ITPR IN THE NEWS!
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Our CEO, Bob Dearsley, was today published in Marketing Week after taking umbrage at their recent PR Strategy supplement that, despite having a whole article dedicated to measuring the effect of PR, seemed to include no reference to the importance of sales leads.
As you can imagine, we were slightly disappointed!
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Bob therefore wrote a letter to the editor, which was published yesterday online and today in hardcopy. The full letter is also copied below:
Dear Editor,
It is glaringly noticeable that in your article last week on the need for the PR industry to measure the outcomes of campaigns, not just the outputs, (Measurement: Making the Grade, within the PR Strategy supplement), there was not a single mention of PR’s impact on sales.
Admittedly, much of the article focused on B2C campaigns and measuring sales leads is arguably a more practical (and many will say, relevant) metric for a B2B campaign. And of course, as the article itself said, “given the diversity in PR, there isn’t a silver bullet [for measurement]” – but surely sales enquiries are the ultimate goal of any B2B campaign?
Levels of awareness and positive perception are of course metrics of value to a marketer, but do they sufficiently illustrate the PR’s effectiveness, especially to the wider organisation? Do the sales teams, and even the board, really care about the latest change in audience behaviour? Don’t they care more about the numbers of qualified sales leads and eventual customers?
B2B marketers therefore have to measure PR activity using metrics of tangible value, and that the wider organisation will recognise as such. Part of modern B2B PR has to be the ability to construct the processes and infrastructure that identifies an individual influenced by the PR activity who then travels through the web or ‘blogosphere’, all the way through the ‘sales funnel’ to becoming a qualified sales lead and then ultimately a customer.
Imagine the ability to determine how many prospects PR generated this month, which specific activities are driving them and which converted to sales – as opposed to the usual numbers of press clippings, AVE figures and perception surveys. Which statistics would you rather present at the next board meeting?
Bob Dearsley
CEO
ITPR
Too see an example case study of a fully measurable PR campaign, please click here