A new survey of 300 B2B marketing and PR professionals provides a glimpse of PR goals, tactics, effectiveness, challenges, frustrations and areas for improvement
Nearly 7 in 10 (68%) of B2B marketing and PR professionals believe PR efforts make a revenue contribution. However, many struggle to prove it empirically. Even so, most respondents are feeling sanguine about their PR efforts, according to a new survey of 300 of them.
That PR grapples with measurement, in a similar way marketing does, isn’t surprising. People always want to narrow down efforts to a single action item that moves the business forward. Yet research shows us over and over again that success is the result of a combination of actions, anywhere from 15 interactions to 277 touches, depending on how they are counted.
The vast majority of respondents (90%) say their organization would see a greater yield from PR if it were better integrated with their sales and marketing efforts. Doing so may help with the measurement challenges.
Broadly speaking, the results of this survey offer a snapshot of how things are going for PR in B2B circles. Below are some of the findings that stood out to me.
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1. What does B2B hope to achieve with PR?
When asked, “What are the primary objectives of your PR strategy?” survey takers responded with the following:
- 70% said manage and/or build reputation;
- 58% said drive demand and lead generation;
- 46% said to support sales enablement and GTM strategies;
- 38% said build trust with stakeholders, including investors and partners;
- 36% said strengthen thought leadership;
- 25% said strengthen internal communications and employee engagement;
- 15% said crisis communications and reputation management; and
- 12% said to facilitate community engagement and CSR.
Commentary: Reputation building or management is a sound objective for PR. Measuring it effectively requires understanding the perception of an organization before, during and after starting the program. If reputation building is the goal, I’d suggest moving thought leadership higher on this list of priorities.
Similarly, PR is also effective at driving demand, in the native sense of the word, but independently, it is not an effective approach for B2B to drive leads. The best way to drive leads is to integrate the output of media relations into your lead generation program. What you do with a media mention today counts as much as earning it in the first place.
2. What PR tactics are B2B organizations using?
When asked about the tactics being used by B2B organizations, respondents identified the following:
- 69% said media relations;
- 68% said brand and reputation management;
- 57% said content support;
- 56% said thought leadership;
- 50% said event support;
- 48% said partnerships/sponsorship;
- 37% said analyst relations;
- 35% said crisis support/communications; and
- 20% said podcast management.
Commentary: These are all tactics suitable for PR programs with the exception of “brand and reputation management.” What I mean by that is, while brand and reputation fit into the PR bailiwick, it’s an objective and not a tactic. For example, the objective can be reached through the other tactics on this list.
In other words, if you sign a contract with a PR firm for brand and reputation management, the firm will do some media monitoring, plus the other activities on this list.
3. Which PR tactics does B2B see as effective?
The survey asked respondents, “What do you believe are the most effective PR tactics in use at your organization?” Here’s how their answers tallied up:
- 61% said brand and reputation management;
- 44% said media relations;
- 41% said thought leadership;
- 40% said content support;
- 27% said event support;
- 26% said crisis support/communications;
- 22% said partnerships/sponsorship;
- 15% said analyst relations; and
- 9% said podcast management.
Commentary: Marketing and PR may struggle to measure effectiveness quantitatively, but they still have strong views as to what is working and what isn’t. However, I’m obligated to point out that brand or reputation management isn’t a tactic; it’s a program.
For example, the subsequent tactics on this list are the keys to building a brand and managing a reputation. That said, the subsequent tactics listed are sound. I’d add that these are most effective when they are used together in an integrated marketing communications program.
It is interesting that as media relations has gotten harder, it’s perceived as more valuable. I find that value stems from third-party validation: nothing you say about yourself matches the credibility of someone saying it on your behalf.
The numbers drop off noticeably after content support. I would venture that’s because, with the exception of event support, these tactics with lower percentages tend to be specialty niches. For example, while most PR professionals ought to have a strong grasp of crisis communications, analyst relations and partnerships, some PR firms and consultants specialize in these areas.
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4. What are the top challenges for PR in B2B?
When the survey asked respondents what was inhibiting the PR team from reaching its business goals, the answers stacked up this way:
- 52% said limited budgets/resources;
- 48% said difficulty measuring ROI;
- 36% said inability to tie PR efforts to sales outcomes;
- 32% said limited bandwidth to manage PR opportunities;
- 29% said lack of alignment with business objectives; and
- 27% said insufficient industry expertise from PR teams.
Commentary: It’s hard to get the budget you need if you can’t demonstrate outcomes and it’s hard to measure outcomes if you aren’t aligned with business objectives. In a B2B environment, PR professionals can best address this by aligning their efforts with sales and marketing.
