The link between PR and data is invaluable – but don’t get lost in the numbers
We’re truly in a data-driven society. First-party data is a huge commodity in today’s digitized marketplace. Everything is personalized according to our data usage– we see personalized ads across our social feeds, receive target emails based on our browsing histories, we hear music selected according to our perceived taste.
The world of B2B marketing should take note. Nearly two-thirds of marketing executives “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is crucial in today’s landscape, but are we sweating the data to enable personalized marketing?
Five steps to data-driven B2B marketing
Data-driven marketing can increase brand awareness by 50%. So definitely time for the PR and marketing function to sit up and take notice – brand awareness is your campaign’s bread & butter!
So, looking to start your data-driven marketing journey? Then Meltwater has your back with its quick guide to utilizing data to unlock competitive advantage and drive business growth.
Everybody needs to be on board – including PR teams
Are you in silos? We’ve long been advocates that even the best agency-led PR campaigns are ones that align tightly with company marketing messaging. And that all starts top down by understanding what your brand equity is. So, here’s the silo acid test – if the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, then marketing and PR campaigns are simply operating independently.
In fact, the Meltwater report states these silos are detrimental to data-driven strategies: “Most teams now recognize that siloed approaches are counter-productive, while fully informed relationships that maximize understanding of the customer journey are far more beneficial. So too are marketing KPIs that encourage your team to be more data-centric.”
Get ready, get set, then go!
Well-thought-out PR campaigns should always be symbiotic with wider sales/marketing objectives. So here’s a quick checklist of how data-driven practices can flow down into PR:
- Define your objectives in terms of your brand equity: Is the goal to generate widespread brand awareness? Drive attention to company growth for new rounds of funding? To target a particular industry for new business? Establish brand presence in a new geography? Then look to ensure your PR objectives are tightly focused to match strategic business goals.
- Gather and analyze the data: Typically this can involve a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data gathering based on corporate target persona, size of company and target industries. This could include editorial calendar searching in target industries and geographies, investigating keyword stats to see what topics are resonating in relevant search, or looking at a metrics baseline to see where you are currently at for website/SEO/page views. Have a checklist of the issues your target persona are dealing with – messages to solve these will resonate!
- Better Together: It’s time to marry up your company messaging and objectives with what is resonating among the media and prospects in your target markets. What you say and how you say it is key here – a carefully laid pattern of proactive PR activity can signal company success and demonstrate industry leadership.
- Measure the results: This can be easier said than done. In order to measure success, there needs to be some success in the first place! Truly measurable results come in the form of cold hard media placements, online, in digital issues, or on social. Only then can you move on to the analysis stage and understand how your campaign is performing, from a messaging and inbound perspective through clickthrough stats.
- Analyze and adjust: The prep above goes a long way. Embedding backlinks, keywords, and correctly coding your coverage reporting is vital here. This allows a mixture of key metrics to be anaylzed, from type of coverage, industries hit, message pull-through, UVPM reach, and more. From here it’s possible to see what’s performing and what’s not – then adjust accordingly month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter.
Following these five steps can help deliver a truly winning data-driven PR strategy. But a quick word to the wise – it can be easy to blur the boundary between gauging important metrics or measuring for measurement’s sake!
Are you driving the data or is the data driving you?
There are some huge benefits to elevating marketing and PR campaigns to become data-driven – increasing lead-gen, building pipeline, and driving new business. But in the pursuit of more and more data, it is possible to go down the numbers rabbit-hole!
Analysis Paralysis is bad for your health – too much focus on the data can sometimes lead to a state of analysis paralysis, which can leave marketers and PR pros chasing their own tail. More on how to combat that here, but in the meantime it’s time PR gets on board in the data-driven era. We’re all trying to get the to same station after all – next stop business growth!
Jamie Kightley is Head of Client Services at IBA International.
