Increasing marketing ROI is paramount for any organization. Yes, it’s true you have to spend money to make money as the old saying goes, but the reality is you have to quantify the impact of those dollars or risk not just losing your marketing budget, but negatively impacting your organization overall. While in some areas of marketing, like advertising, it’s relatively easy to measure ROI, others, like PR, have always been harder to measure. As such the impact of PR often goes overlooked and underfunded. But make no mistake, PR will increase your ROI. Here’s how.
Measuring ROI
In general, ROI or return on investment in marketing is measured by determining how many sales, attendees, donations, etc. happened because of your campaign(s). Using advertising as an example, you could calculate ROI by determining the revenue you gained from a particular ad minus the cost of the ad divided by the expenses and multiplying by 100. It’s a relatively clear-cut formula.
On the other hand, PR has many roles such as boosting awareness, credibility, and engagement with your brand as well as cultivating a positive brand reputation, all of which are more intangible. What’s more, they are what you would typically consider top-of-the-funnel activities in the sales cycle rather than the bottom where the sale is closed. However, you can leverage them in bottom-of-the-funnel activities as well to prove their value in increasing ROI.
How PR Will Increase Your ROI
It’s still important to measure media placements as well as social, website, and search engine metrics, however here are five ways to leverage PR in more easily measured marketing and sales activities as well:
- Use media placements in campaigns – Don’t leave it up to your prospects to come across your media placements, make sure they know about it by including them in your marketing campaigns and/or using them as another reason to reach out. Typically, it takes five to seven touchpoints to ‘hook’ a prospect so to speak.
- Add to sales and marketing materials – Adding award wins, industry accolades, and other media mentions in these materials, especially where they highlight how your brand can help overcome key customer pain points adds tremendous credibility.
- Share on social media – Encourage employees to share media placements on appropriate social media channels to increase not just brand awareness but also sales. For example, Hubspot states that sales professionals with a strong social selling index on LinkedIn have 45% more sales opportunities than those who don’t and are 51% more likely to reach their quota. Make sure you’ve created and trained them on social media guidelines for your brand first though!
- Add accolades to signature lines – Adding clickable links to thought leadership, awards, and other media placements is a subtle way to increase credibility, awareness, and engagement for your brand. And not just in terms of sales, but it can help with recruiting and investor relations as well.
- Create testimonials – The fact that your sales team is closest to your customers and PR is closest to media is actually a beautiful thing. You can work together to create testimonials that benefit your brand overall as well as your individual goals. The ability to share happy customer experiences is priceless!
R team would love to help your organization increase ROI with PR. Learn more about our public relations services and schedule your FREE Discovery Call today!