A PR manager stands before her assembled board members.

“I’d like to show you which of our PR campaigns did the most to boost the bottom-line last year.” she smiles at the stony faces, then takes a deep breath. “But I can’t.”

It’s a ballsy opening to her pitch for investment in PR measurement. One that drives straight at the heart of what the board cares about most.

The bottom line.

She can tell them how each campaign performed according to the traditional volume-based measurements they’re accustomed to; web-traffic, brand mentions, (she grimaces) …AVE.

But to demonstrate PR’s outcome-based value, she’s proposing a joined-up approach. She wants the keys to finance and the corporate CRM, incomings, lead qualification, sales pipeline, the lot.

She wants tools and training so her team can combine all that with her marketing data and turn the whole mass of spaghetti into hard insight and fact-based campaign refinement.

Before she leaves the room, she needs to land a number of key points and overcome several traditional stereotypes to win the cross-departmental buy-in she needs.

Cost

An inevitable objection is based on a fair but out of date assumption about the cost of PR measurement.

Traditionally, the complexity of sophisticated PR measurement has been eclipsed only by its price tag. Even today, particularly where attribution is required, the measurement budgets of some leading consumer brands – employing small armies of data scientists – would dwarf many marketers’ entire annual spend.

But big tech platforms and esoteric maths are overkill where the simple objective should be to tie PR activity to business performance; outputs to outcomes.

PR measurement capability is no longer solely the domain of huge corporate teams with international budgets. Keep the tools simple and the deadlines tight and there’s no reason for costs to spiral.

We celebrated Measurement Month by launching a new PR measurement dashboard, PACE. It’ll provide Speed clients with a snapshot visualisation of how their campaigns contribute to business objectives.

Complexity

A common reaction to the multitude of data sources marketers suddenly find at their fingertips is ‘analysis paralysis’. It’s a condition that can be reliably treated by keeping the scope narrow and going back to the Barcelona Principles number one rule for SMART objective setting.

Setting the right objectives helps make sense of the masses of available data, indicating which metrics should be tracked and which can be ignored.

For instance, if your campaign objective is lead generation, relevant metrics might include website conversions, gated content downloads, newsletter signups and lead qualification percentage.

Or if your objective is to boost customer advocacy, you’ll want to combine NPS scores, repeat purchase rates, product reviews and social media likes, shares and mentions.

Analytical thinking is free. And when you start considering data sources outside marketing’s sphere of responsibility, in sales and finance for instance, it becomes clear that a lot of the data you need is free also.

Google analytics, social traffic, search volume, sales pipeline, lead qualification rate; these are simple data sources and it doesn’t take a maths genius to correlate them with PR activity.

Culture

In an organisation accustomed to reporting on output, turning the ship towards outcomes can be a challenge; a challenge that becomes a roadblock where some of the data you need sits in sales or finance siloes, out of reach.

Imposing a measurement culture for its own ends without carefully considered framing is likely to meet critical resistance. On their own, data and measurement aren’t the point. The point is how they enable smarter, fact-based decisions. The point is the ‘so what?’ to the bottom-line.

If you can demonstrate the fallibility of gut-feel decisions by asking people to test their assumptions against simple data tools, resistance falls away. We’ve seen successful measurement cultures flourish simply by making simple data and measurement tools available.

You’ll struggle to find a professional across any department who turns down information that makes them a more effective decision-maker.

Nurture analytical thinking by requiring all ideas, proposals, solutions, reports and suggestions to come with a data-backed justification. The key question, the part that ignites curiosity and unearths insight, is ‘so what?’. How does it relate to our bottom line?

It’s not rocket science. It’s data science.

The PR Manager’s pitch

The board, traditionally twitchy about technology investment, are impressed.

Their buy-in is paramount. Not just for sign off on the spend, but for the support and momentum required to successfully drive the change in thinking and behaviour, in openness and collaboration between teams.

“Our preconceptions about the complexity of data and the barriers to effective PR measurement are out of date,” says the PR manager.

Some investment will be required. But thanks in no small part to the efforts of AMEC and the members of the Common Ground agency group, the industry now offers tools to suit most budgets, with UX standards that mean the skills to use them can be learned quickly.

“We need to harness this data,” she concludes. “Because with those barriers coming down, you can bet our competitors will.”

By Kerry Gould, Associate Director, Speed Communications