If you’re using your PR measurement tool to report success and nothing else, you might be missing out on real insights that could help you take your brand to the next level.
When I embarked on my journey at Memo as a Customer Success Manager, I initially thought I’d be working with PR pros and media relations experts. To my surprise and delight, I’ve worked with pros across several other facets of comms and marketing.
Whether you’re looking for opportunities to combine resources (budget) or are just curious, below I outline how I see various teams use readership (unique visitors to an article or coverage) for the betterment of the brand.
PR & Media Relations teams leverage readership for pitching, strategy, and crisis response.
This is perhaps the most obvious use of readership–uncovering how many people are reading about a topic and/or a brand helps PR teams understand what’s drawing attention and what’s not. Not only does this help demonstrate value and success of earned media, it can help backup media strategy, and make decisions easier (and faster) in times of crisis.
Comms Ops, Analytics, & Insights teams analyze readership trends for reporting and strategy planning.
We’ve seen a stark rise in comms operations, insights, and analytics teams, particularly with some of the large brands we work with. Ops, analytics, and insights teams leverage readership to better understand new topics, campaign performance, and reporting. This can be anything from investigating messaging and readership trends in a new market to reflecting on past team performance.
You can read more about what comms insights teams are doing at brands like Walmart and T-Mobile.
Product Comms & Content Marketing teams turn to readership for competitive analysis, messaging, and informing paid campaigns.
So many of my customers track their own success relative to their competition–at a brand level, product level, and sometimes at a campaign level. Understanding who and what is attracting readers at each level can help product comms and marketing teams where they’re clearly winning and where the competition is out-messaging them.
Do you have a better product but readers care more about your competition? Did your campaign absolutely crush the competition? Are you entering a new product category that your competitors already operate in? Readership helps product comms and marketing teams figure out where they need to focus in terms of messaging, outreach, and paid campaigns.
Corporate Comms & Affairs look to readership to understand public interest trends.
Understanding consumer interest helps every corporate communications and corporate affairs team understand where attention sits. This is helpful particularly relative to company initiatives. When teams know what the general population is reading about, they can better figure out how to message around global topics and issues, as well as what’s happening within their own industry or ecosystem.
TL;DR
When budgets are tight, we see more and more brands share resources across departments internally. While Memo is most used by media relations and comms insights teams for measuring impact and media strategy, it’s also used by the likes of product marketing, campaign planners, corporate communications, corporate affairs, and more. Readership helps them with everything from understanding public (and employee) interest to competitive product positioning. Shared resources, means shared insights, means stronger alignment for the brand.