B2B PR Strategy: Why Most Companies Are Targeting the Wrong Audience

B2B PR strategy is the deliberate use of earned media, thought leadership, and third-party credibility to shift how target buyers, influencers, and decision-makers perceive your business. Done well, it shortens sales cycles, reduces price sensitivity, and builds the kind of reputation that paid media cannot manufacture. Done poorly, it produces press releases nobody reads and coverage that moves no commercial needle.

Most B2B companies treat PR as a communications function. The ones that grow treat it as a commercial one.

B2B PR sits within a broader go-to-market system. If you are thinking through how PR connects to your wider growth architecture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture, from positioning and segmentation through to channel strategy and commercial measurement.

Why Most B2B PR Programmes Underdeliver

I have sat in enough agency new business meetings to know the pattern. A B2B company comes in frustrated with their PR. They have been getting coverage, but nobody in the business can point to anything it has actually moved. The marketing director is defensive. The CEO is sceptical. And the PR agency is producing monthly reports full of AVE numbers that everyone has silently agreed to stop questioning.

The problem is almost never the execution. It is the brief. Most B2B PR programmes are built around what the company wants to say, not what the target buyer needs to hear, and not where that buyer is actually paying attention. The result is coverage in publications that feel impressive in a board report but are never read by a single person in the buying committee.

There is a structural issue underneath this. B2B buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders, long evaluation cycles, and significant risk aversion. PR that reaches the wrong person at the wrong stage of that process does almost nothing. PR that reaches the right person at the right moment, with the right framing, can do more than a year of paid activity.

Before you can fix the targeting, you need to understand the commercial architecture of your own business. Running a proper digital marketing due diligence process first will tell you where PR fits in the funnel, which audiences are already warm, and where earned media can do the most work. Without that baseline, you are optimising in the dark.

What a Commercially Grounded B2B PR Strategy Actually Looks Like

A B2B PR strategy that earns its budget starts with three questions that most PR briefs never ask.

First: who specifically is this trying to reach? Not “senior decision-makers in financial services.” The CFO at a mid-market professional services firm who is three months into evaluating a new treasury platform and is reading three specific trade publications while doing it. The more precisely you can define the audience, the more precisely you can target the coverage.

Second: what do we need them to believe that they do not currently believe? This is the positioning question. PR is not a megaphone for things people already accept. It is most valuable when it shifts a perception, establishes a category, or introduces a frame that makes your solution the obvious answer. If your PR programme is not trying to change a belief, it is just noise.

Third: what does success look like in commercial terms? Not impressions, not AVE, not share of voice. What is the measurable business outcome this programme is meant to support? Shorter sales cycles. Higher win rates in competitive situations. Reduced churn because customers feel they are with a credible, well-regarded partner. These are the metrics that make PR defensible at a board level.

The Audience Targeting Problem in B2B PR

Early in my career I was heavily focused on lower-funnel performance. It felt efficient. You could measure everything, attribute everything, and show a clean return. What I underestimated was how much of that performance was capturing demand that already existed, demand that had been built by brand activity, word of mouth, and yes, earned media, none of which showed up in the attribution model.

Think about how buying decisions actually form. Someone reads a piece in a trade publication that frames a problem they recognise. They mention it to a colleague. Six months later, when they are in a formal evaluation process, they remember the company that seemed to understand that problem best. They search for it. The search gets attributed to paid. The PR that planted the seed gets attributed to nothing.

This is why Forrester’s thinking on intelligent growth has always resonated with me. Growth requires reaching audiences who do not yet know they need you, not just capturing the intent of people who have already decided to buy. PR, done well, is one of the few channels that can do this at scale without the cost structure of broad paid media.

The targeting problem in B2B PR is that most companies default to the same tier-one business press that every competitor is chasing. The FT, Bloomberg, Forbes. These are not bad placements, but in most B2B categories they are not where purchase decisions are actually influenced. The analyst report, the niche trade publication, the industry association newsletter, the podcast that three hundred CFOs listen to on their commute: these are the channels where credibility actually forms.

