Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
If you’re willing to use a data-driven PR strategy, the payoff can be immense. After all, the most important currency in today’s world is data. But for most business clients, raw data can be confusing, and almost impossible to understand out of proper context. With the development of modern technology, data is becoming easier to gather; it can be harnessed, represented and analyzed in new and innovative ways.
As a PR firm, much of our business focuses on capturing and dissecting data for our clients – then putting it to good use.
For example, when assessing a client’s strengths and weaknesses, we discover their most popular products versus least popular products – and why. We map out and analyze the company’s web traffic. We seek patterns in their consumers’ purchases.
In today’s digitally oriented world, the interaction between the consumer and the business is changing – yet consumers provide key data that a business can use to improve themselves and learn more about their market.
Simultaneously, data can be used to examine a company’s internal workings. For example, how much time does an employee spend on workstreams? Are employees satisfied, and, on average, how long do employees remain with a company? Do satisfaction results vary depending on departments?
For many companies, raw data is often a massive, confusing batch of information, incorporating dozens of different questions. But we examine patterns in collected data, to better understand the business today, as well as predictive analytics, which offers answers for questions about the business’s future. We can also use data to give the business clear, actionable tasks to take that further their goal.
Interacting with your client on this very detailed level is extraordinarily useful in the realm of PR. If you can examine a business and determine patterns, you likely have a deep understanding of the client’s needs and challenges. Data gives us the information to clearly determine what is and isn’t working for our clients’ businesses. When properly utilized, that data can make business models more relevant to those within the company and their consumers.
Data can be the ingredients for a menu of heat maps, interactives, infographics, and videos—making information easily understandable, and fun to interact with for clients and consumers. Qualitatively, you don’t have to stick to raw numbers—data can be used to track survey responses, interviews and more. You’ll be able to effectively market their company with numbers, charts and anecdotal evidence backing up pitches and press releases—which journalists love when being pitched.
New developments in technology make data collection and presentation extremely versatile, and easily accessible to an analyst on the go. As cloud migrations increase in popularity, data storage is more accessible and cost effective. Storing data in the cloud frees up computer and office-space storage, as well as a less expensive alternative to in-house servers.
At Communique PR, data drives everything we do. Every single one of our actions can be broken down into a piece of data, which means we are a walking wealth of information and the best growth tool a business could have.
By analyzing and incorporating data into public relations practices, you can improve the effectiveness of your clients’ businesses, happiness of their employees and much more – the options only dependent on the data sets you pursue.
We think of data as an extensive resource that develops more opportunities, allowing us to put clients at the forefront of trends—and keep them there.
Any avid Instagram user is likely familiar with hearing, “Swipe up here, don’t forget to enter my code,” as they tap through their Instagram Stories.
In fact, in 2017, Instagram updated its settings to allow all business accounts with 10,000 or more followers to add links to Instagram Stories. By adding the link feature, businesses can now link to its products, company announcements, and really any call to action on the internet. Prior to this update, the feature was only available to verified Instagram accounts. (Here is a great resource for using Instagram Stories for business.)
Instagram and other social media platforms constantly update their settings and improve features to better serve their users. This update is no different and was likely a direct response to increases in number of affiliate marketing and brand partnerships.
A recent Forrester study covered by MediaKix examined affiliate marketing in the U.S., predicting the total affiliate marketing spend will continue to grow at a rate of 10 percent each year until 2020. The report also noted that in 2017, the spend on affiliate programs was around $5 billion, and projects that by 2020, affiliate marketing spending will reach more than $6 billion.
With more than 80 percent of brands utilizing affiliate marketing programs, and no signs of slowing down, it’s important for marketing departments to assess whether affiliate strategies make sense for their company and its objectives.
For background, affiliate marketing, although not a new practice, has seen a second wind through social media and the popularity of blogging. Through these affiliate programs, entrepreneurs can partner with brands and established companies to market their products and obtain a portion of the profits. In 2018, we’ve see brands team with lifestyle, fashion and food bloggers to raise awareness and increase sales of new products.
The blogger then directs the user to the website, often providing a discount or promo code. On the back end, the blogger not only receives a profit for facilitating this sale (when the consumer buys the product), but they also receive a percentage of a purchase if the user decides to purchase something else but still accessed the website from the affiliate’s link.
