 

Choosing the right PR partner can be challenging. But taking your time up front to find one that will be open and honest with you about their process, team and results will yield dividends for years to come. As will taking time to properly invest in and trust their need for proper ramp-up time. 

I’ll leave you with this. If I were hiring a PR agency and I wanted to know how they were going to get up to speed during the onboarding phase and what kind of results I could expect from them, these are a few of the questions I would ask:

  • On average, what kind of results are you generating for your clients each quarter? 
  • Tell me about a time you worked with a client where you had never worked in the space before — how did you get up to speed? 
  • What is the #1 thing that determines how much and what kinds of coverage you can generate? 
  • How do we make the most of our onboarding process? 
  • What is your process for monitoring competitors and trending topics? 

And if you want to know how we’d go about building a successful PR campaign for you, reach out to me!

2021 SaaS PR Predictions

This time each year we work with our clients to put together predictions for the year ahead, and for the past few years we’ve been taking our own advice and creating SaaS PR predictions of our own. 

Looking back on a year that, to put it gently, went completely off track, I was surprised to see many of our predictions for 2020 panned out (on the PR front). This year, we saw fewer SaaS marketing execs using share of voice as their standalone metric to measure the success of PR. We also saw a much closer integration between our clients and their customers — so much so that we now offer to interview and write customer stories on behalf of our clients.

When I sat down to think about 2021, a few things immediately came to mind. Yes, some of those things are related to the pandemic and how it impacted the way we do work, but other trends were well underway beforehand.

Paywalled journalism means we must adapt 

It’s happened to all of us — you see an interesting story shared on Twitter and click to learn more only to be hit with a paywall. While it can be frustrating, paywalls actually make a lot of sense. Think about it: you pay for Hulu with no ads, you pay to join Dave Gerhardt’s Patreon marketing group, you even pay for access to workouts on Peloton — why wouldn’t you pay for unlimited access to news content created specifically for your interests? 

As talented journalists continue to fall victim to shrinking newsrooms, they’re increasingly turning to platforms like Substack to grow followings of their own. Most recently startup reporter Eric Newcomer left Bloomberg to start Newcomer, a subscription newsletter about startups and venture capital. Earlier in the year tech journalist Casey Newton left The Verge to start Platformer, and before that Fortune’s Polina Marinova Pompliano left to build The Profile. I anticipate many more will follow suit. 

Earlier in the year, I sent a few questions on paywalls to Travis Bernard at TechCrunch. He launched TechCrunch’s subscription platform ExtraCrunch just a year earlier. His newsroom faced a choice: broaden coverage to drive up advertising impressions and therefore dollars, or double down on a smaller, more engaged audience willing to pay. They chose the latter. 

So, what does this mean for those of us in SaaS PR? Get creative about what you consider an “outlet.” It no longer needs to be TechCrunch or Forbes to count as meaningful coverage for your brand. Encourage your client/boss to look past vanity metrics like unique monthly visitors. As journalists are building their audiences, these metrics may or may not be available. 

Build relationships with emerging publications (including podcasts), and get comfortable with explaining the value of coverage behind a paywall to your client. Sure, there are challenges (namely, sharing on social) but the inherent value is the already engaged, paying audience. And, ask your CFO for more room in the 2021 budget for news subscriptions. 

Speaking slots will become even more difficult to secure 

Now that Neil Patel, Jay Baer and Seth Godin can speak at 10 conferences in a matter of days — what’s left for the rest of us? I am halfway kidding but, if you think securing speaking slots isn’t going to get a lot more difficult in 2021, you should reassess your goals. 

  • Exhibit A) Many events well into 2021 are still going to be canceled, creating fewer overall opportunities.
  • Exhibit B) For virtual events, travel, and its associated costs, are eliminated. This means we’ll see the most well-respected speakers speaking more often.

Those two items lead to a lack of opportunity for anyone not already an established keynote. My advice? Keep your events/speaking team focused on small, local or industry-specific events to build your reel until events and speaking slots become more widely available, hopefully in 2022. 

Audiences wise up to newswires — kind of

For better or for worse, 2021 is not the year the newswire dies. In simple terms, newswires have value because we believe they have value. So, until your CEO stops forwarding you Google Alerts he has set for competitors’ press releases with the “why aren’t we getting this type of press” note attached, newswires are a necessary means to a “make the CEO happy” end. 

In 2021, marketing and comms leads will start considering the broad spectrum of places outside of a wire we can place releases. A company blog or, if you have some extra budget, a paid posting in a trade publication are valid options to consider, and can often have the same impact as a newswire posting (minus the syndications). 

While wires themselves are likely to remain a piece of your PR puzzle in 2021, I think most SaaS PR people will no longer find value in the “outreach” efforts offered by wire services. The claims they send your press release “directly to the newsrooms of all the top media publications,” while technically true are completely useless. And, candidly, in eight years of doing media relations, I have never seen a single organic story run as a result of this type of distribution.

