Do you remember Brad Pitt’s famous movie Moneyball, where the general manager of the Oakland Athletics used the player’s performance instead of relying on the old school eye tests while making selections? It’s like evaluating a player’s performance based on real numbers, instead of going on your guts or making a hunch.
Today, when the world no longer relies on age-old traditional stories and needs real-time data to support your claim, it’s high time that PR strategies become essentially data-driven, believes top business consultant.
But, can a data-driven mindset fundamentally reshape the PR model in the 21st century?
While this is a hard-pressed call for communication professionals to gauge at this point in time, the grim truth is only 19% of companies are taking this seriously, reveals the Cision’s Global Comms report.
As an effective marketing move, companies have always pinned their hopes on the consequences and outcomes that a particular PR engagement begets. A marketing roadmap to a large extent rides on the results of a PR campaign, says renowned business consultants. Hence, figuring out the connection between expenditure & conversion is more important for a marketing executive than mere insight into brand positioning. That’s where the soul of the data-driven PR model lies.
According to the CEO of Lewis PR, Chris Lewis, “Web Analytics narrates more than whether your messages are reaching people. It reveals the reactions of your potential audience, precisely”. Which is actually working as a conversion metric and demonstrates the efficacy of your PR campaign.
Any veteran business consultant having exhaustive industry experience believes that market penetration absolutely depends on creating your brand’s identity and validating it with factual data.
Whatever is the case, you can’t deny that a data-driven approach always wins brownie points if compared with conventional PR. Here’s how it is restructuring the PR panorama across the world.
Creating The Noise
With the bewildering proliferation of brand stories flooding in every passing second, it is obvious that yours also will fall short of creating the noise, unless it has something different to tell. Data-backed pitches can help a story cut through the clutter and get the media hooked. Tables, charts, graphs, and infographics are more likely to offer a clear story and lend credibility to your PR efforts than a fluffy story. If you go by the leading business consultant’s views, there’s no point in bragging about yourself as the “next-generation brand” unless your claim is data-backed.
A recent campaign by HP may explain why a data-driven PR campaign is the need of the hour.
The purpose of HP was unambiguously straightforward. They want to penetrate the market with their brand new printer cartridges and looking to perk up its sales over a generic version that was likely to give HP a tight run in terms of popularity. What Porter-Novelli did is absolutely amazing. Instead of rolling out a stunt-filled PT blitz, they hooked to the social media discussion on printer cartridges and inks.
Leveraging the potential of Inkology, a digitally fueled content platform, HP has funneled its campaign to escalate consumer engagement and sales. With strategic data interpretation, the company has discovered two definitive elements for its success. The first is a competitive analysis of two cartridge types and their respective appeal to the audience. It helps in focusing the content according to that model. Secondly, evaluation of the campaign’s Facebook initiatives. Which involves extracting data from various groups and user communities that further facilitated mid-campaign adjustments leading to higher views and greater interaction.
The Inkology initiative is a practical example of the fact that digitally accessible data along with affordable web analytics tools can be effortlessly leveraged to notch up a more strategic campaign plan with definitive results.
How The Companies Can Act To Measure The PR Efforts
Measuring the success and impact of a campaign is the trickiest thing ever. Even with information overload, companies are battling odds to extract the juice. In this scenario, a business consultant primarily figures out what to measure and ideally, it comes to information analysis. No wonder why there’s a pressing need for PR organizations to numerate themselves. When it comes to gauging the campaign’s success, a data-backed approach outlines the strength and pitfalls of the campaign.
If you are working with a business consultant with in-depth knowledge in PR and marketing, he will tell you that there are multiple data-backed social tools that let you track the efficiency of your PR strategies. Alongside, you can also add an insightful analysis of your top competitors and identify their traffic sources, online & offline marketing strategies, as well as their social media audiences. It’s going to give you a detailed insight into what’s working and what’s not. You can identify where your efforts are falling short and where it drives results.
Tracking leads: It’s extremely informative as far as measuring your campaign’s success is concerned. Tracking leads get you insightful details about your referral traffic and the actionable outcome, such as signing up for a newsletter and email subscription, downloading an eBook, or filling out a contact form.
Social shares: Social shares are most importantly a definitive way to scale the success of a campaign. By knowing the number of social shares, you can practically analyze which topics have worked better and fetch more user interactions.
Brand mentions and links: To launch a marketing move, a company needs to know its position in the industry and how they are cited in the online space. And brand mentions are vital in this case. With various third-party tools like Talkwalker, SocialMention, and Google Alerts, it’s easier for organizations to know how many times the brand name is mentioned in the online space. It helps a brand gain traction as well as recognition in a highly competitive environment.
Data Drives Thought Leadership
Data being an integral part of the marketing communication of B2B enterprises, harvesting data for storytelling won’t be a problem for them. Moreover, there are a plethora of built-in marketing tools that automatically generate extremely insightful data-driven stories. It further helps in doing more informed research & development as well as populating the company’s data bureau with thought leadership materials like whitepapers, blogs, webinars, and so on. The result is elevating your brand’s authoritative reputation to the potential B2B and B2C segments.
The Prime Takeaway
Chris Lewis has rightly pointed out that the transformational potential of the data-driven mindset has saved the PR industry from its impending ossification. For a long time, the industry is challenged from showing any tangible impact of its programs. The result is a large impression-based impact, which is unquestionably one of the weakest metrics to measure a PR campaign’s success.
Keep in mind that the PR campaigns led by a veteran business consultant, are more about individualized marketing. Thus framing your story with valid data can help you reach out to the highly targeted prospects, which further translates into sustainable leads. At this phase, you simply cannot ignore that the data-backed PR is nothing but the future of the industry. Storytelling is already anachronistic, marketing to the millennials demands a data-backed approach that talks about actions and eliminate fluffy ideas. Who knows that your next winning concept won’t be a consumer survey spreadsheet?
