At a time when budgets are increasingly constrained, knowing how to effectively quantify and communicate the value of PR to CEOs, executives and board members is essential. Even if you wholeheartedly believe in the value of PR, it can be a challenge to translate its importance to stakeholders who are short on time, budget and patience. So where do you even begin?
We’ve assembled six best practices that will streamline your communication efforts and help influence your leaders to engage in a strategic public relations plan (and help you be the superhero you already are).
Here are six tips for communicating the positive impact and value of public relations and media relations effectively to senior management and the board:
- Focus on business objectives: The board of directors is primarily concerned with the organization’s bottom line. When presenting public relations results, be sure to connect them to specific business objectives, such as increased sales, improved brand recognition and a larger “Share of Voice” in media coverage versus your competitors.
- Use metrics and data: Use quantifiable metrics and data to demonstrate the impact of your PR efforts. This might include several press releases, total media impressions, the value of advertising equivalency in news coverage, impact on Search Engine Results and SEO, social media engagement or website referral traffic.
- Provide context: Give context to the metrics you present by comparing them to past performance or industry benchmarks. This can help the leadership team and the board understand the significance of your results and how they compare to your competitors.
- Use visuals: Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, using visuals like charts, graphs or infographics illustrate your key points and make the data much more accessible and understandable. For example, instead of listing a top-tier story using the text of the headline, take a screenshot of the story as it appears in print.
Pro tip: when choosing a partner technology PR agency, seek out a team that understands the importance of measurement and offers graphically rich reporting tools.
- Be concise: Keep your presentation brief and focused on the most critical information. Board members have limited time, so you want to ensure you get your message across in the most economical way possible. Stick to top-line results and three to four slides at most.
- Be transparent: Be transparent about any challenges or limitations you faced in achieving your results. Outlining what worked and what didn’t work can help build credibility and trust with leadership and also demonstrate your ability to overcome obstacles while being adept at recognizing factors outside your control.
In addition to showing your PR results with metrics and data, it’s equally important to think about ways to integrate PR metrics with critical marketing and sales metrics. By working closely with your marketing department and using tools like Google Analytics, you can show how PR results, like media coverage, directly increase website traffic, search rankings, sales leads, webinar registration and social media engagement.
It’s also important to make reporting PR results to leadership a regular occurrence, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, twice per year or annually, so the board and senior management are consistently familiar with PR efforts, successes and challenges. The more they know, the better advocates they can be for the PR program.
Overall, the key to presenting PR results to leadership is to make a clear and compelling case for the impact of your efforts on the organization’s goals and objectives. By focusing on business outcomes, using data to support your claims and being transparent about challenges, you can build credibility and trust and demonstrate the high value of PR to your organization. It’s also important to partner with a trusted B2B technology PR agency that can convey an effective media relations strategy and public relations strategy that reflects your business goals. Typically, a PR agency worth its salt can help communicate the value of public relations to your leaders in a way that illuminates the high return on investment that expert PR can net.
As a consumer technology PR agency and B2B tech marketing company, Gabriel Marketing Group helps organizations see the full value of public relations come to fruition. We’re driven by innovation and our award-winning PR and marketing team helps achieve the unique KPIs of our global clients with custom-tailored strategies. We focus on partnering with mission-focused, high-growth clients that create technology to drive global change, and our passionate team of like-minded experts come alongside brands to authentically and strategically represent them to top-tier media outlets.
Ready to find out how GMG’s strategic solutions provide quantifiable, real-world results where other B2B PR agencies can’t?