5 indicators in PR specialist’s work that cannot be ignored

According to Natalia Stein, the head of the communication agency BMB-Agency, the superficial approach in the work of PR-specialists is encountered quite regularly. “You hire a specialist, and in a day or two he starts fantasizing about creative ideas, even though he does not understand the product, not to mention the competitors,” she says.

Why is this approach so dangerous? How to get the necessary information and for what purposes? How to conduct an analysis of competitors that will really demonstrate all their weak points and save for your business up to €360,000 per year? Let’s look into it with an expert.

The main risk of a superficial approach is the lack of a helicopter view, which allows you to see the whole picture of the market. Bypassing it, PR specialist puts “the time bomb” in his client’s product in advance, solving the problem with the wrong variables.

When I became a pilot, I really liked the process of radio communication with the ground. When you get on a plane, you tell the dispatcher three inputs: who you are, where you are and what are you planning to do. This should be the basis of any communication in the company: “Who are we?”, “At what stage of development are we now?” and “Where do we want to go?”.

I had a case in my practice where a young startup, having hired a specialist for 250,000 rubles, beat a single point for more than six months, setting itself the goal of getting into Techcrunch at any cost.

The founder was completely occupied with the work of the product, transferred all the communicative issues to the superficial PR manager. What is more interesting, the PR specialist coped with the task that he has chosen himself as the most important, but this action did not bring any results for the startup.

Information and reputation audit 

Information and reputation audit is the basis of the work for any PR specialist. It is conducted not only in the cross-section of the client himself, but also his direct and indirect competitors. If we analyze, for example, the sphere of cinemas, we would understand that its indirect competitor (from the point of view of the intended purpose) is a restaurant or an entertainment center, because people go there to spend their free time with pleasure.

To begin with, we write out a list of potential competitors, dividing them into direct and indirect ones. Information on each of them is valuable in and of itself. Although, in general, it gives a clear idea of ​​the entire market.

Furthermore, we open the classic analytics system, which displays all quantitative and qualitative metrics, including the citation of the objects from our analysis. The site is selected according to the geographical parameters of the market: international or domestic. 

Domestic: 

• Medialogy; 

• Scan-Interfax; 

• YouScan; 

• Brand analytics; 

• Babkee; 

• “Katyusha”. 

Foreign – for international analysis: 

• CISION (access to the database of journalists who have useful contacts, as well as the HAR service with requests from journalists as on Pressfeed); 

• Agility PR Solution (access to the database of journalists disposing contacts); 

• MeltWater; 

• Muck Rack and others. 

Foreign systems have annual contracts with an automatic renewal format, if the client agrees.

Presence Format 

Having chosen a platform, we check all the keywords of each competitor through it: brand names, product names, names of speakers, stakeholders and opinion leaders.  The conceptual apparatus of the questions you have to solve is also examined.

The obtained analytical reconnaissance allows us to see how many mentions do the competitors give, what publication formats exist in the public field, what are their favorite media platforms. It also reveals the issue of their citation, coverage and other value indicators; all these factors help us to prepare our media strategy of direct positioning in the particular area.

For example, if we understand that our competitors or specific speakers release more interviews, but completely neglect a format of business advice or opinions, we will use this data for effective positioning and promotion focusing on such materials. 

But there can be a “double-edged sword” in such kind of a situation: probably our competitors do not use this format because of its low popularity on the market. This is the reason why the analytics should contain data for at least a year, and better – for two or three years.

After determining the presence format, we can formulate the first KPIs that we need: the minimum indicators for each of the presence formats in a monthly, quarterly and semi-annual period.

 The coverage 

The next metric to analyze is the coverage. It gives the volume of potential “touches” with the audience that probably will read our material. Based on this data, we form the intensity of media activities. 

For example, we can release ten mentions, as our competitors do, with the same amount of material, but these mentions will be on irrelevant sites, that means we will get the minimal coverage. 

The coverage helps us to identify the most suitable media for placement, which allows us to be seen more often and more actively by our target audiences.

Citation and platforms 

After we have received the data about coverage, the next metric will be citation. It tells about the quality of materials but its assessment is certainly quantitative. 

Depending on how relevant our news item is, how well the facts are worked out: figures, analysis, conclusions, and consideration of the issue from different angles, the citation rate will be clear.

In addition to citation, there is another necessary input that information and reputation audit gives us – these are sites. They form a propriety of presence in those media that are most popular among the desired target audience.

