With the sweepstake for the World Cup footie done at IBA and a few grumbles about the draw, let’s ‘kick off’ with all the good news this month at IBA!
It’s been a good time to focus on a bit of trendjacking because yes, despite football moving toward fever pitch, Black Friday and its half-brother Cyber Monday came this month. You may think this is just a US and now a UK event, but no – much like the World Cup it has truly global appeal. We pitched some good retail comments for one of our infrastructure clients not just in the US and UK, but we opted to target Europe with good success. A top IT pub in France was the first to take up the story – is this an omen for the tournament?!
PR is a contact sport too! We meet up with our client on their stand in London
We’re glad to see that the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t diminished the appeal of physical trade exhibitions, with our contact center client exhibiting their new Microsoft Teams-based integration model at the highly anticipated Call & Contact Centre Expo at the London ExCeL center – and the IBA team took time to have real ‘face time’ with our client at the show!
From daily social media posts to promotional blogs, our social media and editorial teams have been busy helping to build a drumbeat of content counting down to the event. We could see firsthand how our client is only one of a small handful of solutions providers that have been certified to natively integrate this model – a position we will be keen to promote in the coming months.
BTW: Running concurrently was the B2B Marketing Expo, where our team was checking out the latest insights on the future of B2B marketing – watch this space for future blogs!
Maximizing the content lifecycle – no own goals for us
It’s never time to blow the full-time whistle on content! Back in June, the team worked on a tight turnaround to nominate a key customer of our business management software client for a prestigious enterprise technology award. The five-generation family-run businesses was listed as a finalist, and some might consider stopping at this, but for IBA that’s a bit like an own goal. The IBA team took this through added time. We have repurposed the asset into a media-facing use case which will span vertical and horizontal market placements.
Next, another extra time victory. Our team of content writers drafted two articles for a client’s own internal annual customer report on the evolution of CX and AI & Automation – but the content usage didn’t stop there. Our editorial and pitch & place teams worked together to tweak these pieces and make them media friendly – and it has paid off! We have been able to secure placements for these articles in industry leading publications across the contact center, IT, and business sectors – with many still to come.
As IBA’s CEO, Judith Ingleton-Beer, highlighted in a recent PR Moment feature, re-purposing PR material can bring prime media placements!
No more 2022 set pieces? The new industry and tech themes rocking 2023
IBA builds client campaigns around key themes and hot business or industry issues, so as 2023 looms, we have been knee-deep in editorial calendars and media kit research. Already our research findings are opening up new topics for our clients and changing the focus on some we have been following in 2022. Our CEO was able to add some insights into the markets where financial institutions are looking to invest in 2023.
This forms the foundation of what topics we expect to be writing about in the IBA editorial office in the new year, and provides the opportunity to kick off the year with relevant trends and predictions pieces for our clients – to position them as industry thought leaders in their own right…
Football aside, it’s been a month of wins
With experts still undecided on which country the football is ‘coming home’ to at this year’s World Cup, one thing’s for sure – the IBA International team is working as hard as ever to secure prime placements, provide event support, and make sure our clients are on the ball with the top themes – with the occasional break to catch the football, and utter the odd grumble over their sweepstake draw!
Caitlin Goldsmith is PR Executive at IBA International
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