thefunnel

Depending on the company PR can mean Public Relations or Press Relations, but in the context of this article it’s defined as trade press relations. Trade press relations have always been a “soft” marketing science, because the return of a PR investment is often not immediately fully visible, and PR like advertising often works in the background changing customer’s perceptions, rather than directly driving leads into the funnel. Having said this, there are many things that can be measured, and also digital marketing has added a new dimension to the measurement PR.

There are three parties in PR, the company, the subject matter influencers (editors) and the readers. The simplest measurement of PR is through the amount of coverage received in targeted media. A one level deeper metric is to also assess the type of coverage on some kind of “positiveness” scale based on being on message, or based on the type of coverage, such as case studies, customer testimonials, product news or awards.  Another metric is counting the amount of coverage, but then comparing this against the coverage for the competition. By doing this one arrives at something called PR mind share. Mind share is simply the amount of coverage received as % of total coverage (total being your + competitors) in your targeted publications for the products you compete. This metric can for obvious reasons be a hard sell if you’re a small one product line company, comparing yourself against a multi product line large company, due to brand halo effects. For PR in print publications the amount of PR coverage is sometimes compared to the equivalent cost of advertising for the same space, multiplied with some factor based on the notion that PR is more credible that advertising, but industry experts seem not have found an agreement if this is a good measurement or not.

Digital marketing and web 2.0 in particular have brought some new positive measurement practices for PR, and some new opportunities, but also some challenges. On the “what value does PR provide”, PR SEO with its potential to increase web site inbound link equity is a something that PR professionals should become familiar with. In addition, how much PR is driving web site traffic in general, can be easily measured, and if web site engagement activities are valued and also traced to its source, this can provide another way of estimating ROI for PR. The largest change for PR is probably the fact that the third part of the PR puzzle – the reader, who used to be a passive recipient (or probably not entirely passive but there was no way knowing what the reader thought,  has now also become a contributor through social networks, blogs, review and comment boards. This has completely changed the landscape of PR, and PR professionals now need to carefully monitor what is being said about them in numerous places, participate and respond as required. Companies are forced to move into the area of reputation management, whether they like it or not, depending on the type of discussions taking place.

The saying goes, “The only reason you need advertising is because the market isn’t talking enough about you”.  So, how do you get buzz going? All sorts of PR is definitely one tactic that you could use, but there’s another one that’s even better – WOM.

WOM (word of mouth marketing) is in some industries one of the most effective, but also one of the most under utilized marketing tactic. Why is that and what are some of the challenges?

The biggest problem in some B-2-B industries is that the customers aren’t emotionally (emotional branding) attached to the product . The product is often just a tool for them to get the job done.  Consider this. Not too many people walk around talking about, for example their measurement gear, unless of course there’s a problem, which would mean bad WOM. Then there aren’t that many opportunities or incentives for customers to publicly express their opinion, sometimes by design and sometimes by default. By design, many companies aren’t allowed to share case studies or comments for confidentiality reasons. Some companies ban endorsements completely, and a WOM without the source (a credible source) is only a marketing ploy. By default. Some industries are slow to adopt social web for business purposes, because they don’t see the business value in it, or going back to the branding point, they are not interested talking about their tools. There’s also another challenge in making WOM successful, which goes back to endorsements. When asked to rank information sources in a survey, many customers state that WOM is one of the top 3. The problem is that when you drill deeper into the sources of this WOM, it often comes from within the company, rather than from other companies. This means that it’s really hard for marketers to capitalize in a larger scale on WOM. Problematic particularly for products that are somewhere in between commodity and strategically critical to a business.

Press Releases can be used to boost organic rankings, and it’s quite easy to understand how this works in principle, but how to measure the effect? And are there other benefits as well. The following articles tries to look under the hood.    The benefits of SEO tuned press release distribution v2