Data-driven Public Relation

Edited by Edetanlen Sunday

Over the last couple of years, the use of data has become imperative in determining the success or failure of a media campaign. There has been a significant shift from outputs to outcomes and ultimately impact. The success of a media campaign doesn’t depend solely on the press releases, impressions and clippings, but on the pre-determined objective of what success is to the brand.

Every brand should be able to align Public Relations and Marketing to enable synergy in achieving the objectives it has set out to achieve. PR is to driving the positive reputation of the brand as Marketing is to driving Sales for the brand. These two units in an organization play vital roles in the bottomline directly or indirectly. Five key success metrics that marketing teams commonly use to demonstrate business impact and value to the brand includes; Brand awareness, customer engagement and retention, lead generation, customer acquisition and lifetime value of a customer while the Public Relations uses the following to measure performance; website traffic, lead generation, brand awareness, earned media and share of voice.

Press releases are often criticized for being irrelevant and “old school” in the world of social media and real-time brand communications. Although press releases are all about outputs and propagation of the brand’s media activities, they can also be measured to show performance. Some of the ways to measure press release performance includes; media inquiries, earned media, social media activity generated as a result of the release, event registration/content downloads and lead generation.

The era of basing the success of a brand’s media campaign success on only outputs is long gone. Every success or failure must be backed up by data. In order to prove what worked and what didn’t, as well as to prove value, data-driven analysis must and should be imbibed by Public Relations organizations.