Measurable PR and Marketing

Setting your B2B PR campaign objectives

Oct 21, 2020 | B2B PR Blog, Measurable PR and Marketing, PR Campaign Planning

Setting your B2B PR campaign objectives

The decisions made at the outset of your PR campaigns are often those that echo the loudest down the line.

The first steps to planning your PR campaign should involve setting clear goals and objectives, tied in to specific business objectives, or at the very least, be the classic PR goals of shaping public perception of your brand and managing your reputation.

For example, your PR campaigns might have the aim of:

Promoting a new product
Raising brand awareness to attract more leads
Encouraging audience engagement
Demonstrating the value of your product or service

Setting these overarching goals gives your campaign long-term vision, and distilling these goals into clear objectives gives you a clear roadmap for how, where, and when you need to achieve these goals.

As Peter Drucker’s famous SMART mnemonic spells out, the strongest objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-specific.

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How to set SMART PR objectives

Be Specific

When defining your objectives, make sure they’re as specific as possible. If your goal is to raise brand awareness, for instance, your objectives should include specific steps towards reaching that goal, such as:

Strengthening your brand
Securing a set number of media coverage articles in target publications
Creating a set of buyer personas that clearly reflect your target market.

Each objective can then be distilled further into tactics used to pursue these objectives.

For example, strengthening a brand might mean conducting a brand asset audit, and securing media coverage is likely to require assessing the media landscape to identify the outlets most favoured by your target audience.

Ensure that your objectives are Measurable

Laying out measurable objectives means the results of your efforts can be quantified. This proves the value of the PR campaign and ultimately links efforts back to the bottom line.

Measurable objectives typically include specific numbers or key performance indicators (KPIs) that are used to benchmark progress at each stage of the campaign. Some of these KPIs might include:

Reach estimates the number of unique people who see and engage with your campaign. This helps you determine if your campaign is reaching enough people and whether this audience is your target market. This KPI can be accurately measured with distribution statistics in paper media, and analytics across the internet and social media.
Traditional media coverage can be measured by the number of press clippings, or the number of thought leadership articles secured in target publications.
Social media engagement can be measured in terms of comments, likes, and shares, that reflect how well your posts are doing on social media.
Web traffic, impressions, and time-on-page metrics reflect rising interest, suggesting that your target audience is keen to find out more about your company.
Return on Investment (ROI): Although PR efforts are often thought to be qualitative with the results difficult to measure, PR campaigns that have achieved their goals can often be traced back to a boosted bottom line.

Setting PR campaign objectives with military precision and flair

Choose Achievable objectives

Sustaining momentum through a PR campaign often depends on how realistic your goals are.

To determine how achievable your objectives are and prevent yourself from getting stuck halfway, carefully weigh them against the following conditions:

Available resources: PR Campaigns require revenue and manpower to come to fruition. Outlays are likely to include analytical and media outreach tools, and the salaries of professionals. If you’re running a paid campaign on Google, for instance, you might need to pay for ad space, copywriting, and specialist help.
Time frame: Successful PR efforts are likely to extend over a series of months or years, with a succession of milestones marking key results. A realistic assessment of these milestones at the outset help you stay on track.

Make sure your objectives are Relevant

Your PR campaign objectives should be fully aligned with the specific business and marketing goals you’re trying to achieve. Otherwise, they might be successfully achieved from a PR perspective, but have no impact on the business— defeating the ultimate purpose.

5 Be Time Specific

Objectives should be fixed within a specific time frame and agreed with all stakeholders.

This is important to not only create a practical sense of urgency that will help push the campaign forward, but also to align with business objectives.

A product launch, for example, will have specific dates and deadlines for conducting market research, creating a positioning statement with clear messaging, and deploying the right media pieces in a promotional campaign.

Meanwhile, a lead generation campaign will require careful planning to sync-up with the plans of sales and marketing and effectively draw prospects in over a specified time period.

Setting PR Campaign Objectives overarching framework

Setting clear overarching goals and using the tried-and-tested SMART framework is one of the first steps in planning and executing a successful PR campaign. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, then how will you know when you get there?

For more guidance and tips on how to plan a successful PR campaign, see our post here.

