Data 101: Grow Your Brand with the Right PR and Marketing Tools

When you’re getting a brand off the ground, there are a variety of factors needed to achieve success. One of the key ingredients is to look at what areas of the business you’re investing in and how you can maximize your ROI. While putting budget behind a PR and marketing strategy is critical, brands can’t just stop after the execution process and simply hope for the best. They must instill data-driven measurement practices that give them insights into how their activities are performing so they can determine what’s working and what’s not.

If you’re a growing brand that’s leveraging PR and marketing, but aren’t sure if it’s quite paying off or if you could be getting even better results, the below tips can help take your strategies to the next level.

Source: Pexels.com under CC license.

Determine your KPIs: Before diving into your data-driven PR and marketing strategy, ask yourself the following question: “What results do I want to see?” Once you have your answer, ask yourself: “What results does leadership want to see?” As the PR lead for a growing brand, you may have a CMO interview in the Wall Street Journal or a new product feature in TechCrunch on the brain. These are great goals, but you must be able to show the value of these placements to the rest of your organization. Think about what metrics will help everyone who doesn’t live in the PR world understand the value of this coverage. Maybe it’s referrals to your site, social media shares or an increase in investor interest. This golden KPI differs from company to company – you just need to find out what it is for yours.

Implement data analytics tools: Think about where you’re spending the majority of your efforts and invest in tracking tools to better understand the results. Does the majority of your budget go to traditional earned activities, including media coverage and thought leadership content? Easy-to-use tools like Google Analytics can provide insights about the number of people viewing your content, and when. This means you can correlate spikes in activity with major launches to better understand which announcements are performing well, and which ones aren’t. The same holds true for thought leadership articles. If an article from your CTO about the future of blockchain is a hot topic that brings people to click through the site, keep it up and incorporate it into more content. If content is not your top priority, but having a strong social presence is, implement a social analytics tool. A social media analytics platform, such as Netbase, can help you analyze social media posts and turn them into actionable business insights for not only marketing and PR, but also customer service, product and sales.

Leverage insights to improve performance: With the right insights, you can pivot your strategies as needed and focus on further investing in the areas that are giving you the right results. Look at data with a critical eye and make a call on which activities are succeeding and which are underperforming. By putting fewer resources into the activities that aren’t giving you the ROI you need, you have more left to devote to the strategies that are working. Doing this helps maximize your investment in PR and marketing and shows the measurable value of your efforts to the rest of the company.

As your brand grows and you look for awareness to prosper within your own market, consider the benefits of implementing a data-driven PR and marketing strategy. It will provide you with the right tools and skill sets achieve your brand’s potential.

Are you ready to level up your data-driven PR and marketing strategy? We can help.