Warning: the following post will sound a lot like shameless self-promotion. But read it anyway, 'cuz if you're in PR, the concepts below will ultimately change your world.
Last week, my firm unveiled the fruits of a 2-year-long effort to FINALLY allow marketers to show the revenue impact of each of their marketing programs. Crucially, and I daresay for the first time, this process also measures the impact of PR on lead generation.
As you've seen in previous posts, I think that today's guiding lights of PR Measurement are a whole lotta hooey. The fact is, Ad-Value Equivalency, Share Of Voice, etc., have no meaningful, LONG-TERM impact on the perceived value of PR in the minds of the C-Suite executives who pay our invoices.
The CEO, CFO, and yes, even the wild-n-wacky CMO care about MONEY. They know implicitly that reputation drives REVENUE, which is the only reason they care about reputation in the first place.
It's also the reason so many of today's marketers are being tasked with "metrics." Virtually every other marketing program has been automated in some way or another, and thus can be measured. PR stands alone on the mountaintop, thinking itself unmeasurable - but dammit, being "hard to quantify" does not make our tradecraft unassailable! Sooner or later, for the whole PR industry, if you can't PROVE it, they won't PAY FOR IT.
If a Chief Marketing Officer can point to a graphical analysis of where the company's sales leads come from, tagged and analyzed by respective marketing program, then they can stop the perception that "Marketing is a cost center" and instead have their heretofore "fuzzy-wuzzy" department be viewed as a strategic profit center.
How often in Corporate America do VPs of Sales argue that "Marketing isn't providing enough leads?" and hear the retort, "Marketing is providing hundreds of leads, that Sales won't follow-up on?" which leads to the rejoinder, "That's cuz they're crappy leads to start with!" Oy! What a headache. A miserable conversation that could be quelled if Sales and Marketing were working from the same set of data about lead generation results.
It's relatively easy, in the world of e-marketing, to know that X number of people clicked on a Google AdWord or replied to an e-mail campaign. The clickstream is there to see. But how can PR firms show their revenue value? And how can the value of PR be integrated with the data that comes from more specific datasets that come from electronic campaigns?
That's the secret sauce of the SHIFT LeadSensor.