Monitor, Measure, Evaluate and Evolve - Bulldog Reporter Webinar

Editor's Notes

• #3: Thank you so much! I am so excited to be here. Hi everyone, as Richard said, I am Serena Ehrlich, the director of social and evolving media at business Wire. If you have ever heard me speak, you know one of the biggest issues I have with the PR industry is that PR pros are just not paid enough. Not only are PR pros not paid enough, their budgets are smaller than their marketing counterpart. This is ridiculous! Every other year Neilsen does this trust in advertising study. Editorial coverage is trusted at a rate of 66%, this is huge! This is much higher than trust in brand-created content. And it gets better. When that article is shared by a 3rd party, the trust in that piece jumps to 83%. When you look at this data, you can see it is actually the work PR pros do that builds trust with their company’s key audiences. It is the PR coverage you are generating that is moving people in and through your marketing funnel. So why aren’t PR pros being paid as much as their marketing counterparts? Because PR pros don’t use data and marketers do. Every PR program you initiate today generates data that you can use to align your PR programming closer to your company’s business goals. You are generating engagement that impacts every part of your sales and marketing funnel. You just need to start using the data you’re generating to align these programs more closely to your company’s business goals. In this presentation, we will show you how. www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2015/global-trust-in-advertising-2015.html
• #4: Before we get started, we have to acknowledge that technology has changed and with that, so have today’s consumers. Today’s mobile phones are in fact, mobile computers. They are the first things people look at when they wake up, and the last thing they see before they go to sleep. Mobile phones have put the power of search and research in everyone’s pockets. Age 37. These people, those born around 1980, are the first generation of consumers who had access to a computer growing up. I did not. I had a set of 1979 encyclopedias. I was raised to ask and believe. But not this new generation. Those born after 1980 have always had access to a computer and the ability to research anything they wanted to know more about. And this audience is now the primary decision makers in both B2B and B2C industries. This generation is extremely comfortable with using search to find information or to help them make decisions. This expertise in search has directly impacted the buying cycle. It used to take 7 touches to make a sale, now it takes over 20. This generation of buyers is not only comfortable with research, they also like to share content that they find interesting. They are active participants in the news discovery and share cycle. They enjoy sharing. The other key part of this audience is that they are visually fluent. They are used to speaking in imagery or emojis and do not rely solely on text when making choices. These are the B2B and B2C decision makers. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/07/modern-news-consumer/
• #5: But today’s consumers aren’t the only ones who have changed. It is not a surprise to anyone on this call but journalism has changed too. Today’s reporters are expected to create more content then ever before with fewer resources. 58% of reporters in our survey said they were creating more than 6 news pieces a week. Instead of simply researching and writing, today’s reporters are now responsible for writing, editing, fact-checking, designing and publishing their news stories. And they are being buried in email pitches at a rate of 25+ or more per day. This means that, as much as journalists are starving for subject material, you have to stand out to get their attention. You have to write a stronger news release, include multimedia assets, and then promote the coverage piece to help it garner the attention it deserves. And this last part is huge; journalistic success is defined by views now. If you can supercharge a story in which you’re mentioned, that journalist will thank you by covering you again and again.
• #6: Before we jump into data, I wanted to note a few more big changes impacting the PR industry. The first is how search results index news releases. Search is a huge part of the news process. Why? Because when consumers are looking for something – the first place they turn to find it is a search engine. Users go here with the intent of finding a piece of content to support a decision or thought. This is why it is extremely important for your news to be found in search. Because that is where decisions makers are looking for information. The great news is, Google knows this and because of this, they put news releases and editorial coverage at the top of search results. Here is how it works. To be an effective search engine, Google watches how people utilize their platform and they change their algorithms based on these behaviors. Right now, when people are searching for company or organizational news, they search Google for the company name and a handful of terms. Google will then bring up the company’s website, social channels, and their most recent news release and/or coverage pieces. Google surfaces these pieces of content because they know that is what the reader wants to see to make a decision about a product or service. So every time you issue a news release or secure a piece of editorial coverage, it appears at the top of search. Are you taking credit for this placement? We can’t control Google, but we should absolutely be taking credit for this while we can.
