Last week, I wrote about an unexpected insight into the relationship between publishing authority (reputation and reach) and consumer behavior.
There are even more surprises in store for you this week as we continue our conversations about connecting earned media content to desired consumer behavior.
What are those consumer behaviors?
These include website visits and activity at the top of the marketing funnel, and new customers, sales, and brand advocates at the bottom of the marketing funnel.
And thanks to modern PR technology, you can now make this connection.
Here at Onclusive, during a recent quantitative analysis of global PR measurement data, we found that certain characteristics of media articles (publisher, brand relevance, brand engagement, sentiment, etc.) and PR-driven website traffic and I tried to understand the relationship with actions. .
Brand relevance appears to be a strong predictor of consumer behavior. or is it? Now let’s look at the data.
Article Brand Relevance and Consumer Behavior
Brand relevance measures how “about” an article is about a particular company or brand, from a single mention to a specific feature.
Based on global data of over 100,000 articles, we found that article relevance to brands correlates only marginally with website traffic.
Articles with moderate relevance get less traffic to your website compared to articles with low relevance. Also, while highly relevant earned media content drives the most website traffic (13% higher than less relevant articles), this figure indicates a weak relationship between relevance and traffic. I’m here.
There is another surprise in the data: article brand relevance is not at all predictive of website behavior, with less relevant articles being slightly (14%) more likely than highly relevant articles. of website behavior is causing:
What does this mean? She believes that a key variable in driving desirable consumer behavior is the quality of the brand’s website itself. This is certainly more important than the relevance of the earned media content that drives these readers to her website.
A website is just as important to the success of any PR initiative as marketing, talent acquisition, investor relations, and other business functions.
How you can use this in your PR strategy:
- Make sure your brand’s website has comprehensive, relevant and fresh content and an effective call to action (CTA).
- A/B test your landing pages, CTAs, and other elements to find out what works best.
- Monitor SEO rankings over time to ensure consistent content quality of your website.
Brand Headlines and Consumer Behavior
Article headline refers to the headline at the top of the article.
So, “include your brand headline” means that your brand name appears in that headline and is immediately noticed by your readers.
Similar to an article’s brand relevance, whether a headline contains a brand name is only a modest predictor of website traffic, with headlines mentioning more than not mentioning them. 16% more traffic.
However, including branded headlines can be effective in influencing website activity. On average, headline mentions tend to drive 27% more actions than no headline mention. This is almost double the website traffic forecast.
How you can use this in your PR strategy:
- As you know, a good headline is extremely important to both the success of your pitch and your first impression on your readers. Continue to create eye-catching headlines (which helps mention your brand if the reporter chooses to do so).
- Don’t focus too much on “featured” articles, as the overall relevance of the article to your brand is only a partial predictor of website traffic impact.
- But always make sure your content is highly relevant to your industry and category. You can benefit as much from being mentioned in this type of article as most are mentioned in an article about you.
A word about our research methodology
Analyzed over 100,000 media articles published worldwide between January 1 and December 31, 2021, representing business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) brands across a wide range of industries A sample was analyzed. Articles in this study included only earned media content published via digital media (excluding social media).
Zack Jenkins is the US General Manager of Onclusive. Need more insight? Stay tuned for the final article in his three-part series on Earned Media Attributes Driving Consumer Behavior. This article reveals the relationship between brand engagement, brand sentiment, and consumer behavior.
