At the Pulse of the SME Sector: Reaching General Media with B2B PR
Visable GmbH, based in Hamburg, operates Europe’s two leading B2B platforms, wlw (“Wer liefert was”) and europages. “Wer liefert was” enjoys a high level of brand recognition within Germany’s SME sector and maintains strong relationships with the trade press. The challenge and objective for us were to increase reach in general-interest and daily news media and, in doing so, raise awareness of the Visable umbrella brand, which was only introduced in 2019.
Building Bridges and Delivering New Insights
By no means an easy task—after all, we were familiar with the assessments of some well-established contacts at major media outlets: “B2B content just gathers dust on our shelves” or “B2B doesn’t interest our readers.” What the general media needed was a “B2C bridge”—a way to generate content from the B2B space that would have macroeconomic relevance and, ideally, social significance.
The strategic key lay in the diversity of industries and sectors represented on “Wer liefert was” and europages. With three million registered companies, the platforms reflect the very core of the European SME sector. As the operator of these platforms, Visable is a credible sender and point of contact for SME-related topics. Leveraging this expertise, we aimed to provide the media with valuable insights into current sentiment and challenges facing small and medium-sized enterprises. The perfect tool for this? Surveys. They not only deliver compelling data and stories but are also one of the most popular formats among media audiences.
In April 2022—just over two years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and less than two months after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine—we surveyed SMEs in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France (for europages) to ask how they perceived the current “age of crises.” We worked closely with the renowned market research institute YouGov on the design and execution of the online survey. High data quality was a decisive factor in successfully placing the results in the media.
High Reach and Positive Perception
Timing also played a crucial role: we were able to offer our content in parallel with an SME summit hosted by Germany’s Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck. The German Press Agency (dpa) combined its coverage of the summit with our survey results and published two news stories that were picked up by leading media outlets such as ZEIT, Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and T-Online. A quote from Visable CEO Peter F. Schmid appeared in several articles directly alongside a statement by Robert Habeck. Thanks to additional coverage in daily and trade media, the survey as a single PR measure already exceeded Visable’s previous annual average PR reach.
Further surveys went on to make 2022 a record year for Visable’s PR, tripling the company’s previous average reach. Visable successfully established itself as an expert voice for the SME sector in daily news media and significantly increased its brand awareness through the extensive media reach of the published articles.