Episode 41: Leveraging Thought Leadership and PR Strategies in the B2B Space | Amy Littleton

In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve and Amy Littleton, President of Stretch PR,  discuss the importance of thought leadership in the B2B space and how to use data and research as powerful tools for positioning a company. 

They also cover leveraging corporate channels on LinkedIn to build a brand, managing client expectations in PR, setting stretch goals, navigating difficult situations and crises, the skepticism some executives have towards marketing and communications, and more. 

Tune in to find out how to maximize the impact of thought leadership initiatives with exclusive content sharing, use technology platforms for effective content distribution, measure success through reach and engagement metrics, and build a strong reputation through PR.

This podcast is sure to help you take your B2B business to the next level and create lasting value within the industry. Don't miss out!

Connect with Amy Littleton and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Disclaimer: The transcription of our podcast episodes has been generated by a third-party AI tool. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee that all typos, errors, or misinterpretations have been corrected. So, if you come across any blunders, don't blame us. Blame the robots. (Just kidding, don't blame them either. They're doing their best.)

Steve Goldhaber: Welcome back to Studio 26. This is Steve with the interesting B2B Marketers Podcast. All right, I am joined by Amy today. Amy, you and I go back in time. We've worked for same company in some. Former or another, but great to have you on the show. Welcome.

Amy Littleton: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Steve Goldhaber:  All right. Give the audience the 60-second intro about who you are and what you've been up to.

Amy Littleton: Great. Well,  I'm Amy Littleton. I am president of Stretch pr. I've been in the PR agency business for about 20 years, operating agencies on behalf of other folks, and started my own firm recently. We specialize in creative, full service, public relations, kind of outbound reputation and brand building work, media relations, social media, executive positioning, thought leadership, brand activation, those kinds of disciplines.

We do a lot in the B2B space, having worked across many industries, including insurance and financial services and professional services. But also we have a consumer practice as well, so I'm happy to be here today. Thanks for having me.

Steve Goldhaber:  Nice. All right. Awesome. So like we always do on the podcast, we jump right into the case studies.

The first one is about a bigger company in the insurance space, and you're gonna share a case that has to do with thought leadership and getting to that. Thought leadership and not just like the very fragmented, Hey, let's do social media blasts all the time, but something more meaningful. So yeah, take it away on case study number one.

Amy Littleton: Great. So I thought it would be interesting to just share the importance of data and research and how that can be used globally, regionally, and locally. You know, when you're communicating in the B2B space, you're trying to sell products, you're trying to sell services, but you're really trying to sell you your company as the smartest person in the room, as the entity that knows the most and has the best talent, and has the best solutions, and understands, you know, customers challenges and the most meaningful way.

And data and research is a great way to do that. It can be as as simple as, you know, a little poll. But for the case study here, we're talking about a large global organization that has thousands and thousands of executives and customers that are in the C R M that are there available to, and that. You know, audience is available to be mined, and this doesn't have to be any company, doesn't have to be global to make this kind of strategy work.

But for this case, it's a survey of executives across the globe really looking at what are their key issues and challenges that they face, and what are they seeing on the horizon, what's keeping them up at night, and then turning that into a piece of content that is showing what across the globe people are thinking about.

Executives of businesses as well as regionally, you know, what's happening in the us, what's happening in Europe, and slicing it even further down to specific markets. What's happening in Illinois, what's happening in Chicago? What do the folks in the Chicago region, you know, what are they most concerned about in their businesses and in their practices?

What macroeconomic conditions are affecting them? You know, what are the challenges there and how can, on the backside this company brings solutions to help with those challenges. So that's kind of the idea.

Steve Goldhaber:  Yeah. I think it's great when companies will actually engage the intended audience for who the thought leadership is for in the actual research.

Because from a marketing perspective, it's a customer touchpoint, right? You're right. You're reaching out saying, do you wanna participate in this? And then once it's done, they're gonna read it on the back end. So you're getting their share of mind and they're doing it in a way where, You know, it's, it's part of that brand experience.

When you collected the information, like how was the survey? Was it a survey, was it in person? How did they collect it?

