The research landscape for PR and media is changing, and I for one am thrilled that data is becoming something we embrace and incorporate at every stage of a project.
I have always been fascinated by data, insight and measurements. While it may have been subconscious, my love for measuring performance started from when I was a young girl. Whether it was in sports or my studies I knew what needed to be done to reach my goals and knew what to do to get there. (Yes, I am insanely goal driven.)
We are becoming more targeted in our approach, in pretty much everything we do, inside and outside our work life, nowadays very little comes down to luck.
You can find out exactly when you will arrive at a location, the top 5 things to do at a holiday destination, how much protein, carbs and fat you need to eat to achieve your fitness goals, your average running pace per mile when you train for your marathon, what restaurants are available to you in the area you live in, what time of the day to tweet to increase your chances of a re-tweet and the list goes on.
The way I see it, data can be the guide to absolutely everything. I guess you can interpret it however you like, but do one thing enough times, evaluate your findings and I am sure you can find a winning formula for pretty much everything.
In work we have gone from making judgment calls to making insight driven decisions. We can showcase the impact of a campaign, pinpoint the most successful points and more importantly understand which area needs to be improved.
We have the luxury of knowing and understanding our target audience, how to engage with them and deliver the campaign in a format they are most likely to interact with.
Data will give you the insight of how your campaign performed, how many read your article, who shared it, who clicked on it, how many clicks converted to enquiries and sales – all of which are incredible tools for evaluating your efforts and how to measure success.
In PR we have always embraced the “who, what, when, where and why” when writing a story. Now we have the same discussion and thought process when planning a campaign.
My top 5 tips of how data can help your campaign.
- Establish what you would like to achieve with your campaign
- Identify your target audience
- Design content which is relevant for your audience
- Position the right messaging through the right distribution channels
- Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate
I for one, have always made data and insight a key point of discussion and I hope this will be a topic that will continue to drive engaging discussions and evolve how we work.
