It’s awards season; at The Fletcher Group, that means making some extra room in the trophy case. We’re thrilled to announce we’ve won PR Daily’s PR for Lead Generation Award, 2020. This prestigious prize, part of the PR Daily Content Marketing Awards, recognizes partnerships between B2B companies and PR/ Marketing agencies who utilize PR content for sales and marketing campaigns.
We entered our PR for Lead Generation campaign with client Blackhawk Network to showcase the importance of PR for sales enablement.
Last year, we expanded our partnership with Blackhawk’s sales and marketing team, showing them how PR content could increase leads and sales through story-telling rather than product-pushing. Our overall goal was to increase traffic to Blackhawk’s website, while adding qualified leads.
We created a steady stream of sales enablement materials around PR achievements such as media placements, award wins and speaking opportunities. These were shared with the sales team to distribute via social media or emails. In this way, Blackhawk was able to promote their brand without being “salesy.”
For measurement, custom UTMs were attached to each piece of content distributed to the sales team to track website traffic. We found that the PR content led to increased web traffic and added qualified leads.
Our efforts led to more than 9,000 page views and more than 40 content downloads on the company’s CashStar website. The PR-driven content also earned a progression rate of nearly 12% and an average session duration of more than three minutes.
On the Hawk Incentives site, our work earned more than 2,500 page views and 15 content downloads. Its progression rate was nearly double the site average, and its average session duration, bounce rate and sessions per user were all better than the site average.
Want to learn more about our process for turning PR content into qualified leads? Watch this video on PR for Sales Enablement from our own Amanda Fiech.
We could not be more proud of the work we’ve done with Blackhawk Network. Our team members worked diligently and intelligently to shepherd the PR for Lead-Gen campaign through each stage of its lifecycle. Likewise, Blackhawk’s sales and marketing groups were steadfast in their commitment to the project. Through the campaign, we’ve broadened our relationship to a valued client, set an internal template for similar campaigns in the future and proven that PR is more than a “top of funnel” contributor. Receiving this recognition from our colleagues at RR Daily (and some hardware for the trophy case) feels like icing on the cake.
