Public relations refers to a branch of businesses whose sole responsibility is to maintain amicable relations between the brand and the public. A good PR department can help a brand have a positive look among its audience.
PR is important in this day and age because a bad reputation can kill your brand. And bad reputations are stupidly easy to acquire. You just need a bit of carelessness and a lack of preparedness. And very soon you will find that your brand is being flamed online and its reputation is in shambles. This results in poor sales and next to no profits.
So, how do PR departments work? What do they do that ensures that the public sees their brand in a positive light? One way is to collect and use data to steer the public’s opinion and ensure it stays positive. Let’s see how they do that.
PR and Marketing
Before we can learn about the role of data in PR and how it helps shape better communication, we need to learn about marketing. According to Wikipedia, marketing is the act of satisfying and retaining customers.
Notice that satisfying and retaining customers involves portraying your brand in a positive light. That is the job of PR.
The point of drawing this conclusion is that marketing can be used to achieve PR objectives. So, if you are good at marketing and providing stellar service, you will automatically achieve a lot of your PR objectives.
That’s why you will see a lot of overlap between PR and marketing, for example:
- Both PR and marketing need to use market data to come up with strategies.
- Both PR and marketing are always ongoing efforts because of market volatility.
- Both aim to foster a good relationship with the customers and ensure they keep coming back.
So, don’t be alarmed if the discussion veers off into marketing. Now, let’s discuss how data and analytics improve PR strategies.
Role of Data in PR and Marketing
1) Sentiment Analysis
To determine what the public thinks of your brand, your PR department needs to collect data and conduct a sentiment analysis. This data must be collected from various sources in order to avoid any bias.
What you can do is amass the data from the following places.
- Social media platforms
- Your own website
- Google reviews
- 3rd party review sites like Trustpilot
- Conduct surveys using various sources
- Any other methods that seem applicable
Once all the data is collected, you can do an analysis to understand what the audience thinks of your brand. Sentiment analysis can be done easily with the help of data analysis tools. You can do that yourself, or you can hire a firm that specializes in it.
Either way, you will have understood your brand’s general sentiment in the public eye.
The next step is to determine whether you need to address the current sentiment or not. If the public seems to hold some negative opinions about your brand, then, of course, you need to address the issues that are purporting that opinion. You also need to double down on the things that promote a good opinion of your brand.
2) Audience Segmentation
The important thing to know in PR is that the same approach does not work for everyone. Some people respond well to certain stimuli, while others might hate that very same stimulus. You can think of it in the sense of flavors. Some people absolutely love spicy foods, while others can’t handle them at all.
In the same way, your marketing approach can be well-received or poorly received based on the type of audience. This is why audience segmentation is necessary. When you have a segmented audience, you can diversify your PR and marketing tactics and engage each segment with the tactics that perform well.
Naturally, you need data to do this. What kind of data? Well, things like;
- Demographic information
- Gender
- Region
- Spending capability
- Spending habits
And other similar stuff can help a lot with audience segmentation. You can find and collect this kind of data with a plethora of tools. For example, market research tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz can find and consolidate all related data in one place.
Data analysts can then draw their conclusions with the assistance of these tools. You can also wire your own platforms to collect such data (with permission, of course)
This can be achieved by using IP location tools to get the region, and the rest of the information can be obtained during account creation. As for buying habits, they can be inferred using the purchase history of the customer.
3) Personalized Communication
Audience segmentation is the precursor to true personalization. Any PR campaign is dependent on how well you can promote your message to your audience. The best way to promote any message is to personalize it according to the recipient.
Some members of your audience may prefer emails over SMS and messages. Others may prefer an announcement rather than a one-to-one correspondence. Many others may prefer a detailed blog post instead of an announcement.
So, no matter what kind of message you are trying to send, you have to keep in mind which medium is preferred by different segments of your audience.
Now, in each medium, you can do further personalizations. For example, instead of sending a template email to all of your audience, you can craft a unique email for each recipient. You can use their name, preferred tone, and preferred format to create an email that they are guaranteed to like. The same goes for messages and blog posts.
Now, that sounds like a lot of work, and it is. However, the results of such work cannot be denied. According to Contentful, 52% of customers report that they were more satisfied when their experiences were more personalized.
If 52% of your audience is happy with you, you can call that a PR success.
4) Better Crisis Management
The true test of a PR department is crisis management. When your brand/company is undergoing some turmoil that can reflect badly on itself, how does your PR department handle it?
Data and analytics can help PR teams to douse fires and do damage control effectively. They can monitor and do sentiment analysis to find out which platforms are purporting a bad image of their brand and start making posts to clear up the misinformation and deal with false rumors.
The very same data can be monitored in real-time to measure the effectiveness of the PR campaign. If the current efforts are not working well, then sentiment analysis will show that the audience still has a bad opinion of your brand and vice versa.
5) Predictive Analysis and Planning
PR campaigns, much like marketing, can benefit a lot from having foresight. Data analytics can help with that. A major part of data analysis is analyzing and predicting trends.
It’s uncanny how much information can be gained related to trends when you plot things on a graph. By using historical data and trends, predictive models can make a reasonable guess about how the trends will evolve in the future.
PR and marketing teams can use that data to prepare for the future and ensure they are ready for anything. In the best-case scenarios, they can make use of the new trends to set the brand apart from the competition. In the worst case, they can avoid getting burnt by negative trends.
Conclusion
So there you have it, the role of data in public relations. We saw that data can help PR teams deal with misinformation and bad reputation Additionally, data also helps PR campaigns be more successful due to the amount of personalization that can be done due to it. As such, data analysis should be a priority for all PR departments.
