What keeps PR pros up at night? The most common answer we get is showing data to bosses and clients—specifically, what tools PR pros need to accumulate data about their PR efforts, which data to look at and which data to report.
"You have to show the effect PR has on the bottom line," said Brandon Andersen, director of marketing for Cision and a speaker at PR News' upcoming Digital PR Conference in Miami. "That doesn't mean PR actually results in a direct sale. But how does it drive prospects to the top of the sales funnel? How does it assist people through the funnel to a sale? If you can demonstrate those, you're talking the C-suite's language."
In a preview of his Digital PR Conference presentation, Andersen offers four tips to help PR pros prove to the C-suite the business value of their work.
1. Before creating your campaigns, know how you're going to measure success. If you're using owned channels to drive engagement with your brand, use metrics such as unique visitors, number of pages viewed on your site and number of conversions to the next step in the marketing funnel.
2. Advertising value equivalency (AVEs) do not, and have never, proven ROI of a campaign. You need to demonstrate real return on investment in order to be taken seriously.
3. Paid, earned and owned channels are no longer unique silos. Learn to work across your different communications and marketing teams to bring down the silos and work together toward a common goal.
4. Learn Google Analytics. Or become best friends with the person/people in your company who run Google Analytics. All PR pros need to be familiar with Google Analytics to show accountability for their communications efforts.
Brandon Andersen will lead the session "How to Prove the Value of Digital PR With Paid, Earned & Owned Metrics" at PR News’ Digital PR Conference June 1-3 in Miami. There’s still time to register.
Follow Steve Goldstein: @SGoldsteinAI