Building Brand Awareness, Brand Authority & Educating the Market is most cost effectively done through great Thought Leadership Content & PR
Why an entrepreneurial innovator chose to stimulate demand for his automotive market solution with strong PR & thought leadership content, years before he began advertising. And how the strategy reaped dividends for his business through acquisition and well beyond.
As a PR consultant, I expect most clients to come and go within three years. We help them build their brand awareness; increase engagement with the market(s) they serve; grow to hit a revenue target; get acquired; or (more rarely today) list on a stock exchange. Then personnel and priorities change.
However, over the last few months, I’ve decided to conduct a series of interviews with the clients that stayed with my agency Agility PR well beyond that average, in this case for more than 12 years.
I wanted to find out why they stuck with our brand of thought leadership campaigning aimed at raising awareness of their offerings; educating the target market(s) about the merits of their products and services; and helping them prove domain expertise and gain authority to speak to decision-makers in the markets where they sell their products and services. I wanted to find out what attracted them to us in the first place and what made them stick with Agility PR, in this case right through the Great Recession of 2009-2013.
This interview was with an old friend and long-term client Paul Smith, now Director of Traka Automotive which is the leading provider of electronic key management to the car dealership world in the UK and Ireland.
He is currently spearheading Traka Automotive’s growth in Europe and the APAC and MEA regions. He founded and built a key management solution business called eTag Solutions from scratch. Within 10 years in 2014 it was acquired by ASSA ABLOY – becoming Traka Automotive.