Are you leaving sales prospects on the table? PR should be part of integrated marketing campaigns – not another silo!
The increasingly digital nature of the B2B buying cycle makes it a disparate journey for prospects. The typical pool of people in a buying group for a complex B2B solution is now 5-10 people and each individual is expected to gather 4-5 pieces of information before contacting a sales rep. A quick calculation shows that there could be 50 content touchpoints with a prospect before they even pick up the phone or send an email to your sales team!
B2B marketing responded with increased focus on content marketing. Demand Sage finds that in 2025, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing in their strategies. This is a vital tool to ensure content is consistently seen by target prospects on the company website and amplified on blogs, social channels, digital ads, and so forth – but this only skims the surface of widening the integrated marketing net.
Integrated marketing is a key part of prospect targeting
Looking beneath the hood of these content marketing approaches, most astute B2B marketing leaders will integrate these marketing campaigns across these channels to deliver a consistent and unified message to the target audience. Content will likely target key pain points or sales messages towards a buying group, with the aim of funneling them through digital channels to capture leads that can be qualified by the sales team.
Sounds like a well-oiled marketing machine – but are they leaving prospects on the table?
Why stop at your own assets
Assets created around key prospect pain points usually form a core part of integrated marketing strategies, so they are often great topics for media-facing activity. From a technology standpoint, are your prospects looking to extract maximum value from Agentic AI applications? Are certain industries struggling to keep pace with regulatory changes? Are prospects being impacted by geo-political issues such as demand shocks or supply chain pressures?
All these challenges and more are likely being covered by journalists whose readers are the very prospects B2B marketers should be targeting with their integrated campaigns.
According to research, 73% of B2B buyers trust third-party thought leadership content over traditional ads or marketing materials. No digital ad, blog, or social post can build trust like seeing a company’s subject matter expert in a leading technology or industry media outlet.
It’s time to get PR off the sideline and into the integrated marketing game.
Plan effectively
It starts from the bottom-up, in the campaign planning phase. The IBA team was recently present at a two-day client marketing strategy session where the marketing team was assembled alongside key representatives from the C-suite, subject matter experts, research & development, and sales.
Getting the integrated marketing engine into gear
Discussions were laser-focused on the UVPs and competitive advantage our client brings to the market. From there, it is a case of vetting these topics against product development plans and comparing to hot topics in industry media to plot a coherent campaign strategy that can be delivered across every possible channel, with PR forming a key part of this focus.
Boost brand awareness
A well-executed PR program, especially when part of integrated marketing, is a powerful engine for building brand awareness. By securing placements in respected industry and technology media, companies can get their message in front of a much wider and more receptive audience – often in the 100,000’s to 1M+ depending on the reach of the media titles.
Seeing a company’s subject matter experts featured in leading publications builds credibility and trust that traditional advertising simply can’t match. This enhances a brand’s visibility and reputation and creates a robust integrated campaign that continually puts the brand in front of target prospects.
The digital metrics too – essential to calibrate campaigns
The benefits of a strategic PR program extend well beyond traditional brand awareness. By carefully adding SEO keywords and tracked backlinks to published content, PR can directly impact a company’s digital marketing performance. When a third-party publication links back to your website, it creates valuable backlinks that signal to search engines – and increasingly AI-powered search tools – that your site is a credible source of information.
This is a crucial element for improving your search engine rankings. By aligning PR efforts with inbound marketing goals, the stories and placements generated by a PR program can directly increase digital visibility and feed valuable inbound marketing leads.
Not another silo! PR should not exist in a vacuum
Adding strategic PR to an integrated marketing campaign is the new modern B2B marketing playbook, moving beyond a company’s owned channels to leverage the credibility of third-party media outlets.
By thinking outside the box and coordinating PR with key marketing efforts, B2B organizations create a powerful strategy that effectively reaches more prospects throughout their disparate digital buying journey.
Jamie Kightley is Head of Client Services at IBA International.
