Back to school: Three strategic comms learnings to take into the new term

Hello,

September is here, bringing the familiar new-term rush for marketing and comms teams: events restart, campaigns go live, and plans left on the back burner over summer suddenly need to happen yesterday.

With plenty already competing for attention, we’ve pulled together three strategic comms lessons worth keeping in mind for the months ahead.

Make your best assets work harder

Marketing teams are under pressure to do more with less. Sometimes the answer isn’t creating more content, but extracting more value from the thinking you’ve already invested in. Good content earns attention. Great content gives sales a reason to start a conversation.

Culture consultancy Kin&Co had a sophisticated piece of IP in its Transformation Blueprint™. We helped turn it into a lead-gen engine, stress-testing the thinking against a synthetic audience of prospective C-suite buyers before building a campaign across content, LinkedIn, email, podcasts and direct outreach.

It generated three high-value prospect meetings, became Kin&Co’s second most-viewed webpage and drove 22% longer engagement than its sitewide average. Read more here

Who owns GEO in your business? If you’re not sure, you’re not alone.

If Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is on the priority list for September, put ownership and measurement next to it. Because while plenty of marketers are thinking about how their brands show up in AI search, far fewer have worked out who’s actually responsible for making it happen

Recent Semrush research shows 75% of comms teams believe GEO matters, yet 29% say nobody owns it and 39% aren’t measuring it at all. Semrush research also suggests PR is rarely in the room when AI-search budgets are being set. That leaves a growing gap between recognising the opportunity and actually managing it.

As autumn planning gets underway, bring PR, SEO and content around the same table, decide where responsibility sits and agree how you’ll measure progress.

Turn events into campaign moments

Autumn events season is upon us, and simply showing up is an expensive way to fill a calendar. A recent Forbes piece argues that the strongest B2B event strategies connect brand, demand generation and customer relationships rather than treating the event as a standalone activation.

For fintech company Conferma, that meant making GBTA the launch moment for its Virtual Card Performance Index. With concentrated PR, content, paid and direct engagement around a moment when customers, prospects and media were already focused on the same conversation. The result: 26 pieces of coverage and a platform that turned new IP into commercially valuable conversations.

So, as the autumn rush gets underway, make sure you’re making the most of the opportunities ahead: make your best thinking work harder, put clear ownership behind emerging opportunities and turn events into something bigger than a date in the diary. 

The With Editor

With Women on Tour

With Women is hitting the road this September. Our free media training programme for women leaders will be popping up at SPE Women in Energy, Soho Mews House and ATS London, sharing the skills to communicate with confidence when the spotlight is on. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/with-pr_with-women-media-training-is-going-on-tour-activity-7495848853682946048-kmPl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAADM2LOgBCVkgSPCKLAw1PmI0xtyWtmSXAtg 

The new rules of AI disclosure

New EU AI Act rules mean clearer labelling of AI interactions and generated content. For marketers, transparency is quickly becoming a requirement, not a choice. [Read more here – https://www.thedrum.com/industry-insight/why-the-eu-s-ai-act-is-about-better-marketing ]

Marketers can help set the rules for AI advertising

Our Director of Adtech and Marketing Services, Graham Alexander, argues that marketers have a window, before AI advertising becomes established, to use their budgets to demand better standards from the platforms.. [Read more here – https://uk.themedialeader.com/if-marketers-care-about-trust-now-is-the-time-to-show-i