In the constantly changing media and influencer landscape, telling great B2B tech stories – which has always been difficult – has only become harder and harder. Far fewer reporters are covering the space, and those that do are often locked in – sometimes not by choice – to covering only the top five or so companies in all of B2B tech. To overcome that as a B2B brand, you need to become downright surgical in finding and then telling the right story to the right audience.
And yet, all too often, brands fall into the trap of telling bland stories to the broadest possible audience – think mass emails to endless, unqualified media and influencer lists. The ironic result of casting such a wide net with tasteless bait is that your story goes totally unheard anyway.
If one thing is clear, the era of blindly pitching a long, ungainly and candidly useless list of unqualified influencers and praying for results is long over. At Big Valley Marketing, we take a different, targeted approach. Not only do we work with our clients to develop the smartest and most compelling stories, but our Media + Influencer team focuses on the influencers that matter. In fact, we have identified the Top 200 media and influencers that matter most in B2B technology.
Our Pressing Matters podcast, which debuts today (Sept. 14, 2022), is our way of bringing you conversations with the Top 200 – one influencer at a time. You can find our first episode here. Our first guest is none other than Jon Fortt of CNBC and Fortt Knox. We will aim to help you get to know Jon and subsequent guests – what’s their origin story, what intrigues them, what drives them, and what got them interested in B2B tech, of all things?
(On the other hand, if you’re looking for how to pitch a reporter, what their pet peeves are or why they haven’t answered that pitch you sent last Friday, you won’t find that in this podcast.)
You might be thinking, how do you target the right story to the right person based on a list that long? To be sure, we don’t hit all 200 with every pitch. That’s a waste of everyone’s time – the client, the influencer and the firm. Instead, we create a customized influencer list about 25-40 targets strong for each of our clients. And even still, we adjust those lists based on market, topic, news of the day, the strength of the news, expected reporter interest and other factors. Sometimes, folks who aren’t on our Top 200 are great targets for a story. That said, the lion’s share of our outreach is made to our Top 200.
Developing the Top 200 was not simple. We weren’t looking to make a click-bait listicle. (We, in fact, do not share the list outside of our clients and team.) Nor is the work ever done. If you follow the media and influencer space closely, you’ll know that folks change jobs as frequently as big stories are played out and forgotten. Other influencers wax and wane from highly influential to less influential and back again. So our list is dynamic. We change it weekly, if not daily.
Finally, while we put our relationships against any competitor in the space, our Top 200 is not just a list of our 200 favorite influencers. As with all work at Big Valley Marketing, the list is also data-driven. We used smart research – audience, reach, the frequency with which each influencer covered relevant topics and more – to help qualify who did and did not belong on the list. That combination of data and experience is how we consistently drive the highest quality results.
To learn more about this approach or our list, email me at dreddy@bigvalley.co or call me at 650-868-4659. If you’re a brand, we’d love to tell your story the right way, to the right people. And if you’re a marketing communications pro who likes to tell good stories rather than throw a bunch at the wall and see what sticks, give me a ring. We’d love to have you on our growing team.
