Melanie Johnson-Holliday
With 2022 done and dusted, the Eskenzi PR team took a moment to review what truly worked for our clients during the year and what we see is changing in the wonderful PR landscape. We regularly sit down as a team to develop creative ideas for the future, but sometimes it is worth just reflecting on what has been, what is changing and what can be improved (we’re not all perfect you know!).
Our meeting looked at the many different aspects of PR and if they’re still relevant in the ‘PR 2.0’ world. The PR-sphere is definitely changing, but some traditional tactics still remain the best way to get your brand out there. Although some people see these PR tools as old hat, they still create the substance in which we can build our new fandangled digital PR strategies.
Below are the top five tactics used in 2022 across the cybersecurity industry to get into the headlines, and we still believe they are the tools that will work in 2023.
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Research is King – Research is and will always be the best way to break into the news headlines. Regular and consistent research will keep you in front of today’s press. The media want new and interesting research that is going to get the attention of their readers, FACT. Working with research teams, engineers and security analysts to compile reports on the threats they’re seeing and the challenges facing organisations is gold dust in the PR world. Make sure they are part of the PR plan, plus there are so many marketing opportunities to be developed from them too.
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News in numbers – Surveys continue to help our clients stand out from the crowd, they help create news that is unique with brand-new information never covered before. In fact, surveys can create headlines you didn’t even think about simply down to the results you get back. Yes, you have some control over what questions you ask, but the results are out of your hands. One thing to remember is, you must have over 1,000 consumer responses for the media to confidently use your survey.
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Getting your opinion out there – The senior management team will be glad to hear that thought leadership is still up there as one of the best ways to gain brand exposure (it also helps with their industry profile), but there is no room for repurposing content now. By this I mean, each thought leadership piece has to be exclusively written for the publication you are targeting. Absolutely no reusing of old material or corporate blogs. More and more often, publications are using plagiarism tools to make sure content is not being repurposed. This can mean a reduction in the number of thought leadership articles placed, but it increases the quality of the coverage.
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Rapid Response – This is a term Eskenzi coined many years ago, but it still works to this day as a means of getting our client’s comments out there quickly. We pride ourselves on making sure we’re closely monitoring the news for breaking stories to get relevant commentary out to our contacts fast. The press knows, if it’s a breaking cybersecurity story, the Eskenzi team are the go-to people to get comments for their story.
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Shout about it – Press releases, the more regular the announcements the better. I mean, please don’t spam the press with irrelevant announcements, but regular, interesting and informative releases will keep the company brand front of mind for your press contacts and keep the coverage coming in.
There will be many blogs after this talking about the future of PR (so keep an eye on the Eskenzi blog) but the tactics of PR will remain the same, and you still need decent and unique content to make it work.
