When it comes to PR campaign management, public relations specialists often feel like they're spinning many plates. From researching relevant journalists to crafting engaging pitches to reporting – you name it, it’s on their list. Managing this can sometimes become overwhelming, public relation pros aren’t superhuman after all. This is when technology becomes an executive’s best friend. While PR solutions can't stop those plates from spinning, there's integrated end to end PR solutions out there that can help more easily manage the process.
Whatever stage of the PR campaign process you're at, be it planning, delivery, measurement or optimization, integrated public relation solutions can assist you with all your public relations needs. During this article, we’ll cover how such solutions are transforming PR campaign management.
New Generation of PR Campaign Management
Digital transformation refers to the integration of technology with the aim of solving traditional business problems or creating new and optimised processes that result in operational changes. Like many offices, digital transformation is also making waves through the PR department. Remember, you don’t have to start big when it comes to transformation, you just need to start; and if your PR team is growing, it’s wise to start sooner rather than later since the bigger the team, the more complex things become. Which leads us to the first traditional business problem that new tech is solving...
How is PR campaign tracking transforming?
One challenge large public relation teams and PR agencies come up against is keeping track of who's doing what and the status of projects. Typically, larger teams’ resort to spreadsheets to provide visibility and enable collaboration, but PRs are quick to call out the shortcomings of using spreadsheets, including:
1. Spreadsheets are difficult to share, both internally and externally
2. There’s no clear indication of who's working on what when
3. Multiple versions of the truth
4. Reporting is painful
5. There are no easy data visualization options.
Much to the relief of public relation professionals, new tech is now available that encourage teams to collaboratively work in tandem, while eliminating back and forth conversations that cause critical information to fall through the cracks. Meltwater Projects is one example of such tools.
What is Projects?
Projects is a central workspace for digital assets, media lists and earned media, where teams can coordinate and collaborate. The feature assists marketing and PR teams with modernising how they execute campaigns, from managing tactical tasks and assignments, organising earned coverage, to reporting on the end results.
Projects can help you:
1. Spotlight your hard-earned media coverage
2. Make it easy for you to understand the status of an ongoing project
3. Effortlessly communicating impact to stakeholder
4. Creating a record of your team’s accomplishments
5. Become more efficient
How are advances in PR campaign management helping professionals connect the dots between paid, earned and owned media?
Traditionally, earned, owned and paid for media acted as different pieces of the overall puzzle, but this is no longer the case. Breaking down siloed working between PR, marketing and comms has been a priority for a number of years, however, since the introduction of social media and a number of technology advances, the choice is no longer there.
One of the trends we’re seeing in the market is the convergence of paid, owned, and earned media and the teams managing them working more closely together. The good news for those working in public relations is that marketing teams tend to have higher budgets. However, for those used to managing public relations in a more traditional way, increasingly being asked to compare paid, earned, and owned media can be a little daunting.
If connecting the dots between all media types is something you're struggling with, don't sweat. Integrated PR campaign solutions enable you to define, manage and measure all media types holistically from one platform. Want to understand which top editorial stories had the biggest impact on social media or SEO? How paid is driving press? The impact of public relations on web traffic? How public relations is impacting marketing effort? An all in one solution helps you complete the puzzle! In a few clicks, you can prove the tangible business impact across paid, earned and owned media initiatives and see across the entire funnel from one centralised interface. This is benefiting public relations and marketing pros in a number of ways, let’s take social media as one example.
Did you know that journalists make up 25% of verified accounts on Twitter?
The platform is a haven for PR specialists. When we partner this with the fact that a PR crisis can erupt on social media at any given point, the power of social media as a PR tool is extremely clear. All in one PR suite allows users to create and schedule social content without leaving the tool. More often than not, solutions allow users to view conversations and threads in a simplified inbox, so you’re able to stay on top of conversations across channels and respond quickly to fans and influencers. You’re also able to measure your social media performance across multiple handles or individually, so you can quickly measure how your PR efforts have influenced social media engagement.
How is PR campaign measurement transforming?
It’s no secret that when it comes to reporting, for years PRs have lagged behind their digital marketing counterparts. While digital marketing pros have the ability to track and quantify most of their efforts, PRs have historically been tied to justify their existence using metrics their board didn’t understand and that didn’t truly reflect their goals. But finally, that has changed. Finally, new technology means proving your worth to the c-suite will no longer be an uphill battle. Finally, the public relations department is about to change from cost centre to a strategic function driving ROI.
Building on the AI-driven insights already available in the Meltwater product, you can now gain access to a new generation of measurement capabilities, including PR Attribution and PR Customer Scoring.
PR Attribution
Tired of juggling many things at once, then not being able to truly attribute the value of earned media to revenue? Well now you can, with our brand new ‘PR Attribution’ feature, built within our end to end PR campaign solution!
Placing a value on your earned media and the traffic it directs to your website has always been difficult, but with PR Attribution, communications professionals can do just that. In a nutshell, our PR Attribution feature helps you easily gain insight into the coverage that’s converting to revenue. Speaking in the language of your board is critical for securing more budget and influence in the boardroom. With PR Attribution, you’re able to demonstrate how your PR campaign is contributing to the bottom line – a sure way to win the c-suite over!
PR Custom Scoring
We understand that not all coverage is created equal. A positive PR hit in the title of one of your top tier publications will put a bigger smile on your face than gaining a negative mention, or one alongside your competitor in a publication you’ve not actively tried to target. PR specialists often manually tag press hits into coverage quality categories which can be a mundane and painstaking task. Thankfully, this scene is a thing of the past! Meltwater is the first company to bring innovative PR Custom Scoring to market.
With our new feature, PR Scoring, professionals are now able to consistently measure the value of media coverage based on their own goals, objectives, and scoring criteria. They no longer have to use a ‘one size fits all’ approach for measurement, because let’s be honest, it doesn’t always work. Metrics that work for a small PR agency won't necessarily resonate with a global conglomerate. We're sure you'll agree that tailoring metrics to your company’s actual business needs is critical. With PR Custom Scoring, you have the ability to support multiple scoring models so you can have different measurement metrics for different projects or take into consideration how negative sentiment affects the overall score.
PR Custom Scoring moves away from generic and static legacy metrics and provides a customisable dynamic scoring model that can be as agile as you and your business. That way, you can define the success metrics that matter to you and report on them accordingly with metrics tailored to your KPIs.
A Single Source of Truth
The number of full-scale end to end PR suits is on the rise. This is a huge win for PR and marketing pros since they can now effectively benchmark results since data is sourced in the same way. When multiple vendors are in play, things can get confusing. Not all vendors measure metrics the same way, so it’s impossible to benchmark your teams and compare apples with apples. A single vendor approach helps you find a single source of truth when it comes to data, so you can rest well knowing your reporting is consistent.
To summarise, the new generation of PR campaign management empowers pros to:
- Prove tangible business impact across paid, earned and owned media initiatives
- Create custom PR attribution scoring metrics to rank coverage
- Effectively benchmark measurement by gaining a single source of truth via one integrated platform
- Improve workflow efficiency
- Make better-informed decisions
Hopefully, by now you have a better understanding of how advancements in technology are transforming PR campaign management and helping PR pros modernise how they execute PR campaigns to increase efficiency, reduce spend, drive more in-depth insights, and improve agility. Want to learn what this could look like for your organisation? Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch!