My good friends at KoMarketing asked me for my thoughts on the most effective B2B marketing tactics of the year (visit link for excellent insights from numerous leading marketers), which I thought were worth expanding on a bit more here. Would love to hear in comments if you had a similar experience this year. Happy Holidays all!

For Marketing and PR teams, 2015 was ‘The Year of Content – Backed By Data’. Today, cold media pitches (similar to annoying ads) are despised, many even publicly humiliated on social channels like Twitter. So while marketers are seeing huge upticks in conversion rates by simply providing their target audiences with useful content (blog posts, video, webinars, ebooks, IGs, etc.), instead of interrupting them, PR leaders are having the same luck with journalists.

Here are two examples of how PR can provide the same value to the media – that content marketers are able to offer their audiences – to secure top-tier coverage:

Holiday Hits

Holidays are a great time to take advantage of this. Take this example from worldwide e-commerce provider, SLI Systems. SLI offers on-site search to thousands of e-commerce sites and is in the unique position to analyze aggregate data across the top retailers of the world. This Halloween, SLI uncovered the most popular costumes of 2015 via millions of consumer searches on costume retailer websites – a great story, backed by data. After pitching the story to relevant journalists covering the retail sector (and holiday trends specifically), the story was picked up on a global scale on an international news wire, several local NBC News stations, several radio shows, and multiple retail trades.

Breaking News Support

Piggybacking on breaking news by offering journalists supporting data is another way to get their attention. Take this recent example from user experience platform, UserTesting. UserTesting has a panel of more than one million participants and is in the unique position to offer user experience research on any site, app, virtually anything – in hours. When the Apple Watch debuted, UserTesting ran an exclusive study for Forbes, revealing that the wearable was not yet a home run with users (story received 29,300 views). When virtual assistant Facebook M was rolled out to just 200 people in Bay Area, UserTesting located one of these lucky folks within its panel and ran an exclusive study for WIRED, uncovering the potential of Facebook’s new AI experiment (story received 6,300+ social shares).

The question PR leaders need to ask themselves is:

What valuable information is my company in the unique position to offer the media to support current trends or news?

Help you, I can?

PR has joined this great content revolution. A great story, complete with supporting data, can work across all your marketing channels.

@jennymoebius thank you for providing insight and perspective for this! @KoMarketing

— Derek Edmond (@DerekEdmond) December 14, 2015