Influencer marketing, another powerful marketing strategy, can help brands achieve online marketing and sales objectives by connecting prominent industry figures with the brand – as a way to verify products, services commonly through social media, or contributed articles, etc.
Both influencer and affiliate programs can be effective. However, the key difference lies in the profitability for the third-party individuals. For example, affiliate marketing is a business model using a third-party’s marketing as an approach to make revenue, and influencer marketing is a technique utilizing the third-party resource for social media relationship building and content development. (More on differentiating the two strategies can be found here.)
So how can affiliate programs align with PR efforts, which prioritize earned efforts?
Often, PR pros recommend influencer programs because they connect brands with industry leaders that can help build credibility and trust among target audiences. This strategy is typically free of costs, and a great practice for smaller companies or startups.
For larger (B2C and B2B) companies and brands with flexible budgets, affiliate programs are a great way to interact with target audiences who associate with these affiliates (i.e., William Sonoma targeting food bloggers, who are followed by William Sonoma’s target demographic).
Integrating PR with affiliate and blogger outreach increases conversion and brand awareness. Below are a few high-level steps PR teams can take when approaching affiliates:
- Define the target audience of the launch or announcement. As with all properly executed PR campaigns and announcements, it’s important to outline who the company is targeting with a pitch, launch or announcement. Completing this step will help narrow the pool of affiliates to consider.
- Segment affiliate lists and conduct outreach to secure or refine affiliate partners. With the target audience defined, PR and marketing teams can work together to tap existing affiliates, or identify new affiliates who have a strong following consisting of the target demographic.
- Educate affiliates about the brand and objectives for the campaign or product launch. After you secure a group of affiliates who have strong connections in your target audience, share relevant announcement materials and the key messages with the affiliate’s so they have a clear understanding of the objects and what you want them to share with followers.
- Develop content for affiliates to share that promotes the product or solution. For example, affiliate bloggers could share previously developed content or articles showcasing the product, such as, “My 10 favorite apps or kitchen supplies, etc.” The article would include links to download the app or access the website and view/purchase the product.
- Work with the affiliate and brand to track and share results. Following the campaign, PR teams and affiliates can track and showcase coverage with one another. For example, if the affiliate was mentioned in an article, sharing the article on social media or again on the affiliate’s platform will help maximize these efforts, raise awareness of the product, and increase conversions.
Although affiliates help raise awareness of products and increase sales – similar objectives of PR teams – it’s important to facilitate partnerships rather than protect strategies or be afraid of losing value from the other.
Marketing coordinators can eliminate these concerns by training and talking with their affiliate and PR teams to ensure campaigns have an active and effective role for each party.
As PR professionals (PR pros) we are often tasked with trying to maximize exposure for our clients across multiple forms of media, while actively listening to audience feedback and mining for emerging trends and conversations that we can leverage to keep our clients top of mind.
While standard reporting is important, how you report on your progress and wins is often as important as what you are reporting on. Let’s face it, no update from one’s PR team likely means there is no coverage to report. Worse, it might appear to clients and other stakeholders that PR has done nothing to secure coverage. As PR pros we know this is rarely the case, but it can appear to be so to outsiders.
One way to reduce potential concerns is for PR pros to maintain a consistent reporting cadence. This applies to specific pitching efforts as well as the firm’s ongoing activity at large. For diligent PR pros this should be relatively straightforward and often takes the form of a weekly update. This provides clients with the ability to quickly determine where activity stands and easily keep track of the moving parts.
The weekly updates also can be a good way to provide line of site toward progress to larger goals. For instance, maybe you secured 65 articles for a client last year and have a goal to increase year-over-year coverage by 20 percent in the current year. The weekly reporting can be a good place to provide updates that show whether you’re on track to meet or exceed your annual goal.
To initiate this process, it’s helpful to clearly outline your plan at the outset so you can manage the client’s reporting expectations in advance. This may seem like PR 101, but all too often this simply isn’t the case. Be explicit so clients know when they’ll get updates from you: weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually.
Additionally, a basic tracking document that can be shared with the client for real-time visibility can work wonders to bolster the client relationship. This level of access provides the client with the ability to monitor activity in between regular reports and further reinforces a collaborative approach.