This is the same logic that makes endemic advertising so effective in certain B2B categories. When your message appears in a context that is already trusted by your target audience, the credibility transfer is immediate. PR should be targeting the same endemic environments.

Thought Leadership That Actually Leads

Thought leadership is probably the most abused phrase in B2B marketing. It has come to mean “content we produced and distributed.” That is not thought leadership. That is content marketing, and there is nothing wrong with content marketing, but conflating the two produces a lot of mediocre output that satisfies nobody.

Genuine thought leadership in a PR context means placing a specific, defensible, sometimes uncomfortable point of view in front of an audience that has influence over your commercial outcomes. It means having something to say that is worth disagreeing with. It means being willing to name the thing that your industry is collectively avoiding.

I remember being handed the whiteboard pen at a creative session early in my career, the person running it had to step out for a client call, and suddenly I was responsible for moving the room forward. The instinct was to say something safe. The room needed something that cut through. The sessions that produced the best work were always the ones where someone said the thing nobody else wanted to say. B2B thought leadership works the same way. The pieces that get shared, quoted, and remembered are the ones that say something with conviction, not the ones that present seventeen balanced perspectives and conclude that it depends.

For B2B companies in regulated or complex sectors, this is particularly valuable. In B2B financial services marketing, for instance, the companies that have built the strongest reputations over time are almost always the ones with a clear, consistent point of view on their market, not the ones that produce the most content.

How PR Integrates With the B2B Sales Process

One of the most consistent failures I have seen in B2B marketing is the wall between PR and sales. The PR team is generating coverage. The sales team is in the field having conversations. The two things should be in constant dialogue. They almost never are.

When PR and sales are properly aligned, the benefits run in both directions. Sales conversations surface the objections, the competitor narratives, the misconceptions that PR can address through editorial placement. PR coverage gives sales something to send, something to reference, something that validates the conversation before it has even started. A well-placed article in the right trade publication, sent to a prospect at the right moment, does more work than most email sequences.

This integration requires a shared understanding of the buyer experience and where different types of coverage land within it. Early-stage awareness coverage in broad business media does something different from a deep-dive case study in a sector publication, which does something different from an analyst mention in a procurement guide. Each has a role. The mistake is treating them as interchangeable and measuring them the same way.

It is also worth thinking about how PR connects to demand generation. If you are running pay-per-appointment lead generation programmes, the conversion rates on those appointments will be materially better if the prospect has already encountered your brand in a credible editorial context. PR is not a replacement for demand generation. It is the thing that makes demand generation work harder.

Building the Media and Analyst Map

Most B2B companies do not have a rigorous map of the media landscape that actually influences their buyers. They have a list of publications their PR agency has relationships with. These are not the same thing.

Building a proper media and analyst map starts with your buyers, not with your PR agency’s contact book. Interview your best customers. Ask them what they read, what conferences they attend, which analysts they trust, which newsletters they actually open. Do the same with prospects who chose a competitor. You will find a very different picture from the one your PR programme is currently optimised for.

Analysts deserve particular attention in B2B PR strategy. In many enterprise categories, analyst coverage is more influential on purchase decisions than press coverage. A mention in a relevant Forrester or Gartner report can influence procurement processes in ways that a hundred press articles cannot. Building analyst relationships is slower, more expensive, and harder to measure than press relations. It is also, in many categories, significantly more commercially valuable.

Trade associations, industry bodies, and professional communities are similarly underused. Speaking at the right industry conference, contributing to the right association publication, or being quoted in the right procurement guide can reach exactly the right audience at exactly the right moment in the buying process. These channels require relationship investment rather than media spend, which is why they tend to be deprioritised. That is a mistake.

Measuring B2B PR Without Fabricating the Numbers

PR measurement is genuinely difficult. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either measuring the wrong things or not being honest about the attribution problem. The answer is not to pretend the problem does not exist. It is to be honest about what you can and cannot measure, and to build a framework that gives you useful signal even if it cannot give you perfect attribution.

