Doing more with less
As marketing falls victim to the global slowdown Terence Lyons examines how PR and PA professionals can step up to the challenge of protecting corporate reputation
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| Lyons: PR can control corporate reputation |
As marketing budgets are cut, PR is picking up a lot of the frontline responsibility to maintain market share and protect corporate reputation.
However the fragmentation of media channels and the increased velocity and volatility of issues in today’s business climate is making it increasingly difficult for communications directors to keep on top of the task.
The risk runs from lower quality and quantity of press coverage relative to competitors, to potentially catastrophic communications and reputational failure.
Today’s business imperative is to equip PR operations with the means to enhance both operational and strategic performance while maintaining a rigorous control over costs. The following data offers both background and solutions to the challenge.
Hard facts about PR budgets
- People: 50% goes to fully paid up headcount, varying from 65 people for the F500 to 2 in the sub $100M category. Yet often less than 30% of time is actually spent delivering your message to key influencers due to inefficient internal processes.
- PR Agencies: 27% goes to agency fees. The typical $6b+ business engages four PR agencies and the sub $100 m works with two. While agencies are most often engaged for “additional arms and legs” the incremental advantage of this ‘virtual’ headcount is often lost due to challenges in integrating agencies, aligning to common methods and reporting frameworks and ensuring a consistent quality of service across markets.
- Activities: 14% goes towards program activities. However many (particularly multi-country) PR operations are hampered by redundancies, non-standard processes, information silos and lack of team orchestration. Press release/newswire services are a good example. While they are the biggest activity budget line item, 69% of PR professionals do not have an updated, online directory of journalist contact details despite the fact 79% of journalists would prefer personalized targeted releases by mail.
- Evaluation: 6% goes to evaluating success, divided between media monitoring and evaluation/measurement. Yet while 78% of PR professionals track company news coverage on a daily basis over 70% of organizations do not have a real time automated solution to do so. Inefficient processes mean PR teams often spend 10 % more time monitoring, measuring and reporting on their PR coverage than actually engaging with the media.
The solutions which exist
Finance has SAP, Sales have CRM and manufacturing have ERP solutions but too often PR has a hodgepodge of Outlook, Rolodex, XLS, Google, home built databases and a galaxy of specialist service providers and agencies that don’t integrate or talk to each other easily. Simply put, it’s a recipe for inefficiency and reduced impact.
State-of-the art Media Engagement Platforms do exist to dramatically enhance both operational and strategic performance. From a centralized platform, every aspect of the PR process can be streamlined, from list building to news distribution and monitoring to measuring results.
Organizations can leverage these innovations to generate dramatic time savings and higher productivity, better internal co-ordination and orchestration and enhance their media relationships for a higher quality and quantity of coverage.
Quite simply they can consistently outperform their less enabled competition in share of media voice, media recommendations and perception of brand value.
How are companies benefiting?
- Faster Strategy: Nokia run a real time media dashboard by product, subject, country and region.
- Optimizing PR budgets: a FMCG company saw a ROI of 150% within 1 year of adoption from hard cost savings.
- Managing agencies better: Visa benchmark their entire European agency network daily.
- Managing crises: Total can immediately reach out to all influencers rapidly in the event of an oil spill.
- Heading off a crisis: Unilever now proactively interacts with influencers of their palm oil strategy following an Orang-utan dressed activist’s invasion into their HQ.
- Protecting brand equity: Microsoft coordinates outreach to a global audience of influencers.