You Ask, I Answer: PR’s Value to Non-PR Stakeholders?

In today's question, Dell asks which metric is most important to communicate PR's value to a non-PR audience. What's the result you get you create? What outcome does PR generate? If you don't know the answer to that, then the metric doesn't matter. Generally speaking, public relations, PR, has two primary outcomes, awareness and trust.

If you do it well, you should be creating awareness of your company or your products or services or whatever it is that you're promoting. And you should be increasing the public's trust in that through the use of credible third parties. Simple example. If you want a full page of copy in the New York Times, you can do that. You just go and buy an ad, buy a full page ad.

But if you want something that is that is credible, a sort of a credible third-party endorsement, then you gotta work for that editorial and not just buy the ad. You can always buy the ad, but generally speaking, consumers don't find ads to be credible. So the question then is how do you measure awareness and trust? Trust is something that is measurable mainly through market research. Asking consumers, you know, uh anything like an NPS question, you know, what is your intent to recommend?

Left-handed smoke shifters incorporated on uh in the next 90 days to a family or friend, right? And if the uh answer is always never, then you know you've got uh a trust problem, right? If people are just unwilling to recommend you to family and friends, this problem. Uh same as asking a question like what is your intent to purchase from left-handed smoke shifters incorporated in the next 90 days? If everyone says no intent to purchase, then you know you have a problem.

You know you've got something wrong that is going to impede your ability to do your marketing and your public relations, and you know that your public relations strategy is not working if those numbers are persistently low. In terms of awareness, uh unaided recall is the gold standard for uh brand awareness. And so again, market research, going out to the market to your target consumers and asking them, name three brands of coffee, right? And if if your brand, if you're a coffee shop and your brand is not one of those three, you know that you're not generating awareness, right? You're not creating awareness that is measurable.

There are some proxy metrics that you can use. Umcial media data to some degree, but social media data tends to have a lot of problems in it. The better source of data as a proxy is uh organic search, particularly branded organic search. How many people search for your brand name, you know, by name every month, for example? How many people search for for trust insights, right, every month?

If the answer is zero, if no one ever searches for you by name, then you know you've got an awareness problem because people don't know to ask for you by name. So uh branded organic search is I think one of the most important and overlooked metrics in public relations. It's something that certainly people don't spend enough time on. But unaided brand recall is one of the best measures of PR, of advertising, of anything where you want to know: do people know us? Do people have people heard of us?

One of the challenges you'll run into is that, particularly for larger companies, you will have a lot of conflated data. There may be a major PR campaign occurring at the same time as an ad campaign, at the same time as an email marketing campaign, at the same time as a social media campaign. So one of the things you'll have to do is some fairly sophisticated statistics, something called uplift modeling, that will allow you to say, let's take out all the business as usual stuff, uh, things that would have happened anyway. Let's take out to the extent we can um other channels that are not PR, and then look at what's left in the data. And if we still see a bump, even after you've taken away all the other stuff, then you know that bump is the impact that public relations had.

But uplift modeling requires you to have lots of data in good condition to be able to understand what it is that happened with a PR campaign. Um that said, if numbers like branded organic search or unaided recall or whatever are zero, you know for sure PR isn't working. Uh PR is not providing any value. So those would be the places that it would start. The measurement of PR and communicating the value of PR is very challenging because in a lot of cases you have to do some fairly sophisticated mathematics, and most public relations professionals, not all, but most are not mathematically inclined to things like you know advanced statistics, um, linear algebra calculus, things that you need to uh have tools at least that can do that kind of mathematics.

But that's how you prove the value of PR, particularly to a non-PR audience, using those those uplift models to be able to say, yes, we increased brand awareness by X percent, which should yield X amount of revenue. That's gonna be music to a CFO's ears, but you've got to work really hard to get to that point in your data. So, good question, challenging question, but uh worth pursuing. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.