How a data culture can bring investment into the PR industry
Why asking ‘so what’ and ‘now what’ during and after every campaign can level-up measurement…
The PR industry has shifted from a buoyant market in late 2022 to a total slowdown in Q2 2023. The impact of the sluggish economy on clients' budgets is an obvious factor, which is leading to increased pressure on marketing directors to demonstrate return on financial investment.
It is therefore a concern that nearly half (44%) of PR professionals recently surveyed by my organisation admitted to presenting a metric they didn't understand when reporting results back to clients and over half (57%) revealing they lack confidence in their own data skills.
Large global agencies such as Golin, H+K, Weber and Ketchum have tried to tackle the measurement challenge by investing in analytics talent and now have centralised data teams working on evaluation and business impact for their biggest clients. Although successful for clients that can afford it, this unfortunately isn’t standard practice across the industry.
In fact, in the same research with 420 PR professionals, 68% of PR pros don't have anyone in an in-house data role and 98% don't have access to an external measurement team.
This highlights a huge measurement problem at a time when budget holders need to see causation or at least correlation of business impact from PR.
And 91% of in-house PR managers surveyed in the research also confirmed they would invest more budget with their agencies if they had more confidence in their data literacy skills.
So if it's not financially feasible to hire data analyst expertise into every PR team, how can the industry upskill in measurement, improve confidence in working with data and in turn increase budget-holders confidence in investing?
PR needs a data culture
The whole industry must pull together. From vendors to agencies, meaningless metrics must be lost and a hunger for ROI across the board must be created.
A ‘data culture’ that encourages curiosity and questions is essential in agencies now. Pigeon-holing ‘data’ to be one team or one person's responsibility won’t close the gap between PR and our marketing counterparts.
Marketing budget-holders know that full marketing attribution is almost impossible but they need attempts at proof of causation and correlation of business outcomes to PR. In turn agencies looking beyond short-term campaign results and the long-term impact earned has on business will encourage budget holders to invest more.
Encouraging all levels of PR practitioners to upskill and take an active role in data analysis will future-proof agencies. Asking ‘so what’ and ‘now what’ during and after every campaign will instantly level-up measurement. An active data role among all practitioners is something that’s anticipated to grow as nearly three-quarters of all managers and directors (71%) would be more likely to promote a junior member of the team with good data skills.
Lose meaningless metrics
Vendors also have a part to play; providing credible metrics that marketing leads recognise and can use in comparison budget decisions – such as estimated coverage views (as a proxy for impressions) and domain authority – help PR teams enter into a position of strength.
Equally, tech vendors should help teams look for insight on outcomes from coverage over time and other correlations of PR and business impact over meaningless and frankly damaging metrics such as reach and AVE (Ad Value Equivalency).
They also have a responsibility to help showcase credible metrics in a digestible manner. With intuitive and easy-to-use solutions, PRs won’t need coding training or a degree in mathematics. All that’s needed is the ability to explain simple metrics, build stories around data and be enthused to explore the ‘so what’ and ‘now what’ with clients because a true partner searching for the ROI is where the investment will land.
Stella Bayles is co-founder of PR reporting tool CoverageBook, host of the PR Resolution podcast and author of PRs' Digital Resolution ebook.