Why is this work relevant for PR?

Tricor’s Group Marketing and Communication Team spearheaded the most disruptive marketing communication and PR efforts in the firm’s 20-year history. Notably, a fundamental component of the brand communications relaunch was the team’s positioning of the ‘Tricor Story’ through regional marketing efforts, calling attention to its status as a proud homegrown APAC challenger brand. Strategically, this brand narrative aligns with the firm’s forte in providing global companies with local expertise and specialized knowledge in business expansion services.

Background

PR CHALLENGE As we embarked on the PR journey, we faced a formidable PR challenge: How do we meaningfully communicate and engage our existing and new clients, potential investors and partners on relevant topics? How do we simplify “professional services” topics, which are often perceived as highly technical, bland and uninteresting? OBJECTIVES With Tricor recently acquired by a Private Equity (PE) firm that has outlined five-year IPO ambitions, we focused on three key PR objectives: 1. Leverage social media to amplify brand awareness, tell our story and raise credibility. 2. Generate positive, impactful share-of-mind thought leadership pieces. 3. Raise Tricor’s profile in key target markets as a customer-focused firm, a trusted partner and an industry thought leader. In executing Tricor’s first formal PR campaign blitz, our team had to come up with the creative on our own in order to satisfy these three key PR objectives.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

TARGETING AND DISTINGUISHING OUR EFFORTS To distinguish our PR effort and maximize impact, we developed a holistic B2B PR strategy marked by the following two components: • Targeted media outreach that honed in on influential reporters and relevant media that serve Tricor’s core markets, industries and audiences. With Tricor in 22 global markets and serving clients across various industries, it was important for us to take this targeted approach so we were maximizing our PR efforts and landing in publications most aligned with our audience. • A data-driven PR relations approach marked by insights and case study narratives tailored for each market segment. We chose to emphasize data in this campaign because we believe the old adage “What gets measured gets done,” has never been more true than it is in today’s marketplace. This means we have to think more creatively about how we collect, use and share data.

Describe the PR strategy (30% of vote)

We raised Tricor’s profile among APAC media in focus markets of Greater China and ASEAN. We utilized robust B2B demographic segmentation through key firmographics to create customized MarComm messaging. In particular, we homed in on the key psychographics impacting purchasing decisions of B2B segments (entrepreneurs, small-medium-businesses, multinationals). We applied multichannel, trilingual content strategy across paid, earned and owned media. This diversified our messaging and expanded the scope of audiences we interact with. We also gained greater control of the message. By focusing on two pillars (targeted media outreach and data-based PR), we captured media attention around business media’s hottest topics: • Business Resilience Amidst COVID-19 • Global Finance, Trade Outlook & IPO Trends • Virtualization/Digitalization • ESG METRICS • Media clips, including quotes, mentions, bylines • Share of voice and earned media coverage value • Digital footprint, including online mentions and assigning positive, negative or neutral sentiment • SEO value