• #7: One quick note. Just because news releases are at the top of search, it does not mean they have traditional SEO. News releases do not provide link-building juice. But news releases do have search weight. To maximize this, put your most valuable terms in the first 5-7 words of your headline. These terms will become your URL string and when typed in search, will assist your news coming up quickly and near the top of search.
• #8: Another impact of PR is the role of social media in the PR process. If search engines are where people go to find specific information, social networks are were news discovery can occur. The interesting thing about social media channels is that they are ruled completely by algorithms. This means the platform decides how much visibility a brand update can get. This is why it is so important for you to share out your releases and coverage pieces across your social channels – every time you place an update into the network, you are giving your fans a chance to see it and to reshare it across their own channels. Social shares decrease the impact of social channel algorithms. To increase the impact and visibility of your news and editorial coverage in search, share your content frequently using updates customized based on the aspiration of each channel’s users.
• #9: Measurement has also changed. One of the biggest reasons PR pros have such a hard time getting budgets and salary is because they continue to measure their work as opposed to their outcome. It is time for PR pros to think like marketers. Not only will this align your work more closely with your business goals, it will allow you to present your work using the terminology that is important to your C-suite This means we are moving away from, for example, counting coverage pieces and instead looking at the quality of coverage and the outcomes attached to that particular coverage piece. Did it include your messaging points? What about multimedia? Did it contain a hyperlink to your website and if so, how much inbound traffic did it generate? How many people saw the piece. How many times did they share it? What conversations were triggered by those shares? Data measurement and monitoring services such as those Agility PR Solutions provides, mean you can move past simply tracking basic numbers and start showing the real impact of your work. Not every marketing program is a success so why don’t marketers get called out when they don’t achieve their goal? It is because even failed programs provide actionable data that they can use to perfect their next program. By moving away from old fashioned, and completely incorrect measurement points like AVEs, you win even when your PR program may not have generated all the coverage you wanted. The side benefit of this is that even if you ultimately secure fewer pieces of coverage than you wanted, you are now providing much more data back to your internal teams. And if you learn from the data, you’ll ensure a higher rate of return on your next program.
• #11: When setting up a strong PR program, the first thing you must do is set up an initial monitoring program to track the conversations already occurring in your space. The more you know about what people are interested in right now, the stronger your created content can be. What is your industry as a whole focusing on? What problems are they trying to solve? What are you competitors saying, what is their tone? Their frequency? Who is their news resonating with? What about your customers and prospects? What are their pain points? Who are they trying to activate? Who are the thought leaders in their space? And what are today’s reporters focused on? Gone are the days of simply guessing what is of interest. By using the data generated by Agility PR Solutions’ measurement tool, you can easily monitor your industry, competitors, keywords and audience to better understand what will resonate with them, ultimately letting you create a stronger, more successful PR program.
• #12: Once you have identified your top themes and positioning statements, it’s is time to create your content. The single most important part of your news release or your editorial content is going to be your headline. The best way to write a great headline is to first write your news release utilizing the data you gleaned while monitoring. Once your news release is written, print it out and then underline all of the industry terms and keywords or phrases you included in your release. These can include things like “mobile world congress” or “net neutrality” or “internet of things” Once you have identified all the keywords and phrases in your release, go to www.google.com/trends and change the location to United States and the timeline to last 7 days. Then copy and paste each of your key phrases into the system. Google Trends will identify which of the terms you selected are being searched at a high rate at that moment. This is great! The more searched a term is, the more media coverage there usually is around this term. Find the terms with the highest search volume, and include them in your news release headline. The headline must be readable of course, don’t create gibberish headlines just because google search identifies 3-4 highly searchable terms included in your news. Do not keyword stuff your headline either. Headlines must be readable, so pick the highly searched keywords that works the best with your news release text and include them in the first 5-7 words of your headline.