5. What are the top frustrations clients have with PR firms?
The survey also asked about frustrations with PR. More specifically, “What has been your biggest frustration with traditional PR firms?” Below is the breakdown of the answers:
- 30% said lack of measurable results;
- 28% said inadequate understanding of industry-specific challenges;
- 24% said limited focus on offerings beyond media relations;
- 15% said poor communication and responsiveness; and
- 3% said other.
Commentary: A simple measurement framework to start turning this around is to break measurement out into three buckets: outputs, engagement and results. For PR, results will mostly stem from anecdotes, which often come from stories customers and prospects mention to sales and marketing. So, alignment with those teams is important at every point in a PR program.
In terms of expertise, there are two points worth discussing. First, the traditional big PR firm sales model is to bring very experienced people to the pitch call, and then push the work down to junior staff once the contract is signed.
It’s a bait and switch. Clients think they are getting all this experience, but when the time comes for execution, they are required to provide a lot of tutoring. No client wants to pay a PR firm to train their employees.
That’s not to knock junior employees. Everyone starts their career in similar spots. The challenges newly minted college graduates are currently having getting jobs today – is going to be very problematic tomorrow when employers are looking for experience.
What individual contributors, at any level, can do is take ownership of their own professional development. Strive to get involved in your agency’s sales and business development efforts. It will teach you about sales and marketing, which in turn provides you with the experience to align comms with sales and marketing.
For agency leaders, bringing junior staff to sales pitches is a professional development program that strengthens the client pitch because they get to meet the team during the courtship.
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6. How is PR measuring success in B2B?
The survey followed up its measurement question by asking about specific techniques. The question asked was, “How do you measure the success of your PR initiatives?”
Here are the results:
- 54% said social media engagement;
- 48% said website traffic attributed to PR efforts;
- 45% said lead generation or conversions influenced by PR campaigns;
- 42% said share of voice and brand awareness;
- 40% said media coverage;
- 37% said event participation or speaking opportunities secured through PR;
- 33% said growth in brand search volume or SEO metrics;
- 28% said direct revenue attributed to PR initiatives;
- 26% said customer or client testimonials referencing PR-driven activities;
- 26% said thought leadership recognition;
- 24% said number of inbound media inquiries or journalist requests;
- 19% said awards and accolades won for the company or leadership team; and
- 17 said internal stakeholder feedback on PR performance.
Commentary: Referral traffic from third-party mentions, share of voice, and placements are traditional metrics. They are also reasonable interim measures, but not definitive. Even so, as mentioned before, isolating and attributing one specific output to a behavioral change that we know requires multiple interactions is a tall order.
I’m also a little surprised to see social media engagement rank so high; engagement on social platforms is interesting in the short-term, but if it ebbs and flows without an outcome over time, it has little value. That’s the caveat to measurement: you can get so hung up on metrics, you wind up gearing your efforts for reach rather than persuasion. If you drive a bunch of ‘likes’ and have great engagement numbers but nothing happens on the sales side, who cares?
If there’s a measure on this list that deserves more focus, it’s “customer or client testimonials referencing PR-driven activities.” To obtain that, PR needs three things:
- Access to direct conversations with customers; it doesn’t happen enough;
- Good relationships with salespeople; that’s who gets these stories most often; and
- Some sort of systemic means to tally this metric.
How can we track the last metric? Ask everyone you speak with this question: “How did you hear about us?” That question should be on every registration form, part of every initial sales call and a question you ask reflexively every time you have a chance to speak with a customer.
7. Where do PR teams have room for improvement in B2B?
The last question from this survey I’ll cover here is room for improvement. The survey asked respondents, “What focus areas do you think PR teams need to better support?”
- 62% said deeper integration with marketing and sales teams;
- 50% said greater focus on measurable outcomes;
- 48% said stronger emphasis on digital and social media strategy;
- 45% said thought leadership development as a core service; and
- 36% said enhanced industry-specific expertise.
Commentary: Sales is the lifeblood of every business. Gaining a deeper understanding of how a market responds to sales and marketing will improve virtually everything PR does to support a business. Leaders should strive to establish better connections for their team members, while individual contributors can reach out on their own.
In a B2B context, the answer to this survey question is a blueprint for developing more seasoned PR people and building better PR programs.
Read the full survey report
I first learned of this survey from Marketing Charts in an article titled, B2B Marketers See Benefits to Integrating PR with Sales and Marketing. The full report contains many more interesting findings that can be found here: The 2025 State of B2B Public Relations Report by Demand Metric and Convey Communications.
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Image credit: Google Gemini and the respective study