Aside from maintaining a strong client relationship to enable successful PR efforts, reviewing coverage with a critical eye will help determine the success of the strategy and identify lessons learned to inform future efforts. When doing a deeper dive, consider the following questions:
- How much of the coverage comes from news items generated from press release distributions? How many are features that began with your pitch to a journalist?
- Have your executives been quoted from interviews?
- Are you securing enough thought-leadership articles with bylines from your executives?
- If pitching goals are geographically oriented, are you measuring them? Likewise, if a campaign is targeting certain vertical markets, then PR pros need to have an idea of the weighting of coverage across each one. This allows for corrections and strategy changes to make sure they reflect business objectives.
As PR pros we know transparency is often the key to collaboration and productive business relationships. As we’ve seen, it can be useful during the pitching process, too.
Much like the age-old question that asks, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” there is the content marketer’s version, “If you develop terrific content but no one finds or reads it, does it help your business?” I can’t answer for the trees, but I know the answer for content marketers is “definitely not.”
For PR, marketing and communications professionals, content development is often a key priority. However, writing the content is really only half the battle – the other element to a successful content campaign is to make sure that that content reaches the right people at the right time.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a critical strategy that allows potential customers and other target audiences to find your content more easily, and also for organizations to reach people that might not have found it otherwise.
However, if you’re using random keywords and publishing blogs and other content assets without much knowledge of your readers, then you might be setting yourself up for failure. Julia McCoy, in an article for Search Engine Journal, advises that “You can’t create content randomly and expect to see results. That’s like throwing a dart at a bullseye…blindfolded.”
For quality inbound leads and profitable traffic, it’s imperative to develop content strategically that’s based on solid SEO principles. Every piece of online content – whitepapers, blog posts, product datasheets and the like – must be written not only to provide useful information, but to also achieve placement in search engine rankings.
Below are some suggestions for how content developers can leverage SEO to make their content easier to find:
- Keywords are key. Remember your target audience is human (we hope), so you should write your content the way that actual humans speak and read, rather than for search engine algorithms. Reusing a keyword or phrase in 20 different ways through a blog post, for example, is both irritating and off-putting; readers will see through it and likely not search for your content a second time.
Likewise, consider the phrases and words that your target audience might use when searching for your company or product. Those terms are often conversational and contextual. As Forbes’ contributor AJ Agrawal suggests, “Try brainstorming what kinds of language potential customers might use to ask questions or describe problems associated with your product or service.” You can also use keyword research tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to come up with your keyword lists.
- Also, think beyond keywords. McCoy points out that “Keyword research alone does not an SEO strategy make. Instead, we want to begin by defining your brand’s purpose and expertise.” Identifying topics and areas where your organization has unique expertise and thought leadership can help guide audience and keyword research.
- Consider who’s in the audience. This seems simple enough, but before creating any type of content it’s essential to really understand who the audience is. What are their challenges? What motivates them? Evaluate your current (and future) customers, as well as the competition. Consider creating target personas for the “ideal” customer you’re aiming to reach and tailor your content to address their challenges….and then lead them to seek out your solution.
- Think globally. If your business spans to different countries, then localizing content can make a huge impact on search results. Often this can be a simple spelling change (realize to realise, for example), or it may require translating copy into local languages. Don’t forget too to include local contact information such as phone numbers and domain names (.com versus .co.uk, for example).
- Track the ROI of SEO. Measurement is key with SEO, and with any content development initiative. Begin by benchmarking where your company ranked for certain keywords before optimization efforts, and then track changes in keywork rankings ta various intervals to see how efforts are paying off.
I hope these tips are helpful as you continue building your content development and SEO strategies. Are there other tips you would include that have helped your business with search engine rankings? We’d love to hear about them!
The Washington Post (WaPo) is one of the most highly respected papers in the country. Founded in 1877, it is the largest paper published in Washington, D.C., and has received countless Pulitzer and Worth Bingham prizes. Securing content in WaPo is a PR professional’s dream, but often unattainable. If you throw an email pitch at a reporter, it is likely to be deleted without so much as a second thought. So how do you place content in this coveted publication? Here are a few options.
