Using data-driven insights to drive your PR campaigns enables you to make informed decisions, maximise the impact of your efforts and demonstrate the value of PR to your organisation.
It’s important to start with your business objectives and make sure you have the benchmark data you need to show if you have been successful.
Here’s where you can start with data-driven PR:
Audience mapping and motivations
Gathering data on your audience is key to unlocking trends and determining their behaviours and motivations. Demographic data alone is not enough. Get deeper insights into your audience. Set the questions you need to ask them, gather the data, spot the trends, and use this data to inform your campaigns and measure your success.
Trends and crisis management
Real-time data and analytics can help to identify trends that you can hop onto to generate good awareness for your businesses, but it can also help you to spot potential crises. Set up real-time social listening and media monitoring so you are on top of your brand mentions and can respond quickly.
AI
The integration of AI in PR campaigns has the potential to revolutionise the way data is utilised, offering more advanced analytics and predictive capabilities. You will always need the human eye to make sense of the data and turn it into action, but AI will continue to help inform campaigns and messaging.
Measurement metrics:
Data shows that PR professionals track an average of eight metrics: story placement and reach/impressions, key message pull-through, revenue impact, website impact and share of voice.
But also think about sentiment and the audience mapping we talked about earlier – if you have this benchmark data, revisit after your campaign or periodically throughout the year to measure your impact and how you are shifting perceptions and behaviours of your audience.