Engagement

There is another important indicator in analytics – the engagement metrics. Standard analytics systems, as a rule, do not show it. But there is a free Mediametrics service that displays in real time all the news most frequently quoted by social network users.

It is one thing to evaluate the coverage and reading frequency of materials in a particular publication in the media, but another thing is to understand how often the target audience shares this material on social networks, reacts with likes / dislikes or comments. 

Thus, the main indicators necessary to form a whole scheme of things are: the number of materials distributed by formats, coverage, involvement, citation, platforms used by the competitors. In addition, in analytics we can see such indicators as geography, that is also very important. 

Without the  above-mentioned work, a PR specialist does not have the right to start working with the media.

Such a detailed immersion in the agenda allows the communications specialist to better understand not only the media activities of competitors, but also understand the simplest basics of the product. 

Based on the results of collecting all the information, we draw up a relevant media plan, in which we indicate the key indicators: 

• number of mentions; 

• number of mentions by separate formats; 

• expected coverage by format; 

• expected overall coverage across all formats; 

• expected citation indicators; 

• expected sites; 

• relevant directions on the market on the issues of newsworthy events (based on the competitors’ experience). 

• If a PR specialist considers the effectiveness of his work according to the above indicators, then the effectiveness for international business is determined in rubles, dollars and euros. Let’s calculate the cost of an error if we neglect the proposed algorithm.

•Of all the evils, let’s choose the least, in the opinion of founders and CEOs, namely the “I can do everything myself!” approach.

• Sometimes the direct interaction between the founder and the journalists/editors pays off, because journalists like to work directly with the source. But when the speaker is blinded by his own greatness and decides to bypass the preparatory stage, the system fails. Sometimes this approach can work and as a result there will be a couple of successful materials in the business or industry media. 

• Or it could be otherwise: one of our clients gave a very detailed interview in one of the high-tech media (let’s not mention clients and editors in vain), and then he or she wondered for a long time why he had ceased to be interesting for the rest of the media representatives for half a year. Although the answer is obvious: everything that could be told has already been told in one huge material. 

• Another client decided to contact a journalist with whom we worked a couple of years ago. He has already changed a working place and is an editor in another edition. And our client was very surprised why his request: “You have written about our competitors, write about us, we are also good” was rejected. I think he was not cut off from the editorial board for a short period of time.

In this case, the losses are directly reputational, which can also be somehow classified as the lost profits.

There is a second way: to hire a specialist from his native, for example, Novosibirsk or even from Moscow. Their work is cheaper, and they speak and understand Russian. The requirements include the knowledge of foreign language not lower than Upper Intermediate. But here’s the problem: no matter how much a specialist improves the language, it is also important to understand the current realities of the media market of a particular country, the mentality and cultural code, to be “in the current flow”.

The isolation of a specialist from local realities postpones his successful communication with international media by three to five months. Further, we will calculate this time in Russian rubles. And the lack of a systematic integrated approach and a clear technical task for a specialist turns all PR activity into shooting sparrows from a cannon. The result is one: a year has passed, and nothing has changed. And such cases happen all the time. 

In rubles, such a year of work costs the company about 2.5 million rubles without taxes, based on the net salary of one specialist with a salary of 200 thousand rubles. 

Not to get up twice, you can simply throw 2.5 million from the balcony, as Pavel Durov did once. But if you conduct a correct analysis of the market and draw up a relevant plan, it is possible, as people say in Europe, to earn this money. 

An unsystematic approach will cost even more if you hire a local international team of three people: a senior manager and two specialists will cost you €15 thousand (or more than 1.5 million rubles) per month. And this is without taxes, which are no less than 50%. 

It usually takes three to six months for a team to “build up”, which is from €45,000 to €90,000 with taxes. And in a year – if you do not take the situation under control – it will already accumulate about € 360 thousand. 

Just think about it: €360,000 is the price to pay for an unsystematic, thoughtless approach based on the “intuition” of a specialist. 

And even our team that connected only specialists with experience, often refuses from certain hypotheses and approaches, because yesterday such a decision was relevant, and today there are new realities, trends and a completely different alignment of forces on the market among competitors.

All in all, on the one hand, they say “if you don’t try, you won’t know.””you will never know unless you try.” And I partially support this approach. But I think, “if you don’t check, you won’t understand”.