Amy Littleton:  In this case it was a survey. So there are, you know, clients across the globe to tap into. But for folks that are listening today, they might be, you know, thinking how could we execute something like this?

And there's a lot of ways to do it. Not only fielding your own survey with your own customers, but also partnering with a media organization or academia where you can really use different audiences to build around those, you know, to get those data points. But what's interesting about it's not just producing the.

Survey and then serving it up to folks with the insights, which is certainly important. But it is all of the work product that goes around promoting that and using that content to leverage in multiple ways. So, you know, I think that is where you get the real bank for the buck when it comes to roi. You know, you produce the report and these things are not cheap to, to produce a report of some sort.

And then you slice it up, you have a global opportunity for media relations. For example, you can go into the local markets with media relations for, you know, national business media or even down to local podcast and business radio. Newspapers, et cetera. I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago and one of the speakers on the stage referred to this very report I'm thinking of.

Yeah. And it was like, it was done about a year and a half ago and, and it's still coming up in conversation and on the stage at this conference. Because it is a proof point of what's happening in the industry and why people should care about the topics that are being discussed by the company. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's great.

What is the duration that you actually need to field it? So are we talking like a month or two? How long does that take?

Amy Littleton: Well, it really depends on the size and scale. These things do not have to be so time intensive, although they can be, and it just really depends on the appetite, the budget. How readily available the data sources are.

You know, how, how your marketing engine can coalesce around it to really, you know, amplify across multiple channels. But, you know, we've also done some very easy LinkedIn polls, for example, where you go on and you capture a bunch of content and quick hits and turn around and produce it out in the content marketing.

So it can be the spectrum of intense and complex and very simple and, and quick. Yep.

Steve Goldhaber: So the example I always like to refer to on the type of thought leadership you're talking about is the Edelman Trust Barometer. I feel like that was pretty early on where they just said, you know what? We're doing research on this space.

We wanna own this space. And they do it every year. And now, I mean, it's gotta be 15, 20 years they've been doing this. And now the interesting parts are not even like the annual, you know, refreshes. It's all the trend data to see what's been happening over the last five or 10 years. And I think that's really, you know, as far as like owning a piece of thought leadership, once you have five, 10 years under your belt, that's a great place to be because it's just, it's a well oiled machine.

And people view you as, look, you've been around you, you really know this space. How many. How many years for this company were they doing

Amy Littleton: this? I would say at least a decade. Yes, probably more. More than that. I'd have to go back, but it would probably be 10 to 15 years. Yeah, and you're right, it is that trend.

Trend data because you know, going back to, you know, when you think about September 11th and those kinds of things that were really important back then, or the recent pandemic and how much that played into the decisions, and people may or may not have predicted that that was gonna happen and then you know, how it impacted them.

So to see that over time, you can see those macro trends play in the data and how people are feeling about things. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: So this company's been doing it a while. It's gotta be working, but now I'm kind of going into what were the measures of success? So when they do the readout of, look, we've done another report, we've sent it out.

What do you look for? Like, what's your scorecard to, to measure the success of it?

Amy Littleton: Well, immediately it is the, the announcement. So we've done everything from have a, you know, press conference in New York or in London. We've had ideas of partnering with doing it at the Global Economic Forum, kind of announcing they're using platforms that exist as well as coordinated global communications effort.

And marketing effort. So launching on the same day, releasing to news media, sometimes doing exclusive with a certain news organization, then translating it across the globe from the different markets. But that's really just the initial launch. From there it is. How do you trickle it down into the local markets and slice and dice the data to make it relevant for various markets?

So you might be going into New York City and you wanna focus on New York City content. So it is the initial launch and then an entire rollout. That takes a long time to really squeeze as much as you can out of the thought leadership. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Tell us more about the exclusive approach, and it doesn't have to be just for this company, but I'd love for you to share with the listeners just that angle of, Hey, we'll give you something if you want to be the first to have it.

Like how does that go down? What do you share? What do you not share when you try to cultivate that type of an approach?

