Making the Case For Your PR Budget
Your brand’s reputation is directly connected to its financial performance. How your organization is perceived by its audience will determine how they engage with your services and products. When it comes to making the case to increase the public relations line item in your budget, look for ways you can demonstrate ROI, share compelling data, and consider the competition.
Use audience reach and relevant mentions to determine the success of your public relations campaigns. For example, on LinkedIn you can see not only how many people viewed your content, but also demographic information about them such as job title, company name, industry, location, and more. You can use this data to make targeted adjustments, so your content is reaching the correct audience. Additionally, you need a mechanism to track relevant mentions of your brand or product by specific people or publications. Connect this data directly to the PR budget. Make the case that not only will increased resources lead to a bigger reach, but that increasing the reach strategically will bring the right people to your organization.
You should also use outside data to support increasing a PR budget. Gather information related to trending topics, SEO, social media, and analytics to predict where and how additional resources can be best used. Media monitoring systems like Meltwater, the one we use, tracks data across online news, social media, print, broadcast, and podcasts to capture content and conversations. With this intel, we can make educated predictions about what consumers and clients are talking about now and what they may want to see or explore in the future. Again, this level of insight offers unparalleled value which can shape future PR campaigns.
Don’t discount looking at what your competitors are doing to enhance their own reputations. Are their CEOs writing op-eds for national publications? Have they launched a social media campaign designed to raise awareness around a particular issue? Rather than directly imitating these efforts, let your competitors inspire you to examine new ways to communicate.
Think outside of PR as well. Make the connection between your work securing coverage and developing content with sales enablement. Has the sales team used your coverage to reel in prospective customers? Do you see spikes in online sales and inquiries on days where coverage or content was published? It’s often critical to positioning PR not as an expense but as a sales enablement tool.
The impact of public relations efforts can feel like a nebulous thing to try and measure, but understanding the return on investment of PR campaigns is the only way to prove its worth. A sustained, data-driven approach to PR will pay off with increased brand awareness, enhanced reputation, and improved thought leadership. When public relations is combined with comprehensive marketing and advertising strategies, organizations will see those intangible things like brand reputation lead to easily measurable sales.