The benefits of a public relations campaign to your business may seem evident: media coverage sends more potential clients to your website (and as a result, grows leads and revenue). But actually public relations campaigns offer a much wider array of ROI drivers that often go unrecognized and unleveraged by marketing teams– leaving money and brand equity on the table. Accounting for and measuring all of these benefits of a public relations campaign is necessary to know the true effectiveness of your efforts and optimize them accordingly. As management expert Peter Drucker said, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. So before you update your public relations strategy, make sure you’re accounting for each of these ROI drivers below.
What Public Relations Benefits Are Businesses Overlooking?
The list of benefits to measure from a public relations campaign is long because of the unique ability PR has to also complement other channels in your marketing mix. The industry you’re in and the audience you target also plays a role in the ways your business will benefit from public relations. We’ve put together a guide that highlights the most important ones to consider, especially many that are often overlooked in the short term by many companies.
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Referral Traffic: The most obvious benefit from any public relations campaign is, of course, the referral traffic. Referral traffic is the traffic to your website directly from those who read about or see your business featured by a news network. In the case of a press article published online with a link back to your website, it’s the traffic from readers clicking that link directly back to your site. Referral traffic is the most basic benefit of a public relations campaign and one of the easiest to measure. However, it’s typically a short-term benefit unless you are consistently securing new press coverage to continue sending new referral traffic to your site. For one individual piece of press coverage, the bulk of referral traffic happens in the first 48-72 hours of the publicity going live because that’s when your news article is likely on the homepage of the press outlet.
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Social Proof: In marketing, social proof (coined by Robert Cialdini) is a term used to describe something that gives a brand social influence. Positive customer testimonials, critical reviews and positive press coverage are all examples of social proof that provides your brand more credibility. When social proof elements are incorporated into your marketing and sales materials, it increases your ability to sell a product. Customers trust and do business with brands that have a high degree of social proof, or in other words, a track record. Showcasing the press coverage your brand has received on your company website, your pitch decks, online advertising and even in your sales proposals has been a proven way to increase your conversion rates by building trust with prospects faster and shortening your sales cycle.
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Search Engine Rankings & Traffic: Although referral traffic from a piece of press coverage is often short-term, there is another form of traffic provided by public relations campaigns that lasts in perpetuity and that is search engine traffic. The website of a major news outlet often has a far higher Domain Authority than your own website. This means that an article about your company on a news outlet can often rank better for search keywords in your industry than your own website can, especially the very competitive keywords. When a press article about your own brand ranks well on a search engine for a beneficial keyword that your own website doesn’t rank for (or even if your website also does rank for that term) you are now benefiting from an additional search engine position that promotes your brand. When visitors find that article on a search engine and ultimately click through to your website from it, it provides a stream of traffic that lasts for as long as that article continues to rank in search (which for a high authority website, it can often be years).
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Activate Sales Leads from Your Email List: As was mentioned in the advice above about social proof, you can also take advantage of the same benefits by sharing your press coverage with your email list. Creating an email blast that announces your feature in the press and also provides a call to action back to one of the sales pages or offers on your website is a proven strategy for reactivating potential prospects from your email list that may have gone cold previously.
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Use PR in Social Media Advertising: For brands who are running social media advertising campaigns, incorporating your press coverage into your ads can help drive up your click-through and conversion rates. One of the most effective methods for doing so is to incorporate a mention of your press features in your ad copy or visual graphics. It helps establish credibility for your ad faster during a moment when you only have a matter of seconds to capture the attention of scrolling users. This credibility helps warm your prospect faster and shorten the purchasing cycle.
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Backlinks: Another important SEO benefit of public relations campaigns to businesses is the acquisition of backlinks through your press coverage. As mentioned above, news outlets have very high authority websites, which makes a backlink from their site very valuable to your own Domain Authority. Generating even one of these backlinks can improve the ranking of your own website on search engines, and generating an ongoing stream of them consistently can help turn your website into an SEO powerhouse that ranks for much more competitive search terms.
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Press Coverage is Permanent Exposure: Lastly, there is a key difference between receiving media coverage from a major news outlet and buying advertising on the very same outlet. Advertising is paid placement on a news outlet for a specified period of time. Once the time has ended, you either have to pay more to continue enjoying the same exposure, or you lose the exposure. With press coverage, your exposure on a news outlets website is permanent without the requirement of any additional investment. This means that the return on investment for a public relations campaign gets exponentially higher as time goes on due to the continuing public relations benefits for a business for the same initial investment.