Amy Littleton:  If I could shift gears to another quick case study, I'll, this'll really underscore that. Yeah. There was a recent client. That was is in the healthcare industry. Nurses, doctors, the entire healthcare provider space, and did a big study, the largest of its kind about what's happening in nursing and you know, kind of how nurses are feeling and what's happening with talent shortages, with burnout, et cetera.

And so we used the approach of doing an exclusive, but it was more of an advance. So if you use the term exclusive, you're really saying, I'm gonna take this to one news outlet. They're gonna get it exclusively, and then I'll roll it out to everyone else. This was more of an advance because there are so many organizations that we knew would want this, and we wanted them to have it because it was important content.

So we didn't want to give it to one exclusively. We wanted to give it to about seven as an advance. So they knew others were going to get it, but they were going to be getting it a little bit sooner, and they were agreed not to release it until the specific time that we noted. And at that time, we were having a press conference.

And we were sharing it over the Newswire and really broadcasting it more broadly to all media, traditional and non-traditional. And so the deal is we will provide you with the content early, the study and the data early, give you time to digest it. And produce your content if you agree not to release it until a certain time.

Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: How often in that scenario do they play by the rules? Because I've, I've been involved in some of those where you think they're gonna do exactly what you want as far as release date, and they just run with the story three days in advance cuz they literally like, They wanna break the news. So how do you manage that?

Amy Littleton:  Well, you manage that through really good relationships with the journalists because they know, you know, that's gonna be the last time you ever give 'em that shot. If they do that, and if you have a good relationship and you really appreciate that relationship, it's on both sides. You know, both the journalists excited and the PR side.

They usually will kind of play by the unwritten rule that we're gonna go at this right time. And sometimes, you know, I've had it happen where everyone agrees on it and then, you know, a very excited trigger, happy web person, turns it on before you're ready. So, you know, things do happen, but at that point the ball is rolling down the hill and you know, usually there's not a lot of harm or foul, you know, if that happens.

Yes.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's also like the element of don't run this early. Please don't run this, run this early. Yes. You know, and then they, and then you do it and, okay, thanks. Yeah,we're out. We're going

Amy Littleton: . You know, it's not a perfect science because you know, as we tell our clients this is not a lot of PR and communications is storytelling.

We're telling stories, we're communicating the news, and we're using journalists and others and working with them to communicate to their audiences. So we don't own the journalists, we don't own the publications. We're not paying for, this is not an ad. So it is more of a relationship and a negotiation, more of an art than a science.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Well put. All right, let's do this. Let's jump into case data number two. This one is also for a bigger company, a professional service company, and this one's about that balance of using, you know, the corporate owned channel as well as individual, you know, executives or employees that work for the company.

So take it away. 

Amy Littleton: So this is a big consulting company. And as you know, consultants only have their brains to sell. And so really the consulting firm is looking to go deeper into the financial services industry and showcase the consulting firm within that space. So that was the challenge. You know, how do we really build the brand within the financial services space with all we have is our people.

So, you know, it's kind of that corporate overlay of the consulting firm and the brand and the reputation of the consulting firm at the macro level, as well as the smart people that are the consultants doing the work every day. How do we build their brand and reputation as well and really maximize and amplify and leverage the two.

So really the goal is to. Leverage the corporate channels, the website, the digital channels, the Twitter feed, the LinkedIn company page with the executive profiles as well as we know all of your executives own their own LinkedIn channels. They may or may not want to use them on behalf of your business, but at the highest levels, mostly they play ball pretty easily.

So with this particular case, we would leverage all of the corporate channels and the content and then take that content and share it and amplify it across. All of the executive profiles over LinkedIn. We've been fortunate enough over the years for many, many executives to trust us with their LinkedIn profiles specifically, where they're like, Hey, here are the keys.

And we, you know, work with them to develop content. But in this case, we were able to drive sales directly into the consulting firm by amplifying content, not only corporately, but also across the executive channels.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So is this there software that helped facilitate this? Did you use a platform to do it or was this just more, we had access to five 10 executives and we just did it natively on LinkedIn.

