Why You Don’t Need a PR Expert in Your Industry – You Need One Who Understands Your Customers

“We’re looking for a PR agency that knows our industry inside out.”

I’ve heard this more times than I care to count – and I get why it feels like the right approach. After all, if someone knows your world, your jargon, your acronyms, surely they’ll know how to talk about you to the market, right?

Here’s the problem. When your PR only talks to people in your industry, you’re often just talking to your competitors, or peers. Or people who already know what you do. They’re not the ones buying from you.

If you’re serious about reaching decision makers, winning new business, and growing your business and brand in the eyes of customers – people poised with the cheque book or hovering over the ‘add to basket’ button – then it’s time to stop looking for a PR agency that knows your field, and start looking for one that knows your markets.

You’re a supplier of security solutions. Do you want a security PR agency, selling stories to the security press, read by other security suppliers like you. Or do you want what you have to say to be read and heard by manufacturers, builders, healthcare suppliers, hairdressers, facilities management, retail and so on?

The problem with looking in, and not out

Too often, companies confuse familiarity with effectiveness. A PR agency might know your industry like the back of their hand. They might have the contacts to get you into every trade title you admire. And that’s ok – reputation within your sector does matter.

But trade press exposure alone isn’t going to influence the CFO, the procurement director, or the operations manager who’s deciding whether to bring your company on board. They’re not reading your industry bible, they’re looking for stories, insights, and proof points that help solve their pain.

Your job – our job – is to ease that pain, but not before we truly understand what that pain is and if necessary, draw it out and emphasise the implications of not addressing it. Of not picking up the phone to you.

So we need to shift the focus

Effective communications, traditional or digital PR, isn’t about how smart you are in your niche, it’s about how clearly you solve someone else’s problem. We need to shift the focus from features to fixes.

If you’re a software provider, what time, resource, or compliance risk do you combat?

If you’re in manufacturing, how do you reduce lead times or improve sustainability?

If you sell into education, healthcare, infrastructure, what do your customers wish they didn’t have to worry about?

A good PR agency helps you understand those pain points and then builds stories, generates thought leadership, and delivers news and views into the markets you serve.

Typically this equates to media coverage across trade press and online links that helps with backlinking and boosting your digital presence, but it could also be about engaging with stakeholder groups, or governing and trade bodies through strategic speaker slots, white papers or roundtables with key opinion formers.

Think like your customer

The most valuable PR professionals aren’t the ones who know your world best. Yes, they ought to have a pretty firm grasp on you, what you do, how you do it and how your industry reacts to change or geo-political forces. But they’re also the ones who can translate your expertise into something the outside world cares about.

A good PR agency will ask annoying, outsider questions your customers are also asking and help you ditch the jargon. They will pitch stories where your buyers are listening and not just where your competitors are publishing. And they’re not afraid to push back if your message only matters to people already on your team. They will tell the chief what they need to hear, and not what they want to hear.

If your goal is to sell (which I guess it is), you need to stop talking to your peers and start speaking to your prospects. Because recognition from your industry is nice, but does it really drive you forward, or just feed your vanity?

Here’s one we made earlier

A client of ours, Parking Facilities, supplies access management solutions and perimeter security to multiple markets. They engaged in a digital PR campaign with us in January, and by the end of April we’d achieved 24 pieces of coverage across digital and print, and boosted their domain authority but crucially, featured across 11 different vertical markets.

Only one of those is the market they operate in. Only one of those is read by their colleagues and competitors. But 10 were markets where they seek their business, where people procure and have challenges, and pains, that we were able to talk about and offer solutions to.

So, what should you be looking for?

When choosing a PR agency, ask yourself:

  • Can they understand my customers’ worlds, landscapes and pain points, even if they don’t come from my industry?
  • Do they have a proven track record of penetrating new vertical markets for their clients?
  • Do they challenge my assumptions about what makes a good story?
  • Can they get us seen and heard outside our own circles?
  • And most importantly, are they focused on helping us grow our business?

Final Thought

Your expertise is impressive. But your customers don’t want to hear about that, and it’s highly unlikely they’re going to be falling over themselves to buy your blue version of what used to be red. They want to know what problem you’ll take off their desk. And that’s where great PR makes all the difference.

So don’t hire someone who knows your industry better than you. Hire someone who knows how to make your value visible to the people who matter.

If you’d like to find out if that’s us, then get in touch.