Well… typically, no! It’s great that your team participated in the report process and your organization was placed well. It’s awesome that you planned ahead and set aside funds from your budget to purchase promotional report rights. Can you pass all of this along to your marketing and public relations contacts and expect they will take the time to promote the results? In most organizations, the answer is again… no.

From personal experience…

When I worked in industry analyst relations, our company did extremely well in a key report, and I purchased promotional rights for the report. My marketing and public relations colleagues were busy working on other projects and I had to get their attention. I met with them to make sure they understood the effort involved in the report participation, the value of the report placement, the influence of the industry analyst firm, and the guidelines to follow for the promotional report rights we purchased. They issued a news release, generated an advertisement for our website, created a marketing campaign, and shared the information internally with sales and other key departments. I thought my work was done until I noticed a month later that the advertisement was missing from our website.

What happened? I made the mistake of thinking my marketing colleagues would communicate with the website content team, telling them the importance of the placement and how long the promotional rights would last – i.e. how long the content should remain live on the website. I was told by the website team I couldn’t have that key website space for more than one month, though the rights we purchased were for a year! After further discussions, the advertisement was restored to the website, but the lesson learned is that you have to communicate the significance of the report placement with all of the key internal team members needed to promote the placement.   

Based on my background as both an AR professional and an industry analyst, I worked with my NelsonHall colleagues to put together guidelines for planning promotional campaigns to communicate positioning in analyst reports, using NelsonHall’s (vendor) Evaluation & Assessment Tools (NEAT) as an example. NEATs help strategic sourcing managers to evaluate outsourcing vendors and consist of a two-axis model: assessing vendors against their ability “to deliver immediate benefits” to clients and their ability “to meet clients’ future requirements”.

Plan for promotional rights

When participating in industry analyst reports, it is important to secure budgetary funds for promotional rights. If your organization does well, the rights will be needed to promote your organization’s position in the report. With NelsonHall’s NEAT, promotional rights allow vendors to use the NEAT graphs, supported by quotes from our analysts, as part of their service marketing initiatives (e.g. in marketing collateral, press releases, news articles, social media, websites, etc.). NelsonHall also delivers a customized report containing a summary analysis of the vendor’s capabilities within the specific service type (including key capabilities, strategic direction, and strengths), plus the latest market analysis summary for the service in question.

NelsonHall has guidelines on how the reports can be used and have a review process regarding their usage. 

Promote your positioning internally to support external campaigns

It is important to make your internal team that participated in the report process aware of the report placement. It is also an opportunity to create a sense of pride in your organization by sharing your positive report positioning. Promotional rights of analyst reports typically allow promotion for an agreed time. The extent to which a vendor is able to leverage the promotional rights depends on being able to communicate their positioning effectively within their organization, and to encourage pride and usage.

When reaching out to colleagues across the business, explain the significance of your positioning as well as the potential benefits to your organization. Make it as easy as possible for colleagues to leverage promotional rights, for example by:

• Getting approved analyst quotes
• Preparing slides for internal departments to use externally. Usage examples include sales presentations and inclusion by solutioning employees in proposal responses
• Create slides about the report placement for your sales kick-off meeting
• Developing brief articles (or simply bullet lists) based on the report.

NelsonHall recommends that vendors share their NEAT positioning with the departments listed below, providing direction on how it can be leveraged:

• Marketing/Social Media:
  • Develop some one- or two-line quotes or facts about positioning to be used as tweets
  • Share a link to a news release about your positioning, to be posted on LinkedIn, Facebook or other social media used by your company
  • Place an article about your positioning in client and employee newsletters
  • Seek opportunities to include your positioning in marketing brochures, marketing campaigns, annual reports and, if applicable, earnings scripts
  • Develop an e-mail marketing campaign about your positioning.
• Web Team:
  • Explain the significance of your positioning and ensure the NEAT graph(s) have strong website real estate for the full duration of the promotional rights
  • Ensure the NEAT graph is accompanied by key benefits, and include an analyst quote as well 
  • Provide a link to the NEAT report.
• Public Relations:
  • Draft a news release
  • Provide the NEAT graph(s)
  • Ensure the news release is shared with key global media contacts as well as trade media, and local media where the company has contacts and presence.