Leveraging PR to Drive Business Outcomes: N6A’s OR Webinar
You can only cover so much ground in one session.
When we launched Outcome Relations (OR) in 2019, it was the product of sitting in front of thousands of CMOs, CEOs, founders and brand marketers over the past decade and hearing the same concern: how can PR align with specific business outcomes? When we defined the OR model, we knew it directly tackles this pain point by assigning PR the same level of accountability as other components of the marketing stack.
We’ve loved spreading the OR gospel whenever possible, so we recently launched a monthly webinar series to give business leaders some key insights straight from us.
In our first session, we covered how businesses can define desired outcomes in order to link PR to ROI, how to clearly define target personas aligned to your desired outcomes, how to drive credibility assets to support desired business outcomes, and how to create an inherent level of accountability and attribution for normally imprecise PR metrics with Outcome Relations.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash
We covered a ton of ground on our first webinar, and we’ll get to cover even more in the subsequent sessions. But you can only get to so much in 20 minutes! Below are a few of the questions that we didn’t get to that we felt will illuminate our OR model even further.
Can you elaborate more on how you can connect credibility assets to ROI?
- The first place to look is the ROI relationship between each credibility asset and amplification asset. For example, take a credibility asset such as a contributed article that is published for your brand in a trade publication. Let’s say you amplify that credibility asset through two different channels; one is a LinkedIn campaign that promotes the asset and another is an email newsletter that showcases the asset. You can measure the impact of leads generated from both channels, and then, ultimately, the conversions of those leads to sales. That will help guide you on ROI metrics that resulted from the credibility asset.
Can you elaborate more on the process behind clearly defining targeted personas within the OR model?
- You need to get as specific as possible with creating personas in order to properly select the credibility assets and amplification assets that will drive outcomes for each campaign. For example, let’s take a revenue campaign. Get as specific as you can with creating the target buyer persona; i.e. what is their job title, are there any geographic locations where they operate, what is the size of the company, etc. The more specific you can get with defining the personas the more effective the ROI will be on the outcome campaign.
How can OR address the quantity over quality problem when it comes to measuring what success looks like in PR?
- Ultimately, it’s all about outcomes with OR. Therefore, some campaigns might be measured on a qualitative basis, where there are fewer results but the results are more impactful once they are secured; while other campaigns might be measured on a quantitative basis, where there are a high-volume of results but they are less comprehensive in nature. The ROI on the outcomes will determine if a qualitative, quantitative or combination approach, will be the most effective.
Why is recruiting the most unheralded outcome?
- The talent function is typically one of the most expensive lines on a company’s P&L, regardless of size and industry. Between internal and external recruiters, rewards programs, culture initiatives, training and more, brands spend a significant amount of money to recruit and retain talent, and understandably so. The role of PR, and the relationship between credibility assets and amplification assets, can be one of the most effective channels to attract talent to your organization. In many cases, this can be an easy offset to expenditure in other areas of your talent function that are not driving anywhere near the same value as PR could drive if it’s practiced properly with the outcome approach.
How do you suggest approaching OR if you have a small marketing team without a demand gen function?
- Be smart, scrappy and resourceful. Even small marketing teams can effectively amplify PR results to drive outcomes in the absence of big budgets or extensive resources. If you don’t have the luxury of big budgets for paid media, look at channels to amplify credibility assets such as email newsletters, organic social and landing page creation.
If you didn’t get to join us live the first time around, be on the lookout for next month’s session!