PR and marketing software has come a long way in recent years, with the ability to track more metrics, gather more data and generate deeper insights than ever before. PR and marketing teams also have their pick of options when it comes to media monitoring and measurement tools. Yet, these options can feel like both a blessing and a curse. While the ability to track results with more accuracy and specificity is critical to proving value and building strategies, understanding what to track, how to interpret the data and how to apply it can be an overwhelming – and time-consuming – task. And if they’re not using these tools to their full potential, PR and marketing teams are missing out on huge opportunities.
That’s where a PR and marketing technology services partner can help. A good partner will work with you to understand your team’s goals and empower you with the resources to meet them effectively and efficiently. Consider the following three instances, wherein investing in a technology partner can ultimately save time and money (and frustration) while freeing your teams up to focus on proactive PR and marketing efforts.
Consolidated Services
With the wide variety of PR tools available right now, it’s far from uncommon for communications teams within a single organization to use different platforms for various monitoring and measurement functions. But this ‘a la carte’ approach can have hidden costs on your team and the organization:
- Multiple contracts – however small – can add up and lead to a bigger-than-anticipated (or necessary) spend for media monitoring and measurement.
- Disparate software programs that don’t speak to one another can mean different teams are duplicating work, creating inefficiencies.
- With different software programs, there’s no “single source of truth” to ensure accurate and reliable results.
Switching to a single platform that provides multiple services could significantly reduce these costs while creating more efficiency for your team and better results for the business. Be sure to choose a platform that comes equipped with a solid, responsive support team who can guide you and advise on use cases to meet your needs.
Accurate Measurement and Expert Analysis
The struggle to make sense out of metrics and turn them into action and outcomes is real. If you aren’t tracking the right metrics, or measuring the same metrics consistently, you can come up with unreliable results. Even then – even if you have access to “good data” – turning it into meaningful insight that you can act on is outside the area of expertise for many communications teams.
Here again is where an external partner with a comprehensive media measurement approach – one that combines technology with industry expertise – can help. A good partner will work with your teams to understand your goals and set up a program that enables you to derive meaningful results you can make sense of, communicate to leadership and use to inform your strategy moving forward.
Executive-Ready Deliverables
Executive teams are relying more heavily on their PR and communications teams to deliver insight and strategic counsel (as they should). But that entails staying on top of breaking news stories, industry trends, competitive intelligence and social listening – and that’s just for starters. Add to that identifying the most important content to compile into executive-ready deliverables, and even with the variety of self-service tools available to help, most communications teams do not have the bandwidth to take this on.
Outsourcing this task can save your team hours of work, which they can instead devote to absorbing the findings and applying them to communications planning and strategy. Not to mention that a partner with the right expertise and technology will likely find stories that your team may miss when doing it manually.
Bottom line
Technology now enables PR, marketing and communications teams to not only monitor what is being said about their brands, products, industry and competitors, but to use that insight to inform smarter strategies and see better results. But that technology won’t take you far if not used and applied strategically. Look for a technology partner with the tools, technology and expertise to ensure you are applying the right metrics for your goals, analyzing them properly and turning them into actionable results.
