thefunnel

Most B-2-B marketing is all about the marketing contribution to achieve a business objective. Often there’s a high emphasis on easy to measure direct contributions such as collateral (brochures, catalogs, etc.) leads, visits, responses or new names, and not much weight is given to marketing “influencers” such as brand equity, awareness, loyalty, etc. (although these can be more valuable for the success of a business in the long run). The reason for this is simply because some things are easier to measure than others, and the short term focus of many companies leads to a very tactical approach. For many marketers, digital marketing has been great, with more measurable things, but the marketing contribution problem still remains, because yes there are more things to measure, but yes they are still very tactical or activity based rather than based on a real outcome. Why am I writing this? Here’s why. The bigger problem as I see it is that the business environment is changing and most of the “generic and measurable” marketing contributions are showing a diminishing return. For example: email marketing response rates are going down, trade show participation is down, most companies are catching on to search and web marketing, so the way in which marketing used to show its (tactical) business contribution is soon no longer being there, and yet, not much emphasis is being put onto measuring the indirect contribution of marketing. What can a marketer do, to avoid going back to be just a servant of sales and a production house for brochures and flyers?

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.