WHERE SHOULD B2B TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES INVEST?

Some of the most common questions we are asked by B2B technology companies investing (or revising their investment) in media relations support in the European market are:

• Where should we base that support?
• Which titles do we target?
• How do we prioritise investment to maximise the return?

There are 44 European countries, 24 official languages and significant differences in the media landscape across the region and so, unless budgets are unlimited, compromises have to be made. A range of models can be adopted, from focusing on a single priority market to on-the-ground support in multiple markets. If it’s the former, the questions are relatively easy to answer but any variation beyond that requires an understanding of where the influential media are based and what reach those media titles might have across the entire region.

In our latest whitepaper, ‘European Media Relations – Where should B2B technology companies invest?‘, we’ve provided some guidance by using RUMA, Babel’s proprietary ranking news analysis platform. RUMA was designed to gather, amalgamate and analyse ranking news from search engine results pages (SERPs). It delivers valuable intelligence to inform and enhance media outreach campaigns, to examine the competitive environment for companies, to identify issues driving the news agenda and to identify which media sources are likely to deliver ranking results.

For this exercise we used RUMA to examining the search ranking of news relating to a sample of key issues in four B2B technology verticals. We examined not only which media titles cover those topics in volume and which typically rank highest, but importantly, how far and wide those high ranking titles are read across ten European markets.

The results might come as surprise but they illustrate the value of doing the research before committing investment. For instance PSD2, the European regulation for electronic payment services, is obviously an important topic in the fintech sector Europe wide, but look at the chart below. It shows a language analysis of the top twenty highest ranking articles (January to June 2022) when searching Google News for ‘PSD2’ from each of the ten countries shown. You might reasonably conclude that investing in a strong UK media campaign (the English language titles are almost exclusively based in the UK), is going to result in a stronger return on investment than spreading scarce campaign resources across two or three countries.

This is a common profile for the B2B technology sector but it doesn’t always apply so it’s important to do the research first, and to take account of other factors, but the 21st century digital economy is significantly influenced by digital search. In some ways, if a company’s news isn’t ranking highly in search engines, it might as well not exist. That makes search ranking a critical metric to take account of.

If you would like a copy of the whitepaper, simply fill out your details below and we’ll email you a copy and if you’d like to discuss campaign support in the European market, or you are interested in us carrying out a bespoke analysis, email us via enquiries@babelpr.com.