PR guide: 5 steps to aligning your goals to business objectives

If you’re having a hard time deciding how to integrate your PR strategy into your marketing plan and overall business strategy, you are not alone.

To help you overcome these barriers, we’ve created a handy guide designed to help you align your goals to wider business objectives in just five steps.

1. Understand your organization’s mission and objectives

By aligning your work with wider business objectives, you’re making yourself a direct contributor to your company’s success.

To do that, start by understanding the goals and the mission your organization aims to accomplish.

PR is a key tool in helping bring these to life, so you ought to be one of the first stakeholder groups to learn about latest the business priorities or shifts in strategy.

At this stage, it’s equally important to ensure your work is visible within the organization. Don’t shy away from taking a seat at the leadership table and getting involved in budgeting conversations.

Knowledge is power–the more information you have regarding priorities within different departments in your company, the better equipped you will be to make a difference.

2. Develop your strategy with the organization’s goals in mind

The next step is creating a communications plan to support each business goal.

For instance, if the objective is doubling revenue in the next six months, then that’s exactly where you should be starting when planning your PR goals.

How can you empower your organization to reach that target?

It often happens that PR practitioners mainly focus on growing media coverage, article bylines or social media mentions, but this short-sightedness can mean losing focus on the big picture and the real challenges your company is facing.

You can bring your work closer to the organization’s objectives with less distraction if you set relevant and measurable KPIs from the start.

3. Get closer to other teams within your business

Breaking silos and collaborating with all the experts in your organization will help reduce workload across all teams whilst ensuring maximum output.

A good starting point is aligning your PR strategy with the marketing goals, which often run parallel to business goals.

By working closely to the marketing and demand generation teams you’ll get a better understanding of their processes and their expertise can empower you to track the quality of the engagements you bring in.

For instance:

• How much website traffic do you get from media coverage?
• What’s the usual behavior of the leads you bring in?
• Where are they in the buyer journey?

Once you’ve nailed down the organization’s goals, it’s essential to establish who you’re trying to reach.

What particular buyer personas or industry verticals is your business marketing to? Is your goal to reach the same audience through your PR efforts? If that’s not the case, you might want to revisit the strategy.

Creating campaigns which engage the core target audience, build brand awareness in the right sectors and have measurable goals is a dream come true for PR practitioners.

Getting closer to your customers and prospects is at the forefront of building impactful PR strategies. Here’s when it becomes vital to invest time in building relationships and learning about roles within other departments.

When was the last time you asked your sales team to listen in on a pitch or talked to them about prospects’ needs? Are you aware of your customers’ pain points in their work or success stories powered by your product or services?

Customer insight has the power to fully transform and enrich your PR campaigns. If you haven’t tapped into this resource yet, it might be the time to give it a try.

4. Measure your results: The ROI of PR is not a myth

The PR industry has yet to solve its most pressing challenge – proving value through measurable ROI.

Reporting on metrics such as impressions, reach or mentions in the media can be difficult to connect to lead generation and revenue.

Tracking media coverage is just the first step and, ideally, you should be able to link it to concrete results. When digging deeper, these are some examples of questions which will help you get closer to showing the ROI of your work.

• Did any PR campaigns, social media posts or media coverage results in peaks in website traffic?
• For how long did those visitors stay on your site? What pages did they visit? How many requested more information about your product/services?
• Are there any correlations between tiers of coverage and the quality of leads they generate?
• Do the demographics of the outlets you’re featured in reflect your key buyer personas?

Less than a decade ago, PR pros relied on print media, TV or radio coverage to measure their progress. It was a time-heavy, expensive process.

Today, the world of PR is more complex than ever before and the most effective measurement must span across many different platforms – online coverage, news mentions, website traffic, content engagements, social media hits, event keynotes, etc.

Due to the unpredictability and ever-increasing level of responsibility that PR professionals are facing, they rely on intelligent tools. This helps them save time and monitor a large array of metrics for their own brand as well as competitors.

With the right technology stack, PR practitioners have the opportunity to dig a little deeper and take their KPI measurement to the next level.

Here are four ways social listening can help:

A. Coverage analysis

Go beyond monitoring the volume of coverage by using sentiment analysis to discover whether the article portrays your brand in a positive or negative light.

You can then find out how much exposure each article is getting by tracking shares on social media and beyond.

Take it one step further and explore the top influencers sharing these articles and helping boost awareness–why not reach out to them for future collaborations?

B. Competitor benchmarking

In order to know if you’re doing a good job, it’s essential to understand how you stack up against the competition.

Intelligent social listening platforms allow you to monitor your competitors and learn about their performance against yours.

This is an useful way to find out in which areas they’re exceeding or struggling, equipping you with the right information to win against them.

C. Logo recognition

When running ad campaigns or sponsoring events, increasing your brands’ visibility is a vital KPI.

However, it can be difficult to draw the connection between a sponsorship, increased brand visibility, and better sales.

Logo recognition arms you with the additional data needed to help measure your investments more efficiently, even when the brand mention you’re looking for is not featured in text, but within images.

D. Get the full picture

Social listening has the ability to level up your measurement strategy by providing the complete picture of your PR campaigns.

Newspaper clippings have now been replaced by online monitoring of articles using platforms such as Lexis Nexis, which enable PR practitioners to get the full picture of their campaign performance.

Additionally, you can now track brand reputation amongst different groups of people including analysts, bloggers, journalists, influencers, prospects, employees, and so on.

You can even take this one step further and overlay factors like location, sentiment, site rankings, and other traffic data.

This will allow you to measure your campaign reach more accurately and understand which audience segments your messaging is resonating with most.