Public relations is the management of information distributed between an organization and the public, and it is vitally important for business success. How businesses are perceived by the public can have a significant impact on sales and profit, which is why companies invest vast amounts of money in their PR campaigns.
In the past, it was difficult to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns. You could buy a page in a national newspaper to spread your message, but it was difficult to quantify how many people actually read it. Today, there is no such problem, as technology allows us to collect almost unlimited amounts of data on the performance of our PR campaigns.
Instead, the difficulty is making sense of all that data. There is actionable intelligence hidden in all the numbers, but you need skilled people and good software to find it. Having the right data analysts who are proficient in functions like SQL join can help improve the efficiency of your PR campaigns, giving you a better Return on Investment and helping to improve the image of your company.
Tracking leads
Good PR should not only influence how people view your brand but also generates leads. When people see a message they like about your company, they’re going to want to find out more. This might mean they see a brand video on Facebook and click to your website. Your main goal was to enhance the image of your company, but as a result, you’ve generated a lead. Technology allows you to track these leads and understand exactly how and why they came to be a lead. Using this information, you can improve your brand messages to continue to generate more leads, making your PR more effective.
Social media
Social media plays a vital part in PR. If your brand receives negative PR on platforms like Facebook or Twitter, it has the potential to spread extremely quickly. Likewise, positive PR can snowball and result in thousands of shares very quickly. To keep on top of your social media platforms, you need to be able to make the most of the data available to you and use it to your advantage. Social media companies give you access to lots of data, but you have to be able to use it in the right way.
Result tracking
Any PR strategy has clear goals it wants to achieve, but how do you know whether you’re reaching those goals if you can’t measure your performance? Data analytics gives you the ability to track how your campaigns are performing against their objectives and pinpoint where things are going well and where they’re not going so well.
Technology has opened up so many ways to reach the public with innovative PR, and the great thing is, you have all the data you need to track their success. The key to improved PR campaigns is hidden in all that data you collect on a day-to-day basis; you just need to be able to find it and turn into actionable objectives.
