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Public Relations

Coverage that earns trust and gets you on the shortlist.

A buyer checks three things before they take your call. Who's writing about you, where you land in analyst research, and whether anyone they respect has heard of you. We work all three.

Why public relations matters

The fastest way to build awareness is somebody else writing about you.

An article carries credibility a campaign can't buy, because it comes from a third party with no stake in your quarter. It also has reach. A trade story puts you in front of hundreds of thousands of B2B buyers the week it runs, then keeps showing up in searches for years, and now in the answers the AI models give.

That's why B2B marketing leaders run PR and AR rather than treating them as the thing you do after the demand-gen budget is set. Coverage builds awareness, carries your differentiators, and sends qualified traffic back to you.

The catch is that PR fails when it's generic. A release nobody asked for, sent to a list nobody curated, gets ignored. 47% of journalists say the pitches they get rarely match what they actually cover, and 51% say those pitches show no awareness of the publication or its readers.1

So we do the unglamorous part first. Who needs to hear this, what do they care about, and why now.

Coverage with our client as the primary or sole focus

Two-thirds

Coverage that includes references to or quotes from their executives

More than half

Coverage where our client's core messages are the substance of the story

3 in 4

Source: Connect Marketing analysis of client coverage.

Why choose Connect

What you're actually hiring.

Experience

Our partners average 25 years or more running media and analyst programs for companies like Symantec, ServiceNow, Nokia, Riverbed, Sun Microsystems and F5 Networks. All the work is done by partners and senior staff. We don't have junior staff, so nobody is learning on your account.

Relationships

We grew up alongside the senior reporters, editors and analysts who cover technology. They take our calls because they know we won't waste their time. That experience is why we know what stories will be green-lighted more than any other firm.

We know your space

Thirty-eight years in B2B technology, and more than 500 companies served, from stealth startups to billion-dollar brands. You aren't paying us to learn your market on your budget.

Security Enterprise software AI and automation Infrastructure Cloud and SaaS Storage Telco Network monitoring Developer tools

Fixed price, not billable hours

You know up front exactly what we deliver and what it costs, and you pay for work done to your satisfaction. Direct costs like wire distribution and award entry fees are billed separately at cost. No surprises at the end of a month, and no incentive for us to make the work take longer.

Our PR services

What a PR program actually includes.

PR strategy

We build the program around your demand generation goals, your thought leadership objectives, and your company and product messaging. Which stories to tell, to which media, in what order. If the messaging isn't settled, that's where we start, because a great pitch carrying the wrong story is still the wrong story.

Proactive outreach

The harder half, and the one that produces coverage you couldn't have predicted. Launch strategy, brand awareness and thought leadership campaigns, and customer stories, worked against a named target list.

Not a blast list. A named list, with a reason attached to each name.

Reactive outreach

Finding and answering every opportunity to get your story in front of the media that matter. Editorial calendar opportunities, journalist requests, press at industry events and trade shows, and media inquiries answered the same day. This is the easier half, but it takes relentless attention to detail and most in-house teams don't have the hours.

Thought leadership and content

Bylines, executive Q&As, podcasts, media pitches, case studies, press releases, blog posts, speaker abstracts and award applications. We bring the topics and the abstracts, you approve one, and we write it. The only thing we need from you is a review, because you're the expert and we're not pretending otherwise.

We build a written voice profile for each spokesperson. It's the difference between a byline that gets published and one the editor rewrites.

Announcements and rapid response

Funding, launches, partnerships, and the breaking story you didn't schedule. We write the release, build the press list, prep the spokespeople, manage the embargo, and move when the news won't wait. We also have the discipline to skip the story of the day when answering it doesn't serve your positioning.

We already know the reporters on the beat, and they already know us. That's the only way a 3am pitch gets read.

Crisis, M&A and IPO communications

Vulnerability disclosures, breaches, acquisitions and public offerings, where the cost of getting the first 48 hours wrong is measured in something other than clips. Message development, spokesperson prep, embargoed pre-briefs, and correcting the record with reporters while the story is still moving.