• #13: Now that you have a great headline, it is time to include multimedia. Adding imagery can make a huge difference in the success of your news release. Time after time we hear reporters complain that they are wasting hours trying to find usable multimedia. Today’s reporters cannot publish articles without images, and news releases with images get, on average, 3x more activity than a text-only news release. So add multimedia to your news releases to increase the impact of your work.
• #14: The last thing you have to do when creating create content is to distribute it widely over a newswire like Business Wire. The reality is, there is no such thing as great content. There is only seen content. If you are trying to reach and activate niche audiences or large, mass audiences, newswires will ensure that both reporters and consumers can easily find and act upon your news immediately.
• #16: Let’s get ready to measure! When it comes to measuring your PR program, you first must select what option will work for you. Do you want to use automated listening tools or do you prefer managed monitoring? The answer may depend on your team resources. If you have team time to spend on reviewing automated reports to manually edit things like sentiment, an automated system could work perfectly for you. However, if you don’t have spare team time, or you are not as savvy with analysis as you like, human-augmented monitoring is a great solution for you. This type of service will review each piece of content and manually tag it for easier data processing. Most measurement users today prefer human-augmented monitoring as it frees up team time and allows for much faster processing of content and context.
• #17: One question I receive a lot is how to actually calculate the ROI of PR. This is not an easy question, there are a lot of other inputs that could be used here such as Lifetime Value. But in it’s simplest form, ROI is the overall impact of your work minus the content creation costs, distribution and amplification costs, and team member costs.
• #19: The first measurement metric for PR is of course, coverage. But don’t just count the pieces of coverage and use that as your barometer of success. This is the old way. Dig deeper to really see how well the coverage relayed what you needed it to.
• #20: How easy was it to access the release? Is your story at the top of the page? If it is online, how easy was it to find your coverage piece in search? What is the sentiment of the headline? The article? How is the news positioned on the media outlet’s social channels? Is the company name in the headline? The lede? What about the URL? Did they mention your competitors? How long was the article? How many of your message points were included? Which of your multimedia assets did they add? Do they link back to your website? If so, did this inbound traffic result even indirectly in revenue generation? Did they convert? By moving past simply counting pieces of coverage, you can provide your management with a much deeper look at the work you do and how key it is for the overall success of your business.
• #21: One of the most important metrics when it comes to editorial coverage is determining how valuable the that coverage really is. Are top 10 media outlets covering you, or are you simply getting placements on 3rd party link farms? Since Google will be surfacing up this content at the top of search, you want to make sure each piece is of the highest quality possible. Some of the metrics you can use to determine quality include: Where was it published Was it published online How many messaging points were included Was a URL or call to action added What specific keywords were used So don’t just show your total coverage count. Utilize services that provide you quality snapshots so you can see truly see how your PR coverage is moving people through your sales funnel.
• #22: One of the biggest metrics in brand success is how they measure up against their competitors. You may have the best brand in the world, but if 75% of the coverage surrounding your industry is about your competitor, you can’t win. Or can you? One of my favorite things to do on a quarterly basis is to see our share of voice vs. our competitors’. Don’t just look to see who has more coverage pieces, really dive down and look to see if these coverage pieces are high quality, if their sentiment is negative or positive (and if it’s been accurately determined!). You may easily discover that your competitors have more overall articles written about them, but the quality is so low, or the author has no journalistic currency, these pieces hurt more than they help. Today’s data platforms like Agility PR Solutions will not only pull the data together for you, they will provide the analysis of that data – ultimately allowing you to act and report on it, faster than ever before.
• #24: Who is covering your story? Where are you getting the most coverage? Are there regions you should focus more effort on?
• #27: Hopefully this deck shows you not only why the news release must change, but how to do it. News consumption trends are our top priority – have questions? Let us know!