How does my business get PR (Public Relations) coverage in South African business media?
This is a question we often get asked in the early stages of our client engagement.
When it comes to building a solid reputation and establishing meaningful connections with your audience, selecting the right Public Relations (PR) partner is essential. A well-crafted PR strategy can elevate your brand, foster trust, and create lasting relationships with your stakeholders. However, choosing the right Public Relations firm is not a decision to be taken lightly – especially when focusing on Business-to-Business (B2B) communications.
With so many options available, it’s important to consider several key factors to ensure you select a PR partner who aligns with your values and objectives.
Below we outline some of our ideas when considering a B2B Public Relations (PR) partner in South Africa.
A track record of coverage in the right publications
The primary goal behind investing in a Public Relations (PR) strategy is to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. While Business-to-Consumer (B2C) content is more likely to be focused on reach and mass-market, a B2B communications strategy is typically more niche.
When assessing a service provider, it is important to look for a partner who has a proven track record of getting clients coverage in the publications you are targeting.
We take a lot of pride in our track record of securing client coverage across a variety of platforms from Tier 1 media through to trade and industry publications.
Industry knowledge and understanding your niche
Our CEO is an ex financial journalist (Fin24), editor (Finweek magazine) and ran a JSE-listed media group in the form of Moneyweb.
On top of this, we have an advisory board who are either current or former directors or executives of financial services or fintech businesses in South Africa or Australia.
In short, we have a very good understanding of the world of financial services PR in South Africa.
We believe this is very important when developing your communications strategy – you need a partner who understands what content is going to get published and can draw the thought-leadership elements out of your spokespeople.
Does your PR partner actually have relationships with journalists and media owners?
This sounds like such a simple question, but in a world where so much is done from behind a keyboard, very few PR firms actively invest in human-to-human engagements with journalists and media owners.
While we fully appreciate the independence of the journalists, we love to host them to events like the Art Fair, cricket or even our monthly game of Padel in Greenside.
These engagements give us an opportunity to understand what is happening in the industry and help our clients align.
Can the PR partner hold a conversation with your various stakeholders?
When developing your communications strategy, you will invariably engage various stakeholders in the process.
Without generalising, many of the marketing roles will be female-dominated, but our experience has been that many of the spokespeople in financial services will be older and male.
Your PR partner needs to be able to have a team who can hold insightful conversations and extract messaging across the content value chain.
Do they invest in their own and owned assets?
One has to take a holistic view of your owned, earned and bought media when you look at your communications strategy.
With newsrooms under pressure, owned assets are becoming particularly important to develop and amplify.
For us, there are 2 questions here:
Firstly, does your PR partner have any owned media assets they can leverage? For instance, our “Meet The Management” series will regularly feature individuals from listed businesses including the likes of Warren Wheatley (JSE-listed Altvest) or the team from RH Bophelo / RH Managers.
Secondly, are they investing in their own team to stay current with media trends and technology? We recently hosted the team from Ornico for a workshop to not only support our clients, but develop our internal capacity and skills.
(The Decusatio team recently partnered with Ornico to host clients for a workshop looking at Trends in Marketing for 2025)
Does your PR partner look holistically at your owned, earned and bought media plan and where it fits in your communication strategy?
Ultimately, you want a partner who can look at your communications strategy and give you the best “bang for your buck” – a powerful question you can ask any potential PR partner is: “Do you follow your own advice?”
- If they are encouraging you to write an opinion piece for Tier 1 media to establish yourself as a thought-leader – do they have the track record of similar work in their own niche? (For example, our CEO writes a monthly column for Daily Maverick).
- If you are being encouraged to invest in owned media assets like thought leadership articles for your website – does your partner follow the same strategy? If not, why not? (For context we will do between 6 and 10 unique pieces of content across our various digital assets as part of a broader thought leadership and SEO strategy).
This question is important, as the PR partner will invariably be challenged on communication strategies with a ‘long-tail’ effect, which take time for the content strategy to gain traction. - Does your PR partner integrate paid spend into their own strategy? While we appreciate that bought / paid / performance marketing spend is a specialist niche and many Public Relations (PR) businesses prefer to outsource this area, we believe that it is important that they at least have a baseline understanding of these segments in their own universe to allow them to share insights with clients. We believe this de-risks the relationship with our clients – for example in February 2025, we spent just under R8000 on paid media across social and Google – we can give a client very real feedback on what similar spend would achieve.
If you are looking for a B2B Public Relations (PR) partner in South Africa then please do not hesitate to contact us. We would love to host you for a coffee at our offices in Rosebank (Gauteng) and add you to our guest list for upcoming events.