Launching an International Tech PR Campaign: What’s the Brief?

You’ve decided you are ready to launch an international tech PR campaign. Perhaps you have a shortlist of tech PR agencies in mind to support you in each target country, and now you need to think about what information to hand over.

There are a few basics that need to be shared: information about your organisation, what makes your business unique, the project or campaign name, aims and objectives, target audiences, budget, timeline, and response required.

It would be a powerful step to share what you believe demonstrates value. What do you really want from your tech PR firm? Press coverage? Media interviews? Someone who can demonstrate expertise of working with the media? Content? A change in company awareness? A reputation for something? Someone to talk to and take advice from? What is the most important thing to you? 

How you share this information is entirely up to you. Written documents, slide decks, or a sleek Canva presentation are all common, but almost certainly, PR agencies will want to ask you lots of questions to make sure they fully understand the brief.

This list of questions / conversation starters is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a good start and hopefully gives you a few things to think about before taking the next step of engaging a PR agency.

International Tech PR Campaign: Questions Coming in Your Direction

Direction

• What’s the aim of the business this year?
• Is there a 3- or 5-year plan? What does that look like?
• What’s the biggest blocker to achieving that plan?

Product / Solution

• What are you actually selling / what’s the service you provide?
• How is it installed / delivered / provided?
• What’s the main benefit to a prospect or customer?
• What version / iteration are you up to now? How long has the product / service been available?
• What are the future updates? Anything major?
• How often are changes rolled out?
• How do you respond to developments in the market?
• What feedback do you get from users most frequently?

Customers

• What’s the biggest challenge facing your customers?
• What’s your target customer size / ideal customer?
• Are you winning customers in certain parts of the country or world?
• How many customers are you already working with?
• How are you really helping those customers? How do you make a difference?
• What’s a typical contract length?
• How long do you expect a customer to stay with you?
• What are they leaving for most often? Why do they leave you?

Partners

• Do you partner with anyone to help those customers?
• Do you work through resellers, integrators, or retailers to help deliver the product / service?
• How do you recruit those partners?
• How many partners do you have?
• How do you keep them happy?
• What do they complain about most often?

Competition

• Who are your biggest competitors?
• Who are you replacing most often?
• Who is most likely to beat you?
• How are you different from those competitors?
• What competitor really annoys you and why?

Finances

• Are you VC-funded?
• What round of funding have you reached?
• How much financial investment did you receive in the most recent round?
• Do you generate any turnover yet?
• Are you profitable?

Lead Generation

• How are you reaching out to prospects at the moment?
• Where are your leads coming from?
• How big is the sales team?
• How many leads do you target per month / year?
• How many new customers do you aim for per year?
• Do you work through any government frameworks?

Comms and PR

• What does your comms, PR, and marketing look like at the moment?
• What’s working well?
• What’s not working well?
• How is it supporting lead generation and sales?
• How are you creating content up to now?
• What social channels are you running?
• Who maintains your social channels?
• Any earned media at all?
• Have you spoken to any media directly?
• How are you producing content for the media?
• Who maintains the website?
• What do you need from us?
• What’s your planned budget?
• Who is most interested in comms and PR inside the business?
• Who do we need to impress most?
• What does success look like?
• What’s your timeline / deadline?

If you need help explaining, documenting, and communicating your International Tech PR campaign, get in touch, and don’t forget to signup for our newsletter.