Every company wants to be noticed.
At the end of the day, if you are a company that is looking to grow, you are probably relying on getting coverage for your business. Whether that is blogs, news sites, or tv spots, every technology company relies on PR to get their brand out there.
But how do you measure the success of a PR campaign? How do you quantify the results and the returns on being placed front and center in some of the biggest publications out there? Can you even put metrics around such a thing?
Our most recent guest on the B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast, Yvonne Eskenzi, owner of Eskenzi PR & Marketing not only believes that you can, but was kind enough to sit down with us and give us some insights into how her firm does it.
How Can You Measure Success?
You just always remember that PR is earned. So you have to get it on it’s merits.
Yvonne Eskenzi
Advertising is all about paying for it. You pay a certain amount of money and then measure how many folks come to your website. It’s is highly measurable.
PR is all about coming up with intelligent ideas to get your clients into the press. These have to be smart, out of the box, creative solutions. So when you look at ROI, it is much harder to measure with PR than with advertising.
That being said, there are ways that you can closely measure ROI from a PR campaign simply by how many pieces of press coverage you are getting each month. If agency A is getting you 5 bits of coverage a month, and agency B is getting you 15, agency B is the more successful agency, and probably the agency that you want to stick with.
Another way is using a tool like Hubspot. You can use Hubspot to measure all of the touch points where people are coming to your site and where they are coming from.
The idea is to try and get your clients as much quality coverage as possible.
Yvonne Eskenzi
This can be done practically in a few different ways, such as increased SEO, focusing on the client’s social media footprint, and sharing a voice against competitors. Really focusing on climbing that mountain and getting them to the top of the pile.
How do you Analyze Coverage vs. Competitors?
Sometimes you will end up putting everything you have into a PR campaign. You’ve been trying to get a client pieces of coverage, and a public quota company puts something out over the wire that ends up dominating the coverage.
Maybe it’s a merger, maybe it’s an acquisition. Whatever it is, it dominates the share of voice and drowns you out.
That can be incredibly frustrating, though it doesn’t mean that the coverage that is being put out is quality coverage, just that it’s loud and numerous. Getting drowned out by the excess noise can be daunting for the client, but sometimes it just takes sitting down with them and explaining the difference between quality of coverage and quantity of coverage.
Is There a “Best” Way to Get Coverage?
The best way to get coverage and deliver for your client is to go out there and get as much fantastic coverage as you possibly can. Not second tier coverage. Not the watered down stuff.
Go big.
Striking the top of the mountain first is a guaranteed way for your coverage to filter down to all of the other places. If you can get your coverage into a BBC or Reuters, the rest of the coverage is going to take care of itself.
Tell your client to close their eyes and dream of the top publications they want to be covered by. Then, go make it happen.
That being said, don’t ignore the trade press. SC magazine, Infosec magazine, and the like, are all publications where people are going to want to read about your tech client’s goings on.
Bottom line: there has to be a healthy balance of touching the trophy prizes as well as the trade magazines.
How Do you Make a Subject Newsworthy?
So at the end of the day, how to you take a client and make them newsworthy?
Imagination. You’ve got to think outside of the box, rise above the noise, be different, look different, and really understand what it is that is going to make that company stand out.
Talk to everybody, not just the leadership. Talk to the leaders, yes, but also talk to the people on the floor. Talk to the ones making the everyday decisions to produce the product. Often times, those are the ones that are going to have some of the best ideas.
PR is a complex thing. You want your company to be covered and noticed, but at the end of the day, you want to be covered and noticed by the right publications, for the right reasons. That is where a dedicated and talented PR firm can take you to the next level.
This post is based on an interview with Yvonne Eskenzi from Eskenzi PR & Marketing. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast.
If you don’t use iTunes, you can listen to every episode here.
