As the communications industry continues to become more sophisticated, it’s vital that your messages reach and resonate with your target audience. While crafting a strong narrative, writing attention-grabbing press releases, and publishing your own content are all important aspects of engaging your audience, these methods are not enough on their own. Today’s public relations leaders must understand how to partner with influencers to effectively deliver their message to the intended audience. In fact, Edelman found that 63% of consumers in a global survey trust what influencers say about a brand more than they trust the brand’s advertisements.

Types of Influencers

Influencers are individuals with established audiences – often in niche areas – that have built trust and authenticity with their audience. By understanding how to engage with each group and how they can impact the reach of your message, you can get the most out of your communications efforts.

There are three common types:

Social Media

Social media influencers are people who engage with your social media content and share your company’s news coverage, ultimately extending your message to their followers.

Reporters

Reporters with established expertise in your industry often have a dedicated following that trusts their endorsements. Further, they have access to publishing platforms which can broadcast your messages to their readers.

Third-Party

Third-party influencers are recognized experts in their field and are frequently cited by the media as an authoritative source. Though they are not affiliated with your company or the media, associating with this type of influencer can lend credibility to your brand messaging.

Why are Influencers Important?

Influencers are important because they increase the reach and impact of your messages by improving their visibility and credibility. By extension, you can improve awareness of and trust in your brand within your industry space.

Visibility

By routing your messages through people with established audiences, their visibility can be significantly increased. You can also target people more directly based on their location, interests, or demographic profile. For example, if Floridians are your target audience, a reporter from a local publication, like the Miami Herald, is more likely to reach that audience than a national publication, such as the Los Angeles Times, despite the latter’s larger readership.

Credibility

Reaching your target audience with your message is only effective if they also trust the source. For this reason, it’s essential to consider the credibility and reputation of the influencer you choose to engage with. For example, if your story is about a scientific discovery, a reporter with National Geographic would lend more credibility than a reporter from ESPN.

How to Find the Right Influencer

Determining the right individual to share your message is dependent on your communications strategy. However, we recommend partnering with those who can best persuade your target audience, rather than reaching out to dozens of people who are not aligned with your goals. In other words, opt for a targeted approach rather than a wide net. To find the right partnership, ask yourself four questions:

Who does your audience hear from and trust?

A thought leader’s visibility and credibility can go a long way in reaching and building trust with your target audience. By researching your target audience and determining their demographic and psychographic profiles, you can more effectively identify their trusted sources of information.

Who generates engagement with media coverage?

Reaching your audience is only the first step. For the best results, they need to engage with your message to build your brand. You can measure metrics, such as social sharing of media coverage, to pinpoint the topics and stories your audience care about most. This method will also allow you to identify the influencers associated with the highest levels of social sharing.

Who covers the right topics?                               

The most effective way to locate reporters who cover topics relevant to your target audience is to monitor coverage of your company, industry, and competitors. You can also find third-party experts in your field by tracking industry news, as well as making note of individuals or sources who are frequently cited or quoted.

Who portrays your company in a positive light?

Focus your resources on individuals who will act as ambassadors of your brand by portraying it positively, rather than those who will neutrally mention it. You can maximize the return on your outreach by tracking the sentiment of various influencers’ coverage of your company and your industry to identify those who will be supportive of your message.

How to Reach Out to Influencers

Once you’ve found the partnerships you’d like to foster, personalize your outreach to ensure each engagement is unique. There are a host of in-depth resources on engagement to guide personalization, from honing your pitch to authors to working with social content creators.

Avoid the automated, semi-personalized emails that only require swapping out names and key details. Personalizing your strategy starts with ensuring your pitch is aligned with the influencer’s interests and expertise. This method will help your message to resonate with their values and build a strong campaign that meets your communications goals.

Measuring Influencer Impact

As you begin including key thought leaders in your communications strategy, ensure you have a media measurement program in place. Not only will media measurement help you develop outreach targets, but it will also allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy.

At PublicRelay, we create custom media monitoring and analytics programs to help each client identify the influencers most valuable to their brand. Launch and measure your influencer strategy today!

Accurate and regularly updated data has become a driving force in the business world. Having in depth knowledge of exactly how everything is performing is no longer a differentiator for your business, it is now a must-have. One effective way of monitoring key data and helping you plan your next move is with a communications dashboard. Communications dashboards display the most important and up to date metrics that a modern business requires.

