While most people would agree that sales and marketing go hand-in-hand, PR can sometimes feel like a bit of an outlier. PR has always been about creating visibility and building trust for the brand, but its role as a marketing tool in driving direct engagement and contributing to lead nurturing is often overlooked. However, if you’re not fully leveraging your PR activity as part of your B2B lead generation, you could be missing a trick.
Activities like press releases, guest articles, thought leadership pieces and media coverage can serve as top-of-funnel strategies that get your brand on a prospect’s radar and spark their interest. By tying these PR efforts into your lead-scoring system, you can easily track how PR-driven engagement is helping nurture leads.
For instance, if a prospect keeps interacting with your PR content, attends an event you’re involved in or engages with media coverage about your brand, their lead score should reflect that growing interest. This way, your sales team can focus their time on leads that PR has helped warm up, leading to better conversion rates.
In this article, we’ll look at how PR and lead scoring work together and share some practical steps to help you sync up your PR strategy with B2B lead scoring for better results.
Image created by writer. Data sourced from demandscience.com
Understanding B2B Lead Scoring
Before we get into the details of how you can better align your PR activity with lead scoring, it’s important to first answer the question “what is lead prospecting?” and understand how lead scoring works. Lead prospecting involves identifying potential customers who might be interested in your product or service. B2B lead scoring takes this a step further by ranking these prospects based on their likelihood to convert.
Using lead scoring like this can prevent wasting time on unqualified leads. The scoring process allows your sales reps to focus their efforts on prospects who are more likely to be genuinely interested in what you are selling, rather than chasing down dead-end or cold leads.
The data you use to assign a score might look something like this:
- Demographics: Things like company size, job role, industry, and geographic location help determine if a lead fits your ideal customer profile.
- Behavior: This includes anything that might indicate a genuine level of interest in your products or services, like visiting your website, downloading whitepapers, attending webinars, filling out a contact form, or opening emails.
- Firmographics: Information about the lead’s company, like its revenue, number of employees, and industry, help gauge if it’s a good fit for your product or service. For example, if you’ve previously had success with leads from mid-revenue businesses, whereas inquiries from high-revenue companies tend to fizzle out, you’d give higher scores to leads from mid-revenue businesses, as they’re more likely to convert.
- Engagement: How often and in what ways a lead interacts with your company—whether through PR efforts or other marketing channels—is a good indicator of their level of interest.
To score your leads, you add up the total from all the combined factors. High-scoring leads are the most promising ones, which you can focus your efforts on.
Image sourced from bigcommerce.com
How PR Impacts Lead Scoring
When you think about marketing efforts that support sales outreach, PR likely isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. You might think of traditional marketing outreach like a cold email template, or digital strategies like targeted ads and social media campaigns. But while PR might not immediately turn leads into customers, it’s all about the long game.
PR can help to nurture and educate prospects through the sales funnel, keeping your brand top of their mind right through from early awareness to the consideration and decision-making stages of the buying journey.
So that you can measure and understand the impact of these PR activities on your leads, they should be factored into your lead scoring system. For example, if a prospect is regularly reading PR-driven articles or sharing your content, that’s a sign they’re engaged, and their score should reflect that.
Here’s how PR can have a direct impact on your B2B lead scoring:
- Building Brand Awareness: PR coverage and media mentions boost your brand’s visibility, driving more traffic to your website or social media. This increased exposure is a great sign of early-stage interest.
- Boosting Credibility: Positive media coverage and thought leadership content build your brand’s reputation. When leads engage with PR content that shows your expertise, it’s a sign they see your brand as a trustworthy solution.
- Encouraging Engagement: PR content, when placed well, can inspire leads to check out your website, attend webinars, or download resources. These activities can be tracked and used to bump up their lead score.
- Nurturing Leads: PR also helps nurture leads by positioning your brand as a thought leader. When prospects see you featured in an industry publication or hear you speak at a conference, it reinforces your credibility and makes them more likely to engage with your brand.