Submit an Op-Ed
One way to secure content in WaPo is to submit an op-ed. An op-ed expresses the opinion of an author who does not usually write for the publication. WaPo is very specific on the qualifications of op-eds they accept. To start, pieces should be shorter than 750 words, although the submission box allows for 800 words.
They accept content on any topic, from anyone. You do not have to hold a certain title to submit an op-ed, however, if you do, there is a place to note that in the “comments” section. A very important note WaPo makes is that they do not accept content that has been submitted or posted elsewhere, including personal blogs. All content must be original.
There is no need to follow up if you do not receive a response. If you do not hear back from editors after one week, it likely means they did not choose to publish your piece.
Submit a Letter to the Editor
Although much shorter in length, letters to the editor are often a good way to get published in WaPo. These pieces are opinionated as well, relating to issues of concern from readers, or responses to articles in the publication.
WaPo prefers letters that are fewer than 200 words and relate to content that has already been published in the paper. Anonymous letters will not be considered, and the writer must disclose any bias he or she might have in relation to the subject – personal or financial.
Similar to op-ed submissions, letters to the editor must also be original and cannot appear elsewhere.
Submit to Outlook
Another option to secure coverage in WaPo is to submit it to the Outlook/PostEverything section. This section is separate in the print paper but grouped together with op-eds in the online edition. Outlook is similar to the Op-Ed section, however, Outlook authors typically have professional or personal experience with the subject that gives the writing a unique and inside perspective.
Outlook submissions can be up to 1,500 words long, although editors like a variety of lengths and topics. Keep your topic catchy and fresh, something that will grab the readers eye, and be ahead or in line with the news.
Outlook/PostEverything submissions can be sent to [email protected].
One of our client’s recently asked us to help with a research project to learn more about staff perceptions. Our ultimate goal was to discover staff attitudes and beliefs articulated in their own words.
To gather this qualitative information, we decided to do one-on-one interviews, as opposed to a focus group, because we were interested in individuals’ perspectives without the influence of their peers and we didn’t want group interaction to be part of the method.
We also recognized that surveys or questionnaires are most effective when looking at how many people hold a certain opinion, whereas interviews are better for understanding what the opinion is and why a person might subscribe to it. By talking with individuals and taking an interrogatory approach, we could more fully explore answers that might otherwise be underdeveloped if answered in another manner such as a survey.
Finally, as part of this project we will need to synthesize and share our findings with the team and potentially the entire company. Reporting often is the last step in the research process and it is important to think through the best way to present your findings and results.
As we completed this research project, I thought it would be helpful to document some of our learnings around best practices.
- Record and transcribe the sessions. Whenever possible, it is a good idea to record and transcribe the sessions. Clearly, transcription can be time consuming and expensive. If it is not possible, then it is vital that researchers take careful notes. As a best practice, consider having two researchers do the interviews: One person can ask the questions and guide the discussion, and the other person can capture the responses.
- Focus on thematic analysis. As you write your report summarizing responses, you will want to review your notes or your transcripts and look for common themes in relation to your subjects. For instance, are there particular responses that were consistent among baby boomers that are different than the responses of Generation-Y subjects? Consider coding responses so you can easily find them and assign percentages in reports.
- Consider developing a hierarchical outline or matrix. Once you’ve read over the written transcript and identified themes or sub-themes, you may want to organize them in a hierarchical outline or create a matrix to track responses.
- Pay particular attention to minority opinions. If there are one or two people who differ radically from the other responses, you may want to make note of those in your report and findings as well.
- Consider presenting quotes from participants. You may want to include a few quotes to illustrate individual’s perspective but be sure to provide the appropriate context for them so they’re fully understood.
- Write your report. Consider your audiences and determine sections you’ll want to include in your report. These may include:
- An abstract or executive summary
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- An introduction or summary of project background
- Methods: where you describe the participants, what was measured, how you collected data and how the data was analyzed
- Results: This is where you report the results and include quotes, graphs, figures and tables to illustrate key finding
- Conclusions: This is the section where you outline the implications of the findings. You may want to articulate your ideas for how to use the information, you may want to highlight benefits or limitations of the findings, or you may want to recommend additional studies be conducted.
If you have other real-world examples of best practices that you’ve used as you researched, analyzed and reported on work situations or to explore other issues, please share them.