SaaS PR
SaaS PR comes in many forms. In our previous blog, The SaaS Marketing Guide, we explored how promoting services, securing funding and attracting new talent can all be achieved with PR. In addition, regular thought leadership coverage can promote vital components of a company’s DNA and position your brand and spokespeople as an expert authority.
At PHA Group, our Technology PR division has a strong track record in the B2B technology sector. We have worked with an exciting variety of businesses at the heart of the digital economy. Many go on to achieve great success.
Here we take a look at four of our SaaS clients. All of which have different objectives but all of whom have seen the impact that PR can deliver.
What makes a successful PR campaign?
What does good look like for a SaaS PR campaign? This will always depend on your business objectives, but you should start by identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) ahead of working with a PR agency to ensure that both parties are aligned on performance metrics and what success looks like.
Our core objective at PHA is to create campaigns for our clients that have an impact. In SaaS PR, as the end goal is often to sell a product, one of the most important factors for success is reaching the right audience with your communications. As this is often the first impression of a brand for many readers, your key messages must stand out and your USPs/differentiating qualities be easily understood. PR is about telling stories and building a reputation over time, so delivering a regular stream of editorial content that is educational, thought-provoking and seeks to create action will improve publication perception of a brand when your target audience is exposed to your content and narrativregularlyis.
Our Saas Clients who have seen an impact
Each client cited in this piece has used PHA to have a direct impact on their business reputation, credibility and exposure. By using a range of PR tactics to engage, educate and inspire audiences, we have used creative content and newsworthy angles to drive tangible results for clients.
Deepcrawl – on a mission to educate the C-Suite on technical SEO
Market-leading SaaS client Deepcrawl continue to work with us to support them in educating the C-Suite on website health. In addition, we have been working with them to promote the benefits of a proactive technical SEO strategy.
To cut through and communicate to this typically hard-to-reach audience, we run a full-service press office comprising:
- Frequent press releases promoting product releases and updates, funding and growth milestones.
- Senior talent acquisition – allowing us to communicate Deepcrawl’s product UPs and business growth.
- Interviews and Q&A style articles with senior leadership to open up conversations with relevant journalists.
- Thought leadership and commentary opportunities to elevate Deepcrawl’s awareness among the C-Suite. In doing so, this allows us educate and demonstrate market-leading expertise
- A strategy focused on marketing, advertising, business and SEO-specific media outlets. This gives Deepcrawl the platform to discuss innovation and best practices for eCommerce websites
Combined, these tactics have seen us deliver on our strategic objective to lead the debate on educating the C-Suite to consider SEO as a core component of their business operations.
Announcing a major business milestone for Italian visual content management scale-up, BOOM
Italian visual content management scale-up, BOOM, is at the heart of European eCommerce growth. We were challenged to provide PR support for its acquisition of Berlin-based visual production start-up LemonOne in June 2022. It was a positive story – the acquisition strengthened Boom’s presence in Europe and accelerated the delivery of its mission. This allowed BOOM to create a scalable environment that empowers digital companies to manage their full visual content lifecycle – however, these company announcements are never simple to land in the competitive tech media landscape.
Given the location and strategic direction of both companies, we identified a European-centric audience on which to focus our strategy and media outreach. To kick off media outreach, we secured an exclusive announcement and founder-led interview with leading European news site EU-Startups, which reaches more than 85,000 business leaders across Europe every month and thus helped reaffirm BOOM’s market-leading position and plans for growth in the eyes of the European tech community.
Establishing ECOMMPAY as a trusted payments provider for eCommerce merchants.
When the established payments ecosystem ECOMMPAY came to us two years ago, they had yet to experience a media share of voice equivalent to their presence and reputation in the market. A core aim for them was to grow awareness of the brand in the competitive and growing fintech and payments landscape in the UK and across Europe.
Over the last two years, our strategy involved implementing a diverse press office programme including:
- a regular cadence of press releases on new products and services.
- a proactive thought leadership and commentary strategy to demonstrate ECOMMPAY’s industry knowledge.
- and regular news hijacking around developments such as the UK’s change of contactless card limit. This allowed us to reverse engineer the news agenda and create a whitepaper on the changing payment landscape, driving top-tier media coverage early on.
To date, we have delivered over 250 pieces of press coverage for ECOMMPAY. This includes coverage across fintech, payments, retail, travel and national media. This has been underpinned by their key message of being a leading fintech ecosystem that helps to grow merchants’ businesses, allowing them to demonstrate their expertise directly to their target audience.
As a secondary objective, through our coverage, we also sought to help improve consumer understanding of fintech innovations. This included topics like open banking, research on cross-border trade and insight on data-driven approaches. To achieve this, we positioned its Executive Director of the UK and Western Europe, Paul Marcantonio, as a trusted advisor for merchants.
Over the last two years, our PR strategy has allowed ECOMMPAY to reclaim a significant share of voice in the UK fintech sector vs its main competitors. This has resulted in a positive reputation that continues to grow every month.
Introducing Fourth to the retail sector and owning the workforce management narrative
Fourth is a leading digital workforce management, payroll and HR solution. Despite being well established in the hospitality industry, Fourth wanted to expand its solution into the retail sector. For us, this meant we needed to raise awareness, demonstrate expertise and help grow the client’s retail client base.
Due to limited profile raising in the retail press and a lack of retail-focus case studies, we began by announcing Fourth’s entrance into the retail market. Subsequently, this would begin the shift in brand perception amongst retail decision makers and help drive interest and traffic. In addition, their partnership with financial wellbeing company Wagestream, allowed us to leverage this into quick news and retail presence.
We then focused on fresh news hooks to sustain momentum. This began with bi-annual market research and whitepaper projects to uncover new trends in retail workforce management, challenges leaders face, and how the industry is changing. Our team maintained responsibility for managing these projects end-to-end, including generating themes and questions, commissioning the research and writing the white papers.
Consequently, since working together Fourth has increased its focus on PR as a strategic priority based on our results. We are now expanding our partnership with more frequent market research projects and a wider scope of work.
Creating impact
Although there is no ‘one size fits all solution to how you should conduct your SaaS PR strategy, there are tried and tested tactics that will generate a consistent flow of content that educates, inspires, and issues a call to action. It should be a vital component of any SaaS business’ objective to increase its brand profile, build a positive perception and ultimately drive leads longer term.
If you would like to discuss your SaaS PR strategy, feel free to get in touch with us here.