Own the customer journey to help prove PR’s role in driving sales

The lines between marketing, advertising and public relations have become increasingly blurred. As a result, PR professionals can’t rely solely on metrics like media impressions to prove their value – the C-suite wants hard numbers that directly impact the bottom line.

Greg Swan, senior partner and Midwest digital lead for FINN Partners, believes it’s time for PR professionals to think with a marketing mindset. Swan suggests finding ways to own the customer journey from “awareness to action” to help quantify the impact of PR activities.

“If you can own the journey of how your customer hears about something, how they learn about it, and then how they get to the website or social, and then where the website or social will take them, you own the results,” said Swan. “If you own the journey, you own the results.”

Getting customers to self-volunteer data

PR often gets a bad rap for reporting results based on digital impressions, news clippings or qualitative impact, which don’t hold as much weight as conversions or sales lift, Swan said. But those social media shares, likes, website views, do matter – if they’re packaged with customer data.

During his 20-year career, Swan has found success harvesting information about would-be customers using clear calls-to-action to a specific link, typically to the brand’s website or social channels, in all PR efforts. These direct, actionable requests can come in the form of a custom URL, a QR code or a news story mentioning a specific website.

These allow a potential customer to self-identify their interest in the message or product while allowing the company to “cookie them” and gain valuable first-party data, Swan said.

Approaches could include creating a landing page with a lead capture form for consumers who see a brand featured on the morning news or ensuring a viral social media post directs viewers to a product page.

Swan recalled creating a PR campaign at a previous company that aimed to generate web traffic and increase email signups for a travel industry company. A focal point of the approach was a shareable contest widget that required an email address. Swan’s team matched the collected emails with new and current customers, expanding the audience databases.

To capture traffic from consumers who saw the earned media hit on TV news or a print outlet, the team adapted their search engine marketing terms to direct to the company’s website when they searched for more information on Google.

“We had now quantified earned media coverage,” Swan said.

Finding ways to integrate

Earned media isn’t always going to produce easily trackable data. Swan has worked on many campaigns where news stories in publications and on broadcast didn’t have custom links. Yet, even without embedded URLs, his teams managed to calculate their sales successes because they tethered their data to marketing figures.

For instance, PR pros can look at the timing of when a story ran on TV or online and compare it to search results and look for spikes in traffic on their website. Teams pitching a story or launching a campaign should tailor their search engine marketing keywords to match, Swan said. This way, when someone reads about it in a trade publication, sees it on TV, or hears about it from a friend and searches online, they’ll end up in a targeted search pool. Swan also suggests social listening tools should always be running and up to date.

After securing that data, cross-reference it against the marketing figures. Sales numbers are pretty straightforward. But there’s also “consideration and engagement phase” data – signing up for a loyalty program or visiting a website’s store locator – that can show a customer’s purchase intent. From a B2B perspective, that could be signing up to learn more or downloading a white paper.

Combined, that information offers a numerical snapshot of PR’s role in the sales process.

Swan gave the example of one of his campaigns that got featured on ABC News and was later syndicated to markets across the United States.

“You don’t have a link for it, but you have your social marketing and search engine marketing programs on,” Swan said. “When (the audience) saw it on the news, they picked up their phone and searched for your brand name or the promotion they just heard of, and then, bam, you’ve got them. Now we’re going to send social ads all around wherever they are, try to get their email address and maybe later they’ll find their way to your social pages.”

In these situations, marketing will target the same audience at the same time with similar messages to see if those people will engage with that content or share it.

“Sometimes, because there are lots of things that are measurable, it seems like the things that aren’t measurable in a similar way are broken or less than,” Swan said. “What I’d say is, those mediums haven’t changed, but how we measure does need to change.”

Casey Weldon is a reporter for PR Daily. Follow him on LinkedIn.