Image sourced from 99firms.com
Strategies for Effective Alignment
1) Integrate PR Metrics into Lead Scoring Models
Classic lead scoring is usually based on the use of fairly standard metrics such as web analytics, email clicks, and demographic data. You can get a better measure of just how interested your prospects really are by adding some PR-driven metrics—like event participation, content downloads, and media interactions—into the mix.
Here are some examples of metrics you could include in your lead-scoring criteria:
- Media Mentions: Leads that come to you via a source that is speaking positively about your brand should get a higher score, especially if the mention is in a well-known and credible industry publication. For example, it might be a mention in a blog, podcast, or other publication. These leads are more likely to be warm or high-quality because they have found you via a positive discussion around your brand, implying a level of trust has already been built.
- Social Media Engagement: Use social listening to keep an eye on leads online behavior, like engaging with PR-related content on social media. It could be sharing an article, chiming in on a conversation about your brand, or simply liking a post—it all shows a genuine, active interest in your brand. These interactions should drive up their score too.
- Content Engagement: Leads who engage with PR-driven thought leadership content, such as through blogs, whitepapers, or webinars, should be scored higher. These prospects are showing an active interest in your brand, industry, or area of expertise, so we can consider them pretty highly engaged in what you have to offer.
Image created by writer. Data sourced from demandscience.com
- Event Participation: Similarly, leads who attend events where your brand is featured as a speaker or a sponsor should receive a positive lead score boost. This shows that they are engaged in industry topics, and have already had a healthy exposure to your brand.
If you’re gathering and collating data from various touchpoints and activities, API models can be useful for automatically bringing in PR metrics from different platforms into your lead-scoring system. This way, you’ll get real-time updates based on how engaged your prospects are, making it easier to keep track of their interest.
2) Collaborate Across Departments
Aligning your PR strategy with lead scoring means working closely across teams—especially marketing, sales, and PR. When these teams collaborate, they can share valuable insights and make sure PR and marketing campaigns are set up to support lead generation and scoring goals.
The marketing department can weigh in on the types of topics and material that work best in driving prospects further into the sales cycle, and the sales team on the quality of leads produced by PR outreach. PR professionals can adjust their campaigns to better meet these needs, secure media coverage, and create content that better resonates with the target audience.
For example, the marketing team might find that prospects love downloading white papers about industry trends, while the sales team sees that these are also the most promising prospects that are more likely to convert. With this feedback, the PR team can focus on getting media coverage around those trends and creating content that really speaks to what prospects are interested in.
3) Track and Measure PR Impact
To successfully align PR with lead scoring, it’s key to track and measure the impact of your PR efforts. This means setting up systems to capture data on how prospects are engaging with PR-driven content and feeding that information into your lead-scoring model.
A few tools can help with this:
- Google Analytics: Use it to see how PR placements are bringing traffic to your website and to track what users do once they’re there.
- Marketing Automation Tools: Platforms like HubSpot or Marketo can track how leads interact with PR content over time. This makes it easier to assign scores based on how PR-driven content influences their buyer journey.
- Media Monitoring Tools: Tools like Hootsuite or Mention help you keep track of media conversations about your brand and see how PR content is being shared and discussed online.
For example, if certain media placements are bringing in a lot of high-potential leads, you’ll want to focus more on those outlets in future campaigns.
Key Takeaways
- Embrace Data Integration: PR teams need to get comfortable with data, using it to show how their efforts help nurture leads.
- Promote Collaboration: Breaking down silos between departments is crucial for creating cohesive strategies that work across the board.
- Evolve with the Role: PR is no longer just about storytelling—it’s about blending creativity with analytics. The boundaries are expanding, and PR professionals need to be versatile.
PR’s Role is Adapting and Evolving
Just as the world of B2B marketing keeps evolving, so does the role of PR. It’s no longer just about getting people talking about your brand, or building a positive reputation for the business. PR is now stepping out from the shadows of its traditional media-focused role and playing an increasingly influential role in lead generation.For PR pros and marketers, embracing this holistic approach is the key to staying competitive and delivering measurable results in today’s complex B2B environment.