Amy Littleton: There are some technologies, but none are, it's not ever plug and play. It's really, you know, they can enable content to be shared across different platforms, but it takes a high touch approach, especially when you're talking about CEOs. We implemented this at another client and I, I actually saw earlier today on LinkedIn, this client is doing a webinar on AI and I probably got hit, I got hit corporately.

I got hit with a few different executives that I know talking about this coming up. So if you think about marketing being a series of touchpoints and how often are you, you know, touching people, that is a great way to do it because as I look in my feed, I see the CEOs promoting about it. I see the marketing guys promoting about it.

I see an executive vice president promoting it as well as the corporate channels, and it kind of reinforces maybe I should attend this. You know? It's probably gonna be pretty smart.

Steve Goldhaber:  Yeah. I love it. I mean, LinkedIn, so many people in the B2B space are on LinkedIn, so I think activation through individuals is great.

When I look at the data engagement, usually two, sometimes three x stronger than brand or a corporate channel. Now the balance there is obviously the brand or the corporate entity has tons and tons of followers. So it's not uncommon to say, well, this person has 10,000 connections and the corporate brand has a million followers.

But you know, it's all about the right audience. I think that's the thing with LinkedIn is I'd rather have a hundred impressions to my specific audience than 10,000 impressions to a lot of people.

Amy Littleton: That's right. It's quality, but it's also. The amplification opportunity, the corporate sends it out and then it gets further amplified through, you know, the engagement that happens and then someone likes it and someone shares it and someone comments on it, and that then gets shared out.

So it really has a compounding effect where it all works together really well. I also would mention that people fail to realize, you know, everyone thinks of internal comms as using your internal comms channels. Well, LinkedIn, Is a great tool for internal comms, for building, you know, relationships with your colleagues.

And so if you think about corporate comms channels and leveraging the, you know, every person that works at a company wants to be friends with the c e O. So they're connecting you the c e o and you know, there's a bunch of people that the C E O may not run into every day. But can have direct communication with by using the LinkedIn channels.

Yeah,

Steve Goldhaber: I think that's great. I think there was that line that people didn't wanna cross. I remember I had a c e O of of a company a long time ago. They just went all in on LinkedIn and it really was, when I talked to him about it, he said that it was his way of staying connected to employees. It wasn't so much about clients, cuz there was maybe five, 6,000 people at the company.

And if he was on the road and he was like meeting with new potential clients or at an industry event, that was his way to kind of like put a selfie up and it was just a great way to stay connected. Yeah, and I think any, obviously on LinkedIn, the more authentic the content is, the better play it gets as far as like engagement.

So what was the, for this consulting company. How do they define the success of this one? Like what made them say this worked or didn't work?

Amy Littleton:  So we look at the tools, you know, the same kinds of measurement tools that most marketers and communicators have audience reach engagement. But we also look at the anecdotal stories of did this drive sales?

You know, people, if you think about just LinkedIn as the platform or communicating a thought leadership across LinkedIn. And then all of a sudden prospects would ping like, this is really smart. I would love to talk with you more about this. I've had this challenge recently, and you hit the nail on the head.

You know, this is great stuff and it gives you immediately an opportunity for sales. And so we've been able to drive multiple millions of dollars in revenue by using those channels to communicate thought leadership content. So those kind of anecdotal stories, but really it is the, the data around audience reach and engagement.

‍

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right. Thanks for sharing the study there. I'm gonna jump into q and a. Tell us about your first job in marketing or comms. I know that the marketing and comms worlds live side by side slash together, but what was your first job?

Amy Littleton: So I came out of undergrad at Florida State University and moved immediately up to Minneapolis.

And worked for General Mills. I did an internship there at General Mills in the communications department, which I had no idea what I was getting into. I was just really excited. There was free cereal every morning, so it was amazing. But I got the opportunity to play a small part in doing a nationwide media tour with Colombo Yogurt, which was a, a General Mills brand at that time, and the US Women's Olympic Hockey team.

