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Building Media Lists for B2B Promotion Campaigns

Date published: April 09, 2014
Last updated: April 9, 2014

Creating media lists is never an easy task – there’s no single search that can pull all of the best contacts, all of the time. But lists are especially complicated when you’re targeting a B2B audience; not only do you have to identify the type of business you want to reach, but you also have to determine which people within the organization you want to reach.

Building lists to reach gadget-savvy consumers is much different from building lists to reach executives in the C-Suite at massive tech organizations.

Identify your audience

The first step in any outreach campaign is identifying your target audience: who do your brand and content resonate with best? For individual consumers, it’s a matter of finding who will use your product or service. For B2B media lists, you must use a little more strategy.

First, review the B2B personas that you have created or that were supplied by your client. If you don’t have them, be sure you can answer the following questions:

  • What are the job titles of the decision-makers?
  • What industries do they work in?
  • Who do they report to?
  • Who reports directly to them?

Now you’ve got primary and secondary targets for your content – the decision-makers and their influencers. If you want to get granular, find out who your primary and secondary targets have the most trouble with – is it the CFO who is constantly saying “no” due to budget? Is it a tech-weary CEO who doesn’t want to risk trying a new method? If your content is particularly enlightening, it may inspire the naysayers to understand and start supporting the need for your solution.

Now, when you move into identifying media outlets, you’ll have a list of professional positions and niche industries to target.

Find out where they go and what they do

A quick Google search of “[job title] blog” should help you gain some traction in your search – pull sites that are written for, by, and about the people you’re targeting. Consider where your content will work best (or if you haven’t yet created it, what type of content will do best on these sites), and start your list.

This kind of search can also offer results of articles being written about those people – what are people saying, and what types of resources are they using to spread their message? This not only helps to inform where you should be looking for coverage, but it also may help inform your content to become more useful and promotable.

Add to the list by searching a PR database like Cision for the niche industries in which your target audience works. Are there writers covering executive or C-Suite topics? Who are they? Get in touch with them.

Quora is also a great place to go to see who’s talking and what they’re talking about – seek out the best source answers to pressing questions about these targeted roles and use that to familiarize yourself with sources, keywords, and issues these people face.

Know what they share

Not long ago, it would have taken hours of manual searching, copying, pasting, and scrolling to find out what CIOs or CTOs are sharing most. Now, we can use a tool called BuzzSumo to help us identify who is sharing what – it’s as easy as a search and a few clicks. That information is vital for B2B Marketing.

To find out what popular CTOs are sharing, search “CTO” (or for a specific handle) under the Influencers tab once you sign in to your (free!) account. Each result comes with a button to “View Links Shared” – once you click through to that, you can even navigate further to “Analyze Links” and boom! A pie chart details which sites your favorite CTO shares the most frequently.

Targeting business decision-makers does require a bit more in-depth research than targeting the masses, but if you take the extra time to refine your lists, your audience will thank you. Just note that you can’t stop after finding the business leaders – for earned media to do its job correctly, you need to find the outlets that CTOs and CIOs frequent, and outreach to writers and editors at those sites.

For more on the next steps of earning effective media placements, check out our Inbound Marketer’s Guide to Earned Media.

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