Director and Founder of Emmett & Churchman Ltd and Emmett & Smith Ltd – and with 27 years in B2B PR – Lorraine’s formative professional years were spent in the Saatchi group working on global consumer advertising brands. Here, she learnt about the principles of persuasive communication from the best practitioners in the world.
The Highs and Lows of PR
Prior to starting her first business in 1994, Lorraine worked across a diverse range of brands from global organisations such as Texaco, Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), Birds Eye and the Health Education Authority (now Health Education England). Introducing the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccination to the UK and achieving 98% uptake in the first twelve months is one of her greatest achievements. Seeing it fall from grace due to dishonest PR practices her greatest professional disappointment.
Moving with the Age of Technology
In 1994 Lorraine made her move away from her consumer roots and set up her first PR company for tech businesses with the aim to deliver integrated PR that was accountable, effective and thought-provoking. The proposition was engaging and the business took flight delivering campaigns for organisations such as AREVA, Alstom, BMT, BII, Cambridge University, Communicaid and Women1st.
In April 2016, Lorraine saw the opportunity to build a business rooted in engineering, science and technology and launched Emmett & Churchman Ltd.
When Lorraine is not working, she prefers to be out on her bike with husband and friends, wild swimming in a lake or if it’s 9am on a Saturday morning, partaking in a Parkrun. A bit of a nester, she‘s happy to make her house a home and loves to discover a new brand of gin!
Emmett & Churchman Ltd is a private limited company registered in England and Wales.
Company Registration No. 10198832. Registered Offices: 5 Merlewood, Bracknell, UK, RG12 9PA.
Phase three: The Bee Hive
PR Delivery
The Bee Hive is all about creativity and delivery, intelligently and proactively performing. There are no new whiz bang tools – just careful, consistent and disciplined delivery, including:
Brilliant Ideas Bank – we create an engaging, on-strategy content calendar, ideas for thought leadership, white papers, comment & insights
Media relations – we build relationships on your behalf to identify, develop and place your stories
Event support – we deliver a structured package of activities to make your 2-day event last six months
Technical authorship – our writing is second to none. We will develop, place, interview experts, draft and gain approvals as part of the deal.
Press interviews – we develop, secure, brief experts, facilitate and follow up opportunities
All editorial writing – whether it’s releases, features, white papers, blogs or ad hoc content, we’ve got it covered.
Project management – meetings, admin, monthly ROI reporting. We’re methodical and love a good project report!
Evaluation – in order to improve campaign design and performance.
We take great pride in delivering CEOs and CMOs of tech companies with certainty through accountable, effective and thought-provoking PR consultancy, underpinned by a proven phased approach and a performance guarantee. Let’s engage.
Once you have your strategy, we need to activate it by introducing it to the wider team, embedding it amongst stakeholders and making sure the available Marcomms tools are updated and aligned. There are six key tools in The Forge, which can be selected according to individual client needs:
An engagement programme ensures internal stakeholders understand and buy-in to new comms strategy by demonstrating how it will make their jobs easier/better/more productive
An audit of all Marcomms materials to make sure all the tools required to communicate with your target personas are updated or created and fully aligned.
Develop a messaging matrix to ensure that all Personas have collateral serving appropriate messages at each stages of the buying cycle.
Collaborate to design individual campaigns to achieve specific business objectives amongst target personas such as cross-sell, upsell, customer acquisition etc.
PESO modelling delivers integrated marcomms, extends reach and optimises investment. This helps to determine internal marketing team and external agency campaign deliverables.
Tailored media training ensures your spokespeople are equipped to engage effectively with the media and conduct themselves with confidence.
…and to complete the package here’s a summary of our PR delivery process – The Bee Hive.
The tangible outcome of the Messaging Lab is a fully-validated communication strategy which is aligned to your sales requirements including: a value proposition, segment prioritisation, target personas, positioning statements and messaging.
The Messaging Lab comprises a series of structured workshops and consultancy engagements that deliver actionable insights comprising:
Comms workshop – focuses on developing and evidencing your value proposition, segmentation priorities and target personas.
This process hones your understanding of potential target segments in order to decide which ones to proactively address. It ensures we know who we are engaging with and why; better targeting reduces waste and promotes marketing/sales collaboration.
Messaging workshop – concentrates on forming and refining your positioning statements and messaging.
This helps you to save time and money by providing focus and specificity, rigour protects reputation against false or loose claims and elevates the communication.
It ensures that compelling messaging is developed for every stage of the buying cycle for each persona with whom you wish to engage.
Validation – Comms strategy research with external stakeholders
This ensures the strategy is the best it can be, peer feedback is considered and on-boarded or actively rejected. Several iterations of the comms strategy may follow to ensure the strategy fits and resonates both with external stakeholders and sales and marketing stakeholders.