So the brand took the hockey team, they had just won the gold medal in the Olympics, took them on a kind of skills and drills tour across the country, brought to you by Colombo yogurt. And so I got to see, you know, firsthand. How you engage news in the local market to come out and cover something that's going on, how you manage the logistics of getting people from here to there, how you do brand activation and kind of bring the brand to life locally, how you get people there in the local market engaged and established partnerships.

So it was kind of really my first foray into public relations, and that's when I fell in love with it. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: You know, so I didn't realize we had this in common. So my first job was in Minneapolis. This was an internship I had done for Campbell une, which was an agency, and Campbell Mao worked with some General Mills products.

So were you at the corporate office? Was it just north of the highway? Was it 3 94 or 4 94?

Amy Littleton: It was just north of the highway, but I don't know. In, in Golden I think is the community, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Wow. Small world.

Amy Littleton:  I'm not gonna share the years that we, that we were doing. That's where you're going.

Steve Goldhaber: I'm like, abort, Steve Abort. I'm like, I can't, I won't do that to you, but maybe I'm trying to, I'm trying to now connect the women's hockey team gold medal success, and I don't know the year and I'm not gonna have you share the year for, for protection. What do you really love about comms or PR today? I mean, you've seen it go through this major shift of everything being digitally consumed, like what is it about today's world that you really enjoy?

Amy Littleton: I have loved being a part of this industry so much, mostly because of our ability to solve problems. And challengers for our clients. You know, the, the fact that news media has changed so much is I think just par for the course.

You know, technology changes a lot. It's going to be ever changing. It's not like things used to be one way and now we have all this change and it's another way. It's accelerated. It's constantly changing and you have to keep up with it, but it really is the same at its core. It's really the same. We're trying to communicate with people, we're trying to engage audiences.

We're trying to persuade people to do something and to act, and so that challenge, how do we solve that challenge with the tools in our toolkit? That's what really gets me up every day. I just enjoy, yeah. You know, a client coming to us and saying, we really are trying to reach this audience, and we really dig in on how can we best do that.

Steve Goldhaber:  Yeah. So I'm gonna ask another question too, on, I imagine every PR company, the worst client is one that they're all excited, they hire you, and then they want the token like, I wanna be on the front cover of this. You got two months to do it. Go. Like, how do you. How do you manage a client like that? Because obviously like when those things happen, they're great, but they're never guaranteed and they take time.

So how do you manage the expectations of someone who is newer to the PR world as far as what they should expect?

Amy Littleton: Well, our company name is Stretch PR for that very reason. To really find those stretch and set those stretch goals where you're striving for something and you know, if you might not get there.

But that is what you really wanna aim for. And so we always say up front to our clients, Hey, I don't know, this is a stretch. I don't know if we're gonna get there, but we would love to, you know, get that top tier placement in the first two months. It's a tall order. Yeah, we are budget constrained. We're, you know, time constrained.

Here's how you can help us get there. With our content, with our stories, with our experts and our spokespeople with the data and research that we have, you know, how can we bring those ingredients to make sure that the story resonates and you know, kind of gets us the traction that we're looking for. But you know, you don't know unless you try, but your client, you know, sometimes clients, you know, clients are people too.

We all want the best for our companies and we want to, you know, Spend the least amount of money and get the highest result. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So, yeah. What's your most interesting get, as they say over your career? What are you most excited about?

Amy Littleton:  The most fulfilling result is when you not only are managing a risk, You know, if there's something that's kind of a difficult situation, navigating through that to have good success on the backend, I think is incredibly fulfilling.

You know, a lot of people, when they deal with crisis and issues, it's not great and fun to be there because you're dealing with something difficult. But to navigate people and personalities and actions and you know, put all that together and navigate through tricky waters and come out the other end.

It's a very fulfilling experience.

Steve Goldhaber: So yeah, I gotta tell you, that is one part that is so tough and the folks who are in that crisis comes who just have that like stoic calmness, whether it's just being a spokesperson to let people know that, you know, there's stability here or. If there's bad information, we're gonna correct it.