Deskside meetings are *finally* put to bed 

This is one area of PR that has certainly been impacted by the coronavirus, and I think for the better. Speaking specifically within the realm of SaaS PR — desksides are no longer an impactful way to communicate with journalists. Now that desks themselves (at least the kind in large office buildings) are few and far between, deskside meetings have become a relic of our PR past. 

As we’ve learned over the past year, we can be just as impactful and collaborative without being in person. Instead of forcing a press tour to work because they’re what you’re used to, set availability for your executive or spokesperson over the course of a week. Slot in interviews as they make sense for availability and interest on both sides, and if the meeting requires a product delivery, send it ahead of time. Make sure to get updated contact information for the journalists, though, since they’re likely not in an office. (PS — phone etiquette changes when it’s a cell phone you’re calling. Proceed with extreme caution.) 

I think I speak for all of us when I say we’re looking forward to putting 2020 behind us. But, for a year that turned out to be quite challenging, it sure did teach us a lot — especially when it comes to communication. 

Never has it been more important to put time and effort into what you’re saying, who you’re talking to, and why you’re saying it. From communication to your employees on a shift to working from home to communicating to the world what you stand for, putting thought behind your words is never going out of style. 

What do you predict 2021 will hold for SaaS PR? Share with us on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

6 Questions To Ask Before Hiring a PR Agency (and Why!)

The search for a PR agency is no easy task — publishing an RFP, interviewing each agency and choosing which one is the best partner for your business and marketing goals. Whether you’re hiring an agency to support a long-term strategy or a short-term campaign, the right PR partner can make your life easier by being an extension of your marketing team. 

When hiring a PR agency, consider asking these six questions to separate the good from great. 

Why are you interested in working with us?

It seems so simple, but asking this question can give you an idea of whether the agency has researched your company. They should note specific reasons, like your product and company mission fits in the realm of their clientele. Bonus points if they notice your competitors in the news and see an opportunity to elevate your company as an expert among them. 

Many PR agencies work with SaaS companies. What makes you different?

It’s essential agencies understand their competitive advantage: What sets them apart from the hundreds of other agencies to choose from? How can they serve the specific needs of your company and marketing goals? If they’re working with other B2B SaaS companies, they should know the industry in and out and be able to share your story and build relationships with the media. Better yet, they should know how to tell your story through your thought leaders, whether that’s interviews, quotes or content (more on that later). Building those relationships on your behalf will be a key differentiator from one agency to the next. 

What commonalities do your ‘best’ clients share? What makes a client go from good to great? 

This gives you an idea of what your agency looks for in clients, and can help you understand how to be the best partner. A few things we prioritize at BLASTmedia include communication, participation, willingness to be bold and trust. Communication is a given, but it goes beyond answering emails and attending status calls. Brainstorming sessions, story mining calls with thought leaders and quarterly planning meetings all contribute to great communication. Participation is another key factor in a successful relationship. At BLAST, we use multiple client thought leaders as spokespeople for different topics in the media or an industry source for reactive opportunities. This falls in line with the willingness to be bold, too. Being bold in a media interview or when responding to competitor news can feel daunting, but the right agency by your side can empower everyone to confidently take a stance and share opinions. Trust doesn’t need a long explanation. It’s the most important aspect of a client-agency relationship. Without trust, nobody succeeds — it’s as simple as that. 

Can you tell me about your experience working with SaaS companies at a similar growth phase as us with parallel goals? 

Client case studies should be the main talking point for any agency when answering this question. They should have clear examples of past clients and their strategy for helping them grow. Ask them what went well in the relationship and what recommendations they would make to a company of your size. To go even deeper, the agency should note specific clients in a similar vertical to yours, such as martech or HR tech, and explain a specific project and why it performed well. If they’ve done their research, the agency should come with ideas on helping your company increase visibility in front of customers, competitors and investors.

What does your reporting look like, and what metrics matter to you as an agency?

You need to know how the agency will support your internal marketing goals through a steady report cadence. If you have a board meeting, the agency should provide key metrics for you to show the value they bring to the team. PR agencies with the most up-to-date tools on hand can provide a detailed look into your key messages, competitors and media feedback and provide recommendations accordingly.

What is your approach to PR when we don’t have news/press releases every month?

PR is much more than issuing a press release on Business Wire or PRWeb. At BLAST, our approach to a successful B2B SaaS coverage mix includes 50% news, 25% contributed content and 25% interviews and quotes from client thought leaders. You’ll notice only half of that is company news. We believe having this balanced coverage is key to successful PR because it positions your company as thought leaders on a variety of topics, whether that’s technical topics or business leadership topics for top tier media opportunities. Additionally, what’s the story behind the announcement? Agencies should know how to extend the life of a press release through thought leadership content, customer stories and securing interviews with one-on-one reporter outreach. When interviewing PR agencies, it’s important to get a sense of their approach and strategy for breaking through the noise and setting up your team for success.

Ready to hire your next PR agency? Contact Lindsey Groepper to learn more about BLASTmedia and our dedicated B2B SaaS PR approach.