Public Relation and Growth Marketing

This week I started Messaging Strategy in Public Relation from CXL , I have always been curious about Public Relation. I had many misconception about what Public Relation really is, luckily now I know more about Public Relation but I want to get a deeper dive so kindly recommend books that you read and liked.

What is Public Relation?

Public Relation is not about paid advertisement, Public Relation is Earned Media. It is about Messaging and Positioning, by identifying target audience, Customizing Messaging strategy and media training.

There are two sides of Public Relation. First, Crisis PR which mainly is about controlling negative mentions about your company. Could be anything about your company that increases the negative mentions. The second side of Public Relation is the Positive one. It is about increasing the positive mentions of your company. Now days, due to Social Media, it is quite hard to control your presence as anyone can say anything.

Luckily, there are many tools that you can use to monitor your presence on the web, these tools include different features that you can user to track your mentions. One of the best features offered is the alert, mainly setting an alert for specific words that once mentioned trigger the alert and send a notification.

One other great feature provided is the reports, social monitoring tools gives you the option to create weekly and monthly reports to track specific metric that you choose. One of the metrics could be the SOV which is the share of voice. How frequently your brand is mentioned against your competitors.

Measuring your brand Share of Voice is manual and no tool can provide the Share of Voice yet, so to measure the share of voice easily without getting frustrated:

1- Decide on the competitor that is in your industry.
2- Calculate the mentions of each competitor alongside with your mentions and get the total number of mentions.
3- Calculate your SOV by diving your number of mentions divided by the total mentions of the industry.

Assume that your brand is called X, you compete with Y and Z brands. To calculate the Share of Voice for your brand, track the mentions of your brand along side Y and Z. Let’s say that X got 2,084 mentions, Y got 1820, and Z got 1930.

Now for getting the total number of mentions, get the sum of the three brands:

X+Y+Z=Total Mentions.
2,084+1,820+1,930= 5,834

So the Total mentions of your brand alongside the competitors is 5,834. Now let’s get your brand Share of Voice:

X Share of Voice= X mentions/Total Mentions
2,084/5834=0.35
0.35*100= 35%

Now we know that your Share of Voice is 35%, now do the same for your competitors and get their number. After getting the number you can track the metric month by month to see how you can increase your brand share of voice against your competitor.

Measuring sentiment analysis is one other features that social monitoring tools provides, knowing how many mentions and you got and are they negative or positive will help you control your brand reputation. With the Social Media and anyone saying anything, usually you will be getting negative mentions. It is more about controlling your negative mentions before it is a crisis that will cost you too much to control. I think that no brand get 100% positive mentions, but brands could excel at managing negative comments while others usually ignore.

Search Engine Optimization and Public Relation

How do you think Search Engine Optimization can be beneficial for your Public Relation? Briefly, Search Engine Optimization is about optimizing your website to be visible in the search engine. There are three main parts of SEO. First, On Page SEO. Second, Technical SEO, and third Off Page Optimization.

How do you increase your website ranking? by optimizing the three parts of SEO. How SEO can be beneficial for PR? by increasing your backlink strategy, who is going to write about you? where? what is their website authority? (Getting a mention from website that is low in authority can harm your SEO).

Focusing on who is going to write about your brand is important as it affects your score. It is important to get mentions from brands that is relevant to your website. For instance, assuming that you own a shoe brand that produces running shoes. if you got a mention from a fitness training center that created a blog about best shoes you can train with then it is positive mention. If you got a mention from a website that is about electronics then this is a negative mention.

But how you decide on all of these? Whether to get a backlink from a blog or to appear in a specific interview, or even to create a tv show. The answer is simply by your Consumer Profile.

What is consumer profile? Consumer Profile is about building a persona for your target audience and deciding on their traits. Where they live, how old are they, what they like, what they watch, and much more.

How answering this question could help your brand? Imagine that you own a shoe company that produces a running shoes, so imagine that your main target audience is people who play CrossFit. You went to a Research Company and asked them to create a Consumer Profile for your audience. After getting the result, you found that 64% of people that play CrossFit in a specific location follows a certain Blogger and likes his content. Now what to do? The answer is a collaboration with this Blogger.

What would happen if you didn’t get this information? you would continue on assuming who your audience are and what they like. Usually you will get wrong bloggers, wrong websites, and wrong collaborations. Doesn’t necessarily wrong but in other words not that efficient. Maybe you spent a thousands of dollars to get a specific amount of mentions that if you conducted a research and knew your target audience, you would easily double your numbers.