When Bomgar acquired BeyondTrust, we pre-briefed analysts and media under embargo and sourced every interview. 40 stories in five days. After all four agencies pitched for the combined business, Connect was chosen as agency of record.

Award submissions

Industry awards are cheap proof, but there are hundreds of them and only a small share carry any prestige. We're selective about which ones are worth your time, then we track the calendars, write the entries, and pick the categories you can actually win. Invisible work that almost no in-house team has the hours to watch.

Seven award wins for CyberFOX in six months. Seventeen award placements for BeyondTrust in a year. We write our own entries too: The Hacker News named Connect Best Cybersecurity Marketing Agency in its 2026 Cybersecurity Stars Awards.

UK and EMEA

Target lists for the UK, France and Italy, maintained rather than bought once and left to rot. Releases distributed and pitched to the regional security and technology press the same day as the US list, and contributed articles actively placed with EMEA trades.

So a buyer in London who searches your name finds something written this year.

Analyst relations

Gartner, Forrester, IDC and the boutique firms that matter in your niche. AR and PR run as one effort here, because your media presence is part of what gets you taken seriously by the analysts, and analyst recognition makes the next round of coverage easier to land.

Selector AI didn't join a category. Gartner named theirs.

See analyst relations

Case study · Rapid response

A federal agency left its cloud credentials in a public repo. Our client, GitGuardian, found them and alerted the agency. By 3am the next morning we had reached 30 reporters.We landed 70 articles in 7 days, with GitGuardian the named expert.

A GitGuardian researcher found 844 MB of plain-text passwords, AWS GovCloud tokens and SAML certificates in a public GitHub repo belonging to a federal cybersecurity agency. Some of the credentials were still valid. Responsible disclosure had stalled. Brian Krebs broke the story, and we were pitching key media by 3am, hours after he published.

  • Pitching by 3am, hours after Krebs published
  • Federal policy, breach desks and wires, each handed the angle their story needed
  • A short video of the researcher walking through the find, so nobody had to take our word for the technical details
  • Repo taken down 26 hours after publication

More of the work

The results, not the activity.

BeyondTrust · Acquisition

40

stories in five days

Four agencies pitched. Connect was chosen.

Bomgar bought three security companies in 2018 and folded them into one business, leaving four agencies on retainer. Connect went in as the agency for the company being bought. We ran pre-briefs with key analysts and media under embargo, prepped four spokespeople including both CEOs, and sourced every acquisition interview. Bomgar gave up its own name: the combined company's CEO cited BeyondTrust's standing with industry analysts, its partner network and its brand recognition. Weeks after close, all four agencies presented for the combined business. Connect was named agency of record, and still runs the program in 2026.

CyberFOX · Standing start

128

placements in six months

From no media presence to category voice

53% share of voice, 30-plus articles on a nine-figure funding round, thirteen executive bylines and interviews, and seven industry award wins. Their CMO on what stood out: the senior team that sold them is the same team writing the bylines and working the media day to day.

F5 Networks · Category leadership

402%

increase in press coverage

From niche vendor to market leader

F5 held roughly 10% of the application delivery controller market against Cisco's 48%. We sharpened the message, then put executives forward through thought leadership roundtables, an analyst buddy program, a cloud computing survey and CEO business-media interviews, and backed it with a customer evidence program. F5 ended up out-covering every major competitor, with 267% more articles than Cisco and 42% more than Citrix. ADC share climbed to 38% as Cisco's fell to 26%.

F5 ADC share, before10%
F5 ADC share, after38%
Cisco, before48%
Cisco, after26%

Application delivery controller market share, before and after the program.

Primary Data · Launch

99+

articles across stealth and launch

A launch built a year ahead

Well-known leadership, a unique approach and impressive funding, but no beta customers to point to and a year until launch. We generated 55-plus articles while the company was still in stealth, then 44 more at launch, plus executive and start-ups-to-watch awards before a product shipped, and endorsements from IDC and Gartner that backed the approach.

