Q7. What impact is PR having on the business?

Ah, the Holy Grail...Anyone who has ever worked in PR has at one time or another heard this question from a boss or a client. If only there was an easy, one-size-fits-all answer that would satisfy every questioner and situation. But alas, there just isn't!

There is definitely linkage between PR outcomes and business impact, and it's our job as PR people to find it and prove it, but you can't do it alone and it will require additional resources, processes and data. You will need help from sales, product development, marketing, IT, IR, customer service, product development, business development and anyone who touches customers, interacts with stakeholders or manages the brand.

In our experience, marketers who exhibit precision and discipline in how they track brand awareness, corporate reputation, sources of sales leads, prospective employees across all channels and mediums will be best suited to answer this question. Anyone who professes a finger-in-the-wind, gut-level, I-know-it-when-I-see-it approach to the marketing discipline probably won't.

A word of caution: Low the claims by various industry alchemists (e.g. PR firms, trade groups and so-called measurement vendors), who through divination (see also: unnatural acts with data), to have a secret code that correlates PR activity and outputs to brand equity, stock price or corporate reputation, you can be assured that it will make for an interesting meeting, but it won't apply in your case. It's not that there isn't a link between PR and business impact, there is. It's just that it's different for every company and every situation. You won't be comfortable wearing someone else's clothes.

So where do you begin? A good starting point is to understand how the sales team tracks sources of prospective opportunities—how did new customers hear about your company? New customer opportunities and ultimately wins can often be directly traced back to someone reading a byline, a blog, case study or feature article. Make sure the mechanisms for tracking sources of customer interest are present, being utilized and the communications team is getting regular downloads of this critical data.

Similarly, the communications function can have a direct positive impact on employee engagement. This is a complex area of analysis colored by many individual factors including title, tenure, reporting relationships, compensation and other workplace issues, but employee morale and engagement can measured and monitored using interviews, pulse sessions and surveys. Since this is such a complex subject, I’m going to get some insight from one of the leading authorities in the space, Warren Egnal the head of Engagement Strategies.

Comments

[Ignacio Duelo]

Your lessons are very interesting. I arrived here through Katie Paine's blog. Measurement is an issue where advances are far away from the limit. If you think of this in US, imagine here in Argentina, where many agencies make their press reports with the amount of mentions in the media... and just that, without any impacts or anything else.

Regards from a subscriber.