That is such a skill because in those moments, the person delivering that information, whether it's through, you know, verbal or written, that's what it's all about. You know, like something happens in the marketplace and, and you may have an hour to come up with something to, to make or break it you know, is if you misstep, you're gonna fuel the fire.

And if you do a good job, then people kind of go, oh, well maybe this is not such a big deal after all. So that, that's an amazing skill.

Amy Littleton:  It's tricky. And you also have a lot of stakeholders involved. You know, you have C-level executive that wants things a certain way. You have attorneys that want it a certain way.

Yes, you have everybody factoring in and you are the communicator. You know how people are going to receive things and you understand risk, but you also understand the need for transparency and honesty and integrity. You have to be that strong voice in the room so that you know. People don't make bad decisions or emotional decisions or knee jerk reactions.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's tough. Or just go with the. No comment. Or we, I guess that's the worst thing you could say, right? There needs to be more context behind, you know, at least sometimes if it's like investor relations related things, like we just, instead of saying no comment, you have to say, unfortunately we can't co like, we'd love to, but we can't comment on this because it has to do with, you know, things that are related to the s e c and we just, we just can't say anything.

‍

Amy Littleton: Yeah, and then you can bridge too, but what we can talk about. Yes. You know these things. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Look at you. Look at you. Just working it in. Here's, here's what we do wanna talk about. Now that we have your attention. That's good. What is it about the work that you've done over your career that, like, what's this thing that just like drives you nuts?

You're like, people. Let's stop doing this. It's not productive. It's not helping your brand. What would you like to see eliminated?

Amy Littleton:  I have seen over the years, and it's really different size of companies, different company stages, executives who may be a little skeptical about. Marketing and communications and you know, they bring this level of skepticism and well, you know, we don't know what works or, you know, does it really, you know, we're, we're really getting an roi.

I heard the other day, you know, I'm a numbers person, you know, and so I, I get it. I understand that for some people, it's not natural. They're down into a business operation and that's what they understand. Yeah. But the discipline of marketing and communications to build a brand and reputation is unquestioned.

And it is really important. It, it drives me crazy when executives think, well, you know, since I don't understand it, it must not be important or it must not be valuable. Yeah. That kind of drives me crazy. It's like, well, no, it's because you don't understand it, that you don't think it's valuable, but I can point to, you know, 50 different case studies to show you how valuable it is.

And you're really missing out. Yeah, if you don't figure it out.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. My final question to you is, what can you share? You know, this audience, it's all B2B marketers. You know, what can you share with someone who's not really into the PR game? Maybe they've worked with an agency here and there, like what's your advice to get them thinking about, it's not just about traditional thought leadership or doing ad campaigns.

What would you, if you were in the room for like their annual planning process, what would you advise them on how to, how to get started?

Amy Littleton:  I think the key is for them to think about what is our storytelling strategy, if you think about it from that level. You know, what is our selling strategy? What is our advertising strategy, and what is our storytelling strategy?

How are we getting our message out there? How are we getting people to feel passionate about our company? How are we getting people to understand the value we bring to our clients? And that's all storytelling. So that's where the communicators can come in to position the company well, to tell great stories and to make sure that those stories are reaching the right audience.

So that that audience actually does something or feels something different. So I would say just, you know, if you think about the tools in the marketing toolkit, this is your storytelling tool and you need to make sure that you, you use it.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right. Awesome. Well, Amy, thanks for joining us today. I've enjoyed getting to know that our careers may have started at the same, same year.

Amy Littleton: I have to do some research now about the hockey team, but luckily they've won a few times, so we'll go with the most recent one. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right.I like it. I like it. You're like, I started six years ago.

Amy Littleton: Exactly. It was very recent.

Steve Goldhaber: Very recent. All right. Awesome. Well, thanks again for joining us and thank you all to the listeners, make sure to like and subscribe.

You can listen to this podcast. Many, many channels. I'm not gonna list all of them, but I will do a shout out to the 26 characters website. That's where we catalog all the previous episodes. So thanks again, Amy, and looking forward to seeing everyone. Next time on Studio 26. This is interesting B2B Marketers podcast. Take care. Bye-bye. 

‍