A good communications dashboard can help a company stay on top of ever-changing news cycles, plan a new PR campaign, monitor an impending crisis or help give a detailed overview of their industry.

Here are three examples of dashboards that have helped PR professionals address their needs, plan strategies and satisfy their curiosity.

Know yourself with an Overview Dashboard

In a world where countless metrics can be tracked, a good business needs to be able to identify what specifically will be the most applicable statistics to track for the goals they are looking to accomplish. The best PR teams need to know how their business is performing, what are its currents strengths and what areas require improvement, so your Overview Dashboard should quickly and easily display the few key data points that answer the question “how are we doing?”.

Whether it’s volume and tone of coverage, social sharing broken down by platform or an-in depth view of key topics, you can gain immediate insights into your principal concerns. By taking the time to tailor this dashboard to your specific needs, you may save valuable time that can be put towards planning how best to use this data to be more agile. 

Know your competition with a Competitive Dashboard

A good Competitive Dashboard can be key to gathering a clear and concise overview of just how you stack up to your main competition. Keeping a close eye on one’s peers can help ensure communicators identify areas for improvement as well as points of strength within their own company.

PR and communications teams may require a side by side comparison of themselves and their foremost competitor, or perhaps they need to expand their view and keep track of all their main competition at once. The ability, not only to monitor competitor metrics, but also to accurately compare and contrast their own performance with others, can help teams answer the question “how are we doing in relation to others?”.

Know your path forward with an Issues Matrix

Last week’s hot topic is often this week’s old news. Modern industries have dynamic news cycles and it pays to stay ahead of the curve on matters both big and small. An Issues Matrix Dashboard can help companies monitor key topics within their industry as well as current news trends.

With this dashboard, PR pros can easily determine what aspects of their industry have been trending negatively, which have been trending positively as well as which matters have been the most talked about.

For teams that need to keep abreast of topical industry news, or for those that are interested in how their industry is portrayed in the media, this dashboard can be an invaluable tool. This dynamic dashboard is perfect for an ever-changing industry and can help answer the question “how is our industry doing?”.

The best dashboards are those with the highest engagement levels and teams that take the time to build these dashboards to their specific requirements certainly reap the benefits that these hubs of information can provide. No two companies are the same and those that cater their dashboards to their individual needs stay informed and ahead of the curve.

Many of us have probably heard of SMART goals or goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. Rather than having a vague notion of what you want to accomplish where success is somewhat subjective, setting SMART goals provides structure to your objectives and maps a clear path to success.

Using SMART goals in PR and communications could look something like, “we’re going to increase positive innovation messaging to the Street by 10% in the next 6 months” or “we’re going to launch an employer brand campaign and earn placements with great place to work messaging in our top 20 outlets that reach millennials in the next 6 months.”

What constitutes success here is clearly spelled out and your progress can be easily tracked. But if you want to set even better goals, make your goals SMART-ER. Global Managing Director of AMEC Johna Burke explained SMART-ER goals in a recent webcast, adding ethical and revolutionary to the facets of great goal setting.

Ethical Goals

Ethical refers to the data used to measure success. Your PR and communications measurement should be consistent, transparent, and valid, meaning where and how you get your data, the criteria for success, and other metrics can easily and confidently explained. The measured results should also be replicable. If you don’t understand exactly how you get your data, you can be sure your executives will ask the same questions you’re asking yourself. Make sure your communications analysis is transparent.  

Revolutionary Goals

Are the insights from your measurement program revolutionizing your communications strategies and tactics? Streamlining or changing processes inside and even outside your department? Setting revolutionary goals is all about understanding the impact of your results and using insights to optimize strategies. If you successfully increased positive innovation message penetration to the Street by 10% in the last quarter, what impact did that have on your brand and your organization’s business goals? Maybe you’ll see a correlation between the uplift in positive coverage and an increase in institutional investments. Glean insights from the data and results that not only prove your worth, but show you what to do next.

Learn more about SMARTER goals from AMEC Global Managing Director Johna Burke.

Communicators agree vague potential impressions metrics are quickly becoming irrelevant because they don’t provide business value. But how can PR pros demonstrate their contribution to business goals and become more strategic business partners is the question that naturally follows – especially when their executives are accustomed to seeing potential impressions grow ad infinitum.

