To raise awareness for our clients, we often strive to reach their target audiences by building relationships with key journalists and driving relevant editorial coverage. Despite the proliferation of conference calls and online meetings, we believe press tours are still the best way to engage and form relationships with journalists. Additionally, meeting with the journalists in person allows us to spend more time learning about the journalists’ perspectives on both industry trends and our client’s business, which always proves to be an interesting, insightful experience.
In the case of our client, Smartsheet, a collaboration tool currently in use by more than 2.5 million people, we are working to connect the company with journalists covering cloud and enterprise technologies. In order to start building relationships for Smartsheet with journalists interested in these topics, we partnered with Smartsheet to execute both a West Coast and East Coast press tour, visiting San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C. and New York City in the spring of 2013.
Focusing outreach on national business media, we were able to secure 16 meetings for Smartsheet with the following outlets:
- Baseline Mag
- Bloomberg BusinessWeek
- CITEworld
- eWeek
- Financial Times
- Forbes
- GigaOM
- Market Watch
- MIT Technology Review
- Network World
- Successful Meetings
- Tech Target
- TIME Magazine
- Wall Street Journal
- Washington Post
To date, Smartsheet has received coverage in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Forbes and CITEworld. Just as important, the in-person meetings laid the foundation for what we hope will be lasting relationships moving into the future. In fact, Smartsheet has already helped connect one reporter to a source for another story completely unrelated to Smartsheet or online collaboration. In today’s connected world, it is often easy to stay behind a desk. However, getting out on the road is a great way to build meaningful relationships with industry influencers. Smartsheet saw tremendous value from gaining first-hand insight into journalists’ perspectives on developments in the enterprise technology industry, especially in collaboration. Furthermore, we always appreciate the opportunity to make in person introductions for a company, as they tend to be a rarity, and go a long way towards building lasting relationships.
For more on tours from Communiqué PR, please see:
- On the Road: Medio’s Press & Analyst Tour
- Best Practices for the Successful Press Tour
- Radio Media Tours