There are a few things you can measure with reasonable confidence. Direct referral traffic from coverage. Brand search volume over time. Share of voice in target publications relative to competitors. Win/loss data that includes questions about where prospects first encountered the brand. Sales team feedback on whether prospects are arriving with more or less prior knowledge of the business. None of these is a perfect measurement. Together they tell a coherent story.

What you should not measure: AVE. Advertising value equivalency is a fiction that the industry invented to make PR look comparable to paid media. It measures nothing real. If your PR agency is leading with AVE in their reporting, ask them to stop. If they cannot tell you what they would replace it with, that is a problem.

The deeper measurement challenge is that PR operates on a longer cycle than most marketing channels. Coverage that runs today may influence a purchase decision that happens in fourteen months. Building that case requires longitudinal thinking and a willingness to invest in brand before the return is visible. This is a harder conversation to have with a commercially pressured leadership team, but it is the honest one.

When I have been through acquisition due diligence processes, the companies with strong earned media profiles and genuine thought leadership positions always commanded better multiples. Buyers could see the brand equity. They could see the credibility. It showed up in customer retention, in competitive win rates, in the quality of the talent the business attracted. PR does not show up cleanly in a marketing attribution model. It shows up everywhere else.

Sector-Specific Considerations for B2B PR

B2B PR strategy is not one-size-fits-all. The right approach in a professional services firm is structurally different from the right approach in a B2B technology company, which is different again from a manufacturing business or a logistics provider.

In professional services, PR is almost entirely about individual expertise. The firm’s reputation is the aggregate of its people’s reputations. The strategy is to build visible authority for specific practitioners in specific domains, through bylined articles, speaking slots, and commentary in the publications their clients read. The firm brand follows from the individual reputations, not the other way around.

In B2B technology, the dynamic is different. Category creation is often the real prize. If you can establish the language that buyers use to describe a problem, you have a structural advantage that is very hard to compete away. This is why companies like Salesforce invested so heavily in defining “CRM” and “cloud” in the early days. The PR strategy was not just to get coverage. It was to own a frame.

For B2B tech companies managing the tension between corporate brand and product-level positioning, the corporate and business unit marketing framework is worth working through before you set your PR brief. The architecture of your brand affects which stories you can credibly tell at which level, and a PR programme that ignores that architecture will produce inconsistent messaging that confuses rather than convinces.

In more complex go-to-market environments, particularly those involving channel partners or indirect sales, PR needs to serve multiple audiences simultaneously: the end buyer, the channel partner, and often the investment community. BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy in financial services captures some of the complexity here, particularly around how different stakeholders require different narrative approaches even when the underlying product is the same.

The Website as PR Infrastructure

One thing that consistently surprises me is how little attention B2B companies pay to what happens after coverage lands. A journalist writes about you. A prospect reads it. They go to your website. And the website does nothing to reinforce the credibility the coverage just built.

Your website is where earned media converts into commercial outcomes. If the site is not structured to receive that traffic and move it forward, the PR investment is being wasted at the last yard. This means having a press page that is actually maintained, a news section that reflects current activity, and landing experiences that are coherent with the narratives your PR programme is building. Running a structured website audit for sales and marketing alignment will tell you quickly whether your site is equipped to convert the credibility your PR is building.

The same applies to the broader digital footprint. Coverage that generates backlinks improves organic search performance, which compounds over time. Mentions in analyst reports often drive direct search. A PR programme that is generating coverage in the right places will, over time, improve the performance of every other channel in your mix. This is the compounding effect of earned media, and it is why the return on B2B PR investment tends to look better over a three-year horizon than over a three-month one.

If you are building or refining your go-to-market approach and want to see how PR connects to positioning, channel strategy, and commercial measurement, the full Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is the place to start. PR does not operate in isolation. It works best when it is one component of a coherent, commercially grounded growth system.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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