The Evolution of Public Relations
In a world of rapidly increasing costs and diminishing return for what seems like everything marketing, there is one word that should always be top of mind for senior b-to-b executives: Leverage. The notion of spending once and deriving value multiple times not only stretches limited budget dollars, but begins to link what were previously disparate efforts into a cohesive, impactful strategy that drives results. Exhibit A of the all-too-common lack of leverage within b-to-b marketing is public relations. Despite both its importance and potential power, this function’s lack of integration into other marketing – and sales – activities significantly reduces its leverage, and thus its impact.
There is a wide chasm between those that apply a PR strategy purely as a general communications vehicle, and those that begin to weave it into the rest of the sales and marketing mix. The key variables that work together to form this chasm include:
Functional Alignment. While the role of acting as the liaison for senior management will not go away, impacting the revenue generating support capabilities of marketing will require PR to branch out beyond its historical comfort zone.
Functional Approach. Best-practice PR functions cultivate a sense of back-and-forth community with their audiences, enabling them to not only drive awareness and support demand creation programs on a regular basis, but to also become a more credible source of information in the face of negative concerns that can quickly manifest into reputation-damaging events.
Deployment. True PR leverage is gained by driving systematic awareness and reinforcement of positions throughout the buying cycle, rather than one-and-done message campaigns that do little to engage customers or prospects.
Metrics. A large number of PR functions continue to rely only on legacy metrics that include total impressions, brand awareness, clip counts and positioning versus the competition; the measurement of newer social media tactics tend to revolve around quantifiable Web activity metrics and analytics.
Technology and Services. The ability to measure the integration and impact of PR on other marketing and sales functions means a reliance on more than traditional media technologies and service providers.
When PR is merely the mouthpiece for an organization, its ability to demonstrate value is limited. While broadcasting press releases was once the key component of driving awareness, it now only serves to point out just how out of touch an organization can be. Leveraging the social media world by simply using it as another channel to push your message out is not the way to evolve the PR function; instead, fitting PR efforts into a highly integrated strategy that leverages its activities into the overall focus of sales and marketing is the surest path to success.
