One of the biggest challenges for PR professionals is understanding how their efforts affect consumer behavior. It has been difficult to connect earned media content to behavioral outcomes such as his website visits and activities, ultimately increasing customers, sales and brand advocates.
We now have PR measurement techniques that allow us to do just that.
Onclusive recently took a closer look at global PR measurement data and uncovered surprising insights into the relationship between various media attributes and desired consumer behavior.
Our research explores how predictive characteristics of earned media (publishing authority, brand relevance, brand engagement, sentiment, etc.) influence individual articles to drive brand website traffic and action. I tried to understand
Insights from this research could change the way you approach your job as a PR professional, so let’s take a closer look.
Publication Reputation and Consumer Behavior
A publication’s reputation is the overall authority of a media publication based on its ‘layers’.
The higher the reputation, the more likely the article will rank higher in online search results.
For example, established publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are considered Tier 1 (high reputation), while mediums such as niche content sites and blogs are considered Tier 3 (low reputation). . Tier 2, or publications of moderate reputation, represent something in between.
We found that media outlets with high reputation and media outlets with medium reputation drove roughly the same amount of website traffic, followed by outlets with low reputation. In other words, publication reputation is not a good predictor of the brand’s visits to his website from earned media articles.
Here are some of the things that reputable publications make a big difference: It tends to drive significantly more website action, being 41% higher than publications with medium reputation and 73% higher than publications with low reputation.
In other words, website visits from reputable publications typically translate into more action from your audience.
We believe this indicates a growing consumer confidence, influenced by reputable publications.
How you can use this in your PR strategy:
- Don’t ignore lesser-known media. Niche content sites and blogs can be powerful drivers of website traffic.
- To maximize the amount of action your readers take when they visit your brand’s website, build relationships with leading publications and consistently include them in your targeted media list.
Publication reach and consumer behavior
Publication reach is the total readership or circulation of a media outlet and thus the potential readership of any given article.
For clarity, reach or impressions are not a measure of actual article readership.
Like reputation, publication reach does not correlate strongly with website traffic. The difference in reach between articles that drive website traffic and those that don’t is only 9%.
This is one of the unexpected insights from our analysis. The fact that publication reach is not a strong predictor of website traffic is completely counterintuitive.
However, articles that drive website action have a 25% greater public reach than articles that don’t.
Bottom line: Reach doesn’t predict overall traffic, but articles published on high-reach websites tend to drive more website action once consumers reach a brand’s website .
How you can use this in your PR strategy:
- Even outlets with a small circulation can still generate significant website traffic, so consider including low-reach publications in your target media list.
- At the same time, continue to research which publications related to your industry, brand and competitors have greater reach and publish your story there to increase desired website action from your audience. try
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. Stay tuned for the next installment in our three-part earned media attribution series that drives consumer action. Next week we’ll focus on brand relevance.
This article provides invaluable insight for public relations professionals. We highly appreciate the application of quantitative data measurement that can be used by professionals to increase brand recognition. Onclusive’s findings, including an increase in consumer behavior associated with reputable outlets, show the types of publications publicists should add to their media her list.