Measurement

Message pull-through, not clip count.

We're not going to send you a clip count and call it a report. We load your message pillars into our coverage tool and report how the message performed in the articles that ran. A hundred mentions carrying the story you're trying to move away from is a bad month, not a good one.

Every client is different, so the plan gets tailored. These are the things we can track.

Message pick-up

Did the message you wanted in the market actually appear in the coverage, and in the analyst research?

Share of voice

Of everything written about your segment, what percentage included you. Measured against your real competitive set, not a flattering one. For Blackpoint Cyber's 2025 review we mapped them against eight rivals, including a leader at ten times the volume, and showed where Blackpoint could win.

Level of influence

Whether the coverage ran in a tier-one publication that reaches your buyer, with the readership to matter, or in a place that only looks good in a spreadsheet.

Site traffic

How much of your traffic came from coverage, so the program connects to something your CFO already looks at.

Echo of an article

Whether the story travelled. Comments on the piece, shares, and the secondary coverage a good article sets off.

Competitive monitoring

What your competitors are landing, where, and with which message. Their gaps are your openings, and they're only visible if somebody is watching.

Perception audits

What reporters and analysts actually say about you when you're not on the call. Advocate, neutral, or skeptical, and why.

Which sources the models cite

Which outlets the LLMs draw on in your category, and whether you're in them. It decides which shortlist you land on.

The AI-era reader

Your buyers are asking AI who to trust.

A CMO researching vendors now opens ChatGPT before a browser tab. If the AI's answer about your category leaves you out, or describes you wrong, that's a deal lost before anyone calls.

It's the same job we've always done, aimed at a new reader. Earning credible coverage in the sources AI models cite, in language a machine can extract and repeat accurately. Clear claims, real numbers, plain language. The discipline that gets a reporter to use your quote gets a model to summarize you accurately, and vague copy gets summarized vaguely.

Analyst research, tier-one trade coverage and primary explanations from your own experts are what AI answers lean on. Getting you into those isn't a separate AI play. It's the work, done well, with the new reader in mind.

How we've AI-transformed

Which outlets the models cite

The sources an AI answer leans on in your category, and whether your name is in them.

Whether your positioning survives the summary

Models compress. We check that what comes out the other side is still your story.

Where competitors show up and you don't

The gaps are the brief for next quarter's pitching.

Recognition

Award-winning work, and award-winning clients.

Cybersecurity Stars Awards · 2026

Best Cybersecurity Marketing Agency

Helping security companies tell their story to the people who cover it.

The Hacker News
Cybersecurity Stars Awards 2026 winner medal, awarded by The Hacker News.
The Hacker News
Best Cybersecurity Marketing Agency, 2026
SABRE Awards
PR Excellence
Bulldog Awards
Media Relations
PRSA Bronze Anvil
Public Relations
Platinum PR Awards
PR Daily
Telly Awards
Video
Inc. 5000
Fastest-Growing Private Companies
PLACEHOLDER
Swap in the next award
PLACEHOLDER
Swap in the next award
The Hacker News
Best Cybersecurity Marketing Agency, 2026
SABRE Awards
PR Excellence
Bulldog Awards
Media Relations
PRSA Bronze Anvil
Public Relations
Platinum PR Awards
PR Daily
Telly Awards
Video
Inc. 5000
Fastest-Growing Private Companies
PLACEHOLDER
Swap in the next award
PLACEHOLDER
Swap in the next award

Want to know what the conversation says about you today?

We'll analyze a full year of your coverage against your competitors'. Where you show up, where you don't, and what the major AI models say when a buyer asks who leads your category.

Thirty minutes, no obligation. Either way, you keep the analysis.

1. State of Journalism 2026. Muck Rack, March 2026. Survey of 1,044 journalists fielded January 30 – March 2, 2026; 897 responses in the final analysis.