SKC Insights

Thanks to technology, it’s much easier to gather marketing data to boost your business. But are you leveraging that data for your company's public relations?

All the little marketing data-points — those you need before a campaign, those you get during one — come together to inform how you can tailor messages to achieve the most efficient effect. Companies that analyze and use their data can see big benefits.

Here are 4 ways to integrate data into your PR to boost your business:

1. Audience Data – Sussing Out Your Ideal Customer

Do you know who your ideal customer is? The better you know your audience, the more effectively you can create successful campaigns. Using customer data can help you discover more about your buyers, such as their demographics, interests and behaviors. Picture your perfect customer, the person who will make the decision to buy your product or service. Where do they live? What is their educational level? What is their job title? Businesses who know their buyer personas know how to tailor their content (earned, owned and paid) in ways that resonate and influence. Companies who don’t often miss the mark and risk alienating their audience.

2. Preferred Channels – Putting a Bullseye on The Right Outlets

Once you know who your audience is, you need to know the kinds of media they are consuming. Knowing preferred channels and consumption habits will keep you from wasting time in the wrong places. For example, if you know that the type of decision-makers you want to attract read healthcare management-focused magazines, then you know that you must aim to create content helpful for outlets like Journal of Healthcare Administrative Management. Knowing where to aim will speed up your customer acquisition efforts, lower your acquisition costs, and contribute to the bottom line.

3. Earned Media Engagement – Sprinting Beyond Clips

Earned media engagement is traditionally measured by clips or the quality and quantity of media outlets that picked up your content. This category of measurement can be further expanded in the digital age. Mentions on social media channels, like shares, likes, and comments are useful metrics to consider for online content. Comments can even be engaged with from your side, allowing you to have a direct conversation with your audience. Consider taking a page out of Amazon’s book. Amazon uses data such as when a customer makes a purchase, rates or likes an item, to provide accurate product recommendations. They use this data to encourage customers to buy more from them. You can do the same to encourage customers to buy more from you.

4. Powerful Business Results – Sprucing Up Conversion Metrics

PR has lagged paid advertising in tying back to business outcomes, but now with sophisticated tracking mechanisms, earned media is narrowing that gap and providing important insights into ROI. With today’s capabilities, it is possible to track a person’s unique internet protocol address using cookies over a website, allowing a company to see if the reader looked at services or products after consuming a piece of content. Layered on top of share of voice and/or sentiment analysis, conversion metrics give a fuller picture of how a campaign did and what it produced. And now you can take a step back to look at all these insights and decide what you could do next to improve your campaigns even more.

Marketing data is only valuable when you make use of it. With these tips on how to use data to boost your business, you can take out the guesswork and make informed decisions. If you would like to learn more about how marketing data and PR can help your business, click the button below to schedule a call with an SKC professional or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.