One way to correlate PR activities to your organization’s goals is to conduct demographic and psychographic audience analysis of your earned media coverage to ensure you’re reaching your target potential audience, not millions of anonymous people. Leverage demographic and psychographic analysis in the following ways:

Demographic Audience Analysis

Demographic audience analysis segments your audience by data points such as age, gender, income, education, marital status, and political affiliation. Compare your readership on these demographics to see if you’re getting coverage in front of people that you are trying to get to take action.

For example, a non-profit organization benefitting children is trying to increase their millennial donor base. They can understand exactly how much of their earned media is currently reaching not just millennials but those above a certain income threshold with children.  Using this information they can determine if they need to adjust their outreach plan.

Psychographic Audience Analysis

Psychographic audience analysis segments your audience by data points such as social and consumer behaviors and future buying intent. This allows you to get extremely granular with your targeting, especially when combined with demographic audience analysis.

Say you work for a utility company and want to get coverage about your organization’s R&D in clean energy in front of a more liberal audience, whereas you want conservative readers to see your message against a certain energy industry regulation. Use psychographic audience analysis to target a specific segment down to the key message.

Benchmark your reach to this segment and improve penetration over time using insights from campaigns as you continually perform demographic and psychographic analysis. It might surprise you what demographics and behaviors drive increased relevant web traffic, report downloads, and other conversions.

Influencer Identification

Use demographic and psychographic audience analysis by outlet to proactively pitch outlets and authors who aren’t covering you or are only covering your competitors, but reach the audience you want to target.

Demonstrating your ability to reach relevant audiences is a business conversation your C-suite will want to have and appreciate your effort to contribute to business goals.  

It’s not enough to count how many brand or product name mentions you and your competitors are getting – you need to know what is being said – and by whom. You need specifics to really understand your position in the market and be able to share that highly valuable insight with your C-suite. You can then use those insights to revise your strategy, reallocate resources, and take advantage of gaps in your competitor’s positioning and messaging if they arise.

1. Market positioning vs. earned coverage

Every communications plan revolves around market positioning. Communications and Marketing teams use themes for their campaigns, web copy, press releases, pitches, etc. But sometimes those messages aren’t mapping to what authors are writing about. For example, one of your competitors is touting an innovation that is revolutionizing the industry. But none of their earned coverage is mapping to that message. What are they writing about instead? How can you take advantage of that gap?

2. Third-party influencers

Many industries have subject matter experts that the media will turn to for comment on a regular basis. These experts can be academics, industry regulators, analysts, and politicians among others. It can be incredibly insightful to understand how these influencers talk about your peers or competitors – especially in articles where your brand isn’t mentioned. Are your relationships with these important influencers where they need to be?

3. Media relations

In addition to uncovering third-party influencers in your peers’ earned media, you can also find new authors or outlets to pitch. The intel you gather will help you craft smarter pitches. Should you reach out to authors that write negatively about your peers? Or those that have never covered you at all? Hear how some of your peers are using competitive intelligence to up their measurement game.

Sometimes it’s difficult to quantify the business impact of a PR crisis. But in the case of Uber’s string of bad publicity in 2017, the business impact of PR is quite clear – and devastating.

A recent Stratechery article (if you don’t already subscribe, I highly recommend) makes a compelling case for the idea that Uber’s PR problems actually saved their biggest competitor, Lyft.

In 2017 Uber dealt with a federal lawsuit over stolen technology, workplace harassment accusations, and a series of high-level executive mishaps  that ultimately ended with the resignation of then-CEO Travis Kalanick.

At the same time Uber was fighting these crises, Lyft gained significant market share as seen in the chart below from Lyft’s S-1.

 Lyft provided an explanation for these results in their S-1 saying,

“The growth rate in Revenue per Active Rider increased significantly in the first and second quarters of 2017 as our brand and values continued to resonate with riders and they increased their usage of Lyft instead of competing offerings.”

“As our brand and values continued to resonate with riders” is key here. There has been much talk recently about the importance of brand advocacy and values. It’s well-documented that consumers increasingly expect their brands to make a positive impact on society – or at the very least, not make a negative one, as I’d argue Uber did in 2017.

For example, in a recent study from APCO Worldwide, respondents said the single-most important thing a company can do when it comes to being “good to society” is  treat their employees well. Amid harassment allegations and high employee turnover, Uber clearly did not live up to this order and paid the price  – in market share that they have not been able to win back and eventually the loss of their CEO.

Brand building and public relations was a key  differentiator between these two companies in a competitive marketplace where the switching barriers are minimal. If this case study proves one thing, it’s that the strategic and business value of PR cannot be underestimated – Just ask Uber and Lyft.

