Bospar’s Hands-on PR Vastly Improves HRtech Client’s Profile
Skillable is a hands-on learning and skill validation pioneer. More than 400 global companies have used its technology to launch 35 million labs, where people practice and validate skills.
Clearly, the company has had great success attracting business, providing people with hands-on learning experiences, and enabling organizations and individuals to validate people’s skills. Plus, the company’s growth, innovations and pioneering work have led to it winning a shelf full of awards.
Challenge
Yet despite all the success, this award-winning pioneer was virtually non-existent when it came to media coverage. Time and time again, its key competitors would steal the media spotlight.
The new CMO knew something had to be done. There was a critical need to deploy winning PR to heighten the company’s brand awareness and thought leadership across the HR, IT and larger business sectors. Having worked with Bospar to deliver amazing PR results for a past employer, among the CMO’s first orders of business was bringing on Bospar as the company’s PR agency.
Strategy
Bospar knew just what to do.
We did deep-dive story-mining sessions with key subject matter experts (SMEs) to better understand their areas of interest and potential bylined article topics for each SME, and we assessed the client’s market, its key competitors and what makes the company stand out.
We recognized that, post-pandemic, companies were trapped in a skills spiral and needed help figuring out how to retain and retrain employees to drive engagement and productivity. We also understood that widespread adoption of AI was making workers skittish, leading them to question how they could remain valuable to their employers and prompting them to develop their skills and become AI literate to increase their marketability now and in the future.
The PR team identified and analyzed the competition, which included a handful of companies, and it became clear that our client’s differentiator was skills validation, the last mile of learning that many organizations weren’t paying attention to or were foregoing altogether. We also wanted to emphasize how the client enables companies to customize labs to the way they work.
We then created a strategic, forward-thinking plan, including one bylined article per month and one press release per quarter, to position the client with media as the thought leader that it is.
But we understood that many media outlets that accept contributed bylines operate on long lead times. So, we also leaned into newsjacking, the practice of actively monitoring the news for topics that dovetail with our clients’ interests and inserting our clients into breaking news stories by providing reporters who produce those stories with ready-to-go client thought leadership quotes. Some of our newsjacking even led to secured bylines. For example, when we pitched a quote related to the Apple Vision Pro news, TechRadar invited us to produce a byline.
Because we know that proprietary data is a great tool with which to secure impactful media coverage, we also collaborated with the client and Propeller Insights to plan, execute and promote a survey on how IT pros feel about current learning and professional development opportunities, and we shared those results in a press release and pitches to tech media.
Campaign Results
The PR program was a success!
Our share of voice (SOV) report revealed that in the six months before the client deployed Bospar, it received just four media mentions and had 3% market share. In the six months following Bospar, the client’s media placements (71) and SOV market share (24%) skyrocketed.
This 21% SOV increase in just six months highlights the immediate impact Bospar’s winning public relations strategy had on media awareness for this client – whose market share for this metric increased from fourth to second, just behind its highest-profile competitor, Pluralsight.
Within the first six months of engaging with this HR client, Bospar had secured 22 byline opportunities, 16 of which published in that time frame. By the end of one year working with this client, Bospar had secured placements for 32 bylines – a rate of about two bylines a month.
A small sampling of the top media placements Bospar’s efforts produced include:
- The Forbes article “4 Reasons Employers Can’t Seem to Shake the ‘Quiet Quitting’ Career Trend” by contributor Bryan Robinson, Ph.D.
- The story “How to Create an AI Team and Train Your Other Workers” in which Lucas Mearian, senior reporter at Computerworld, quotes two of the client’s thought leaders
- “Can Upskilling Be the Solution to AI Job Disruption?” by Techopedia technology journalist Franklin Okeke
- Information Week’s “The Psychology of Cybersecurity Burnout” in which writer Richard Pallardy includes several mentions and a photo of one of the client’s thought leaders
- The Silicon Republic article “The Most In-Demand Tech Skills and Trends for 2024” by reporter Blathnaid O’Dea, whose story is heavily based on the client’s survey and even includes a link to the client’s survey press release that lives on the client website.
Bospar also crafted and secured placement for bylined articles in these outlets, among others:
- Forbes Business Council: “AI is Reshaping the IT Professional’s Role for the Better”
- com: “How Focusing on Skills can Mitigate Hiring Biases”
- HRTech Series: “Generative AI is the Next Logical Step for Skills Development”
- Training Industry: “L&D’s Role in Supporting Workplace Neurodiversity”
The client was thrilled and shared the following sentiment in an email to the team:
“I love the Bospar team. It’s no small measure for me to bring you all to a second organization. I don’t make those decisions or investment lightly. I have seen the incredible work that we can do together.”
— - Sarah Danzl, CMO at Skillable
