Aligning PR Strategy to Organisational Goals

One of the biggest challenges PR bods face when trying to demonstrate RoI to clients is that, typically, it is not a lead-generating activity. Unlike marketing, where you can see the click-throughs rolling in, it is much harder to determine if a lead has come from a certain piece of coverage or report. PR is much more about raising awareness, establishing credibility, and helping clients to be seen in the right places so that they can make those all-important RFP shortlists. 

For PR to be effective, it needs to be aligned to sales and the organisational aspirations of the company we are working with. This is why it is vital to have an in-depth understanding of what these goals are and support this with activities that will get you in front of the right people, so that they can influence, educate and secure new business. In addition to that, in order to get the most from PR, clients need to share and socialise content and coverage internally and externally. Here are a few examples of how PR can align itself with sales to help meet strategic business goals:

1. Driving interest in a new product or service: While those in the industry will know, product news does not drive the levels of coverage it once did; yet this is not to say that product or services launches are redundant. The critical thing for a product or service launch is to have a clear audience and strong message that talks to challenges this audience faces. For example, our client ElasticHosts recently launched a sister company, io. Springs.io is a pure container-based cloud service, which provides usage-based billing, helping customers to reduce costs and avoid over-provisioning. It was targeted predominantly at smaller organisations with limited internal IT resources. As a direct result of the press coverage achieved from the launch – which included titles such as Computer Weekly, Business Cloud News, V3, Network World, to name just a few – Springs.io also had a number of visits to its website and sales enquiries; as there had been no other marketing push aside from the PR, this traffic can directly attributed to the articles that appeared.
2. Targeting new vertical markets: It is hard to crack into a new industry and part of that challenge is that often businesses can lack the customer references making it hard to establish credibility. PR can help with this by providing a means for clients to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise – either through opinion pieces or through creating statistics and news that helps to educate the market about a problem. A great example of where we have executed on this brief was with our client Egress, an encryption technology provider. The business was focused on targeting financial services organisations, so we helped to craft a Freedom of Information request to show that fines for data breaches in this sector were on the increase. We broke the news during the Infosecurity Europe show, gaining coverage within the main pages of the Financial Times. As a result, Egress said a number of banks and FS companies visited the stand and were asking about the research, helping to provide a conversation starter with prospects.
3. Repositioning the business: Companies spend years cultivating their brand to ensure their customers and the wider market understand who they are and what they do. This is key to getting on shortlists, but changing perceptions can be very difficult and take a long time. One of our clients, Dynatrace, has been going through this process over the past year. It was previously a public listed entity under the Compuware brand, but went private in September last year. As part of this move, it has re-established itself as a digital performance company and made strategic acquisitions to cement its position as the world’s largest APM business. To support the rebranding and repositioning of the company, we have arranged a number of briefings to talk about the new direction of the company, hooking into the wider trend in the IT sector of companies moving from public to private ownership. Examples include: Diginomica, ‘Dynatrace – exploiting private equity for freedom and growth’; The Register, ‘Dynatrace and Keynote are borging into a super-APM outfit’; Computing, BMC Software, Compuware and now Tibco: Why are more and more software companies being taken over by private equity?; and ComputerworldUK, ‘Dynatrace and Keynote merge to form largest APM Company in the world’.

If you want your PR programme to be a success, then it is vital to keep your team updated on where the business is going and how you want to be perceived. Failing to communicate your organisation's strategy will only create disappointment on both sides and reduce the RoI for your PR campaign.