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The vital role of PR in Sales

Oct 7, 2020 | B2B PR Blog, Brand Awareness, Measurable PR and Marketing, Messaging development

The vital role of PR in Sales

Let’s examine the role of PR in Sales

A well-executed PR campaign plays into all stages of your customer’s journey—putting more leads in your pipeline, nurturing your prospects as they move down through the funnel, and building enough trust to seal the deal.

In this way, PR campaigns can help your salespeople to convert more leads into prospects and more prospects into conversions, therefore boosting the bottom line – just like advertising, direct outreach, and other marketing campaigns that are often more directly linked to conversions.

PR broadens your reach

There’s no doubt about it; the brand awareness buzz that good PR creates can help you capture more leads.

Carefully selected placements and media mentions ignite conversations that help boost your presence in the real world. These help create high-value backlinks and referral traffic, to improve your rankings in the search results – putting your brand firmly on the map.

This boosted presence in the marketplace, ultimately translates to more leads entering the top of your sales funnel—and not just any leads, but leads that are well-acquainted with your brand, and already have a level of familiarity with your product or service.

PR helps position your brand

A well-executed PR campaign can attract more ideal prospects by perfectly positioning your brand in the marketplace.

Whatever the qualities that make up your brand identity—from the cool sophistication of Apple, to the visionary courage of Tesla—a good PR campaign can showcase those qualities, demonstrating to your target audience that your product or service has the characteristics needed to solve their specific problem.

An 8-step communication strategy to help you win new business

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PR shapes your brand story

Among other media strategies, placements in carefully selected publications can evoke these qualities by creating a strong narrative. The power of stories was illustrated in an experiment by Stanford professor Chip Heath, who asked students to give one minute speeches containing three statistics and one story. Afterwards, only five percent of listeners recalled the statistics, while more than sixty percent remembered the stories.

Whether your story is one celebrating your achievements—commercial or otherwise—or promoting your culture and purpose, narratives can hit emotions that resonate amidst endless noise. The strength of this emotional association is what helps you remain top of mind, on their consideration list, and build a reputation that keeps your customers coming back to your brand, instead of your competitors.

In this way, exposure in the right places doesn’t just draw more leads into the top of your funnel, but they trickle down through the sales process, ensuring prospects are receptive to your brand, and likely to trust you enough to feel good about working with you, as opposed to your competitor.

PR builds trust

Trust in institutions—including businesses, government, and the media—is at a low ebb, according to the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer. This erosion of trust is particularly noticeable in the tech industry, where the pace of change has become so fast that many feel left behind—waiting for their jobs to be replaced by automated bots or AI.

PR can help overcome this lack of trust

by creating a strong relationship with customers through what infamous Psychology and Marketing professor Robert Cialdini calls pre-suasion:

“The process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. Strategically guiding preliminary attention, to move prospects into an agreement with the marketing message before they ever experience it.”

While B2B PR blogs can help to establish authority, and paid placements in established publications can demonstrate your credibility, appearing in the editorial section of a magazine or newspaper is the gold standard for building trust. Because these articles have been independently endorsed by a trusted third party, their credibility runs deeper than blogs, paid placements or advertisements, helping you to build a great brand reputation and win real lasting trust with your audience.

PR helps overcome customer objections

At the end of a customer’s journey, unforeseen objections can suddenly arise that are guaranteed to make a new salesperson sweat. A robust, strategically planned PR campaign can anticipate and address these customer objections before they are presented—making the life of a salesman a little easier.

According to research from DemandGen, 41 percent of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content before even engaging with a salesperson.

Content published on your owned channels, such as social media and website can help overcome common sales objections, including hesitancy over pricing and misunderstanding of benefits.

More effective however, is third-party content.

A study conducted by Nielsen in 2014 revealed that third-party “expert content ” was even more effective at lifting purchase considerations than user reviews, with PR boosting familiarity significantly more than branded content.

“On average, expert content lifted familiarity 88 percent more than branded content and 50 percent more than user reviews; they lifted affinity 50 percent more than branded content and 20 percent more than user reviews.”

By tying this type of content into your sales process, through links in emails or social media, the strength of ‘expert content’ can be fully capitalised on, to help avoid last-minute complications, overcome objections, and reinforce the customer’s buying decision.

So, to summarise; from bringing more primed leads into the top of the funnel, to building trust and overcoming sales objections, a solid PR strategy and campaign plan can make life easier for your sales teams, directly boosting your bottom line and having a positive impact on your brand reputation.