When a large nonprofit children’s hospital garnered negative publicity around their executive compensation practices, the organization’s issue management team needed to determine if and how to react. The most important questions on their minds were:

• Is this a crisis or not?
• How does this coverage compare to other peers in their industry?
• And will this negative coverage upset our target audiences and donors?

PublicRelay helped the communications team formulate a plan to analyze and handle this looming issue.

Step 1: Determine the severity of the issue and who is producing the coverage

First, the nonprofit’s communications team referred to their historical data to determine the significance of the story. They analyzed where it was coming from by outlet power as well as volume. The team was able to determine the coverage was not being produced by the high power outlets that typically influence the hospital’s donor base. The negative attention was also not significant in volume compared to other brand crises that the hospital had seen in the past. Therefore, the negative press about the brand was unlikely to immediately impact donations.

Step 2: Determine if it is spreading

The communications team paired the information with social sharing data to ensure that the story wasn’t gaining traction. Millennial donors are a key public for the hospital, so the organization was concerned about the reach of this potential issue on specific channels like Twitter and Facebook. After tracking the coverage across social platforms, the team was able to confirm that it was not picking up many social media shares nor growing in traction.

Step 3: Compare the coverage to others in the industry

As a final precaution, the team wanted to compare the issue about its compensation practices with other peers in the nonprofit realm to ensure that they were not getting more attention than their counterparts. The media analysis revealed that out of all the other major research foundations and hospitals of similar size, they had far less negative coverage than their peers during a similar event.

Step 4: Monitor the topic more closely moving forward

Although this instance did not require a response, the communications team now proactively analyzes the topic of executive compensation throughout its industry to ensure that they are not blindsided by any negative stories. Furthermore, they can consistently keep their C-Suite informed about trends in this domain and prove that they are appropriately tailoring their responses to negative stories.

Establishing and acting on a well-defined corporate Purpose was an important trend in 2018 and discussed widely in the communications field. But as former Shell Head of Communications Bjorn Edlund points out in his blog for the Arthur W. Page society called, “Welcome to the Purpose Wars,” some are becoming skeptical of its role in business, dismissing corporate purpose as an empty promise, rather than a source of social good.

As we move into 2019, it’s worth questioning what is the purpose of Purpose and where does it fit into business?

Purpose as a Compass

Edlund advocates Purpose as a leadership mechanism – a tool that guides decision-making and inspires stakeholders. Indeed, employees and consumers increasingly expect their corporations to act on social issues.

In the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, 73% of respondents agreed companies can take actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in which they operate. 76% said CEOs should take the lead on social change rather than waiting for the government to impose it and 67% expect prospective employers to join them in social action.

It’s clear that corporations must have some guiding purpose, mission, or values to live up to these expectations, but how can they ensure they act on their purpose authentically and earn the trust of their stakeholders?

Use Data to Strengthen Purpose

Companies need to develop a system to measure Purpose because as Edlund writes, “you can only manage what you can measure.”

Developing this framework is an important opportunity for communicators as the gatekeepers of brand reputation. If Purpose is a guiding force behind business decisions, communicators have the opportunity to bring valuable data to their CEO and other executive leaders – data that they probably have never seen before.

In order to measure Purpose, break it down into core values or topics and measure the pull-through of these topics in the media. Your values will most likely be nebulous, hard-to-define topics so communicators must make sure their measurement system takes into account the context of an article, not just keywords. This kind of in-depth analysis will yield accurate and actionable insights to be used across the business.

Contextual media analysis will reveal the public perception of your values – which ones you are living up to and perhaps more importantly, which ones you are not. This is valuable information for not only the communications department to focus their efforts, but for leaders across all business units to use when making decisions. Living up to your company’s purpose should be a company-wide goal and the measurement and sharing of data behind Purpose is another way communicators can integrate the business, break down silos, and become strategic partners to the business.

In December, I spoke at the PR News Media Relations Conference about the importance of aligning your media relations KPI’s to the goals of the C-suite. Often in communications analytics, people get bogged down counting keywords – or worse, relying on largely discredited AVE’s.  But basing your media relations strategies on these metrics are misleading and do not show your executives how your team contributes to the goals of the business.

CEO’s and the rest of the C-suite care about outcomes, not outputs. Outcomes are results that move the business forward, while outputs are the tasks media relations pros execute everyday like press releases, pitches, and social media promotion. Outputs are important to your team and necessary to achieve those business outcomes, but your CEO does not need to know the tactics executed to get there. When determining your media relations KPI’s, you should base them on the business outcomes you want to achieve. If your organization’s goal is to be known as an innovator or thought leader in the industry, these goals become the basis of your metrics.

Two important areas that media relations can create business outcomes are message penetration and influencer conversion.

Message Penetration

Amplifying key messages is one of the most important ways communicators can contribute to the reputational goals your C-suite cares about. Measuring which topics are pulling through in your coverage and their sentiment in relation to your brand or position is very important to measure progress on your reputational goals. Knowing which messages resonate with your top tier authors and outlets, as well as how certain messages perform on each social platform is also key to maximize message penetration. Repositioning your brand, changing opinions, or even affecting stock price are business outcomes your CEO will care about that result from increasing positive key message penetration.

Measuring message penetration can also mean identifying gaps in industry coverage, or whitespace opportunities. Industry whitespace is a great opportunity for your brand to establish thought leadership and own a new conversation, again creating a measurable business outcome.

Influencer Conversion

Engaging the right influencers will amplify your messages and lend credibility to your brand. But what makes an influencer right for your brand and how can you identify them?

Understanding an influencer by topic, sentiment, audience, and social reach will help you identify your top influencers for a particular message. It’s not just about the “beat” that they cover. Instead of sending a mass email, target your outreach to influencers who you know have written about your topic favorably in the past. Understanding an author’s social profile and reach will also help you refine your pitch. Do they have more sharing on a specific platform when their stories are positive about a topic or negative? . This will dramatically increase the chances they engage with your message. In fact, a large professional services client successfully and positively engaged 81% of their top 50 influencers with targeted outreach based on researched data points.

Incorporating third-party influencers into your influencer strategy also lends credible, unbiased support to your brand message or position. Third-party influencers like academics, industry experts, and political pundits are important brand allies. Strategic engagement will yield measurable outcomes that your CEO and board truly care about.

Build Credibility with Measurement

Setting your media relations KPI’s based on business outcomes will make your efforts measurable from the start. Use data to optimize your strategies throughout campaigns to achieve the desired outcomes, then use it again to demonstrate the business impact of your efforts to the C-suite. Delivering consistent, measured results will build your credibility and ensure you’re seen as a strategic partner to the business.

Patient experience is the cornerstone of brand reputation and patient loyalty. And with the move to value-based healthcare, it directly affects the bottom line. Acquisition and retention of customers is now everyone’s priority. Healthcare communicators have an important responsibility and opportunity to improve patient experience and strengthen their organization’s mission by listening to patient feedback, particularly on social media.

Social media is a key growth opportunity for healthcare communicators and, most importantly, it’s not just about paid marketing. Patients want to know what other patients are saying about their care, not advertisers. This patient-to-patient trust is especially evident with the rise of online patient communities. At a recent PR News Healthcare Social Media Summit, it was noted that patients now find content provided by healthcare companies more credible than healthcare news reported by the media (2018 Edelman Trust Barometer), putting healthcare companies “in the optimal position of building relationships with their patients, many of whom seek information about their conditions and community through social channels.”

If patients are looking at social media activity before choosing a healthcare provider, how can healthcare communicators turn these posts into insights that they can act on?

Listen, Don’t Monitor

It starts with truly listening to patients on social media. Many social listening tools monitor chatter on social media and are helpful to catch extremely negative or irregular activity to which you might need to respond. But to incorporate patient experience feedback into strategic communication decisions, social media conversation must be consistently analyzed for the topics that are important to your organization.

Social media feedback can be analyzed for a myriad of data that is relevant to improving the patient experience. Posts can be broken down by topics like service lines, geographic areas, specific facilities, employee interactions, quality of care, care environment, and care costs. These topics can be further broken down by subtopics that show which type of employee the patient interacted with, if that interaction was professional, friendly, or knowledgeable, if the patient spoke positively or negatively to the safety and comfort of their care, or about facility appearance, wait times, and operations.

Analysis of these data points (see chart below) allow healthcare communicators to pinpoint any deficiencies or highlights in patient experience, down to the region, facility, or employee type. The data can be used to inform future campaigns and understand the impact of those campaigns over time. This capability is invaluable for large healthcare systems that span several regions or states and need to ensure consistently excellent patient experience across the organization.