How likely are you to ask a roomful of your company’s top sales professionals, “Are we making your life easier? Do we help you close business?” If you’d hesitate to ask, the old adage “Don’t ask a question you already know the answer to” may have sprung to mind.
Marketing communications professionals all need to be willing to ask that question. It’s our true north and the only way to earn a top net promoter score from the sales organization. The current economic landscape brings heightened attention to this idea, increasing the pressure on marketers to deliver revenue-driven metrics and results.
There’s a way to know the answer to the question before asking. Top sales professionals report using earned media coverage throughout the entire sales cycle. Capturing that direct revenue attribution is challenging and not the goal to chase. The air cover generated by increased brand awareness, strong media coverage, content marketing and organic social media flushes out prospects with intent to purchase. That we can measure.
The earned media measurement goal is to capture the correlation between coverage—air cover—and known digital metrics used to forecast the marketing and sales funnel, otherwise known as the pipeline. To do so, we recommend you partner with your digital analyst, web team or agency and ask them to build reports that capture the data that truly matters.
Once built, reports can be automatically sent at regular intervals or when key metrics indicate a change +/- 5 percent (or desired order of magnitude change). Tracking changes allows you to quickly flag and analyze potential earned media coverage.
Here are seven metrics that will help attribute your earned media efforts to the bottom line:
1. Branded Search Visibility
Branded Search Visibility represents the click-through rate of branded terms in organic search. It is an estimate of the percentage of clicks your site receives, based on the ranking positions across brand-only keywords. Earned media drives brand search volume.
2. Strategic Search Visibility
Search Visibility represents the click-through rate of strategic terms in organic search. Typically, this is no more than a dozen keywords, and the strategic terms map to core services and products sold. It is an estimate of the percentage of clicks your site receives, based on the ranking positions across all keywords you are tracking. Earned media featuring product launches and thought leadership should increase rankings.
3. Organic Web Traffic with Conversion
Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic, which defines the visits generated by paid ads. Organic web visitors find your website after using a search engine like Google or Bing, so they are not “referred” by any other website. Web traffic with conversion data highlights web sessions that result in a conversion. Conversions are predefined actions (demo request, contact sales, downloads, video views) set up in your analytics application. Earned media coverage drives search traffic.
4. High-Value PageTraffic
Percent of organic web traffic to top-10, prospect-centric web pages. It’s critical to ensure overall traffic increase is reported relative to pages known to contribute to conversions. These are the pages designed to move a prospect to the next best step in the buyer journey. Earned media focus is often aligned to critical announcements, tracking impact on key related pages during strategic times demonstrates earned media attribution. The demand generation team has long tracked the correlation between campaign timing and increased traffic. Apply this methodology to capture the correlation between coverage and online search activity, which drives organic traffic to the website.
5. Key Linking Domains
Inbound and mutual links are key metrics in the Google search algorithm. Domain authority—a Moz-calculated metric indicating how likely a domain is to rank in Google’s search results—is a useful way to measure the value of earned media links, which often come from high-authority outlets. Certain PR platforms, including Agility PR Solutions, make it easy to see domain authority directly within their media relations tools, helping teams prioritize outlets that can have the greatest SEO impact. While not all media allows links back to your site, tracking the percentage that do can show how PR efforts contribute to improved search visibility.
6. Referral Web Traffic
Referral traffic is Google’s way of reporting visits from sources other than direct traffic, search engines, or social channels. This metric serves as a PR catch-all. To track referral traffic from specific media coverage, ask a colleague or agency with access to Google Analytics to create a segment for those URLs. Or go a step further with Google Analytics built directly into a media monitoring platform like Agility PR Solutions. Agility users can integrate GA4 with PR measurement data to see exactly when earned media drives visitors to their website.
7. Social Media SOV
Share of voice measures how much of the conversation your brand owns with target audiences compared to your competitors. This analysis focuses on social media channels and helps you understand where your brand stands in the digital conversation. Platforms like Agility make this type of analysis simple with built-in social listening tools that compare social topic share of voice across key metrics such as posts, impressions, and engagements. When earned media coverage is amplified through organic social activity, it often drives a measurable lift in website traffic and overall visibility.
Reviewing metrics early and often
When grounded in business goals and measurement, team members at all levels have the contextual stickiness needed to learn and manage revenue campaigns. With a focus and shared responsibility for moving the needle on these metrics, PR professionals can help solve the most pressing question in your organization: Do we have enough in market to hit our marketing attributed revenue goal?
The average sales cycle is too long for the likes of your C-suite and anyone with variable compensation tied to winning opportunities. They want more, faster. Adding these seven digital metrics to your existing earned media coverage allows you to provide insights and actions related to building pipeline velocity and marketing attributed revenue.
Good marketing captures the attention of those with the intent to purchase. If you don’t grab them, competitors will.
Interested in reviewing your brand’s digital footprint? Download our eBook, “The Value of Data in the Digital World.”
This article originally appeared on the PAN Communications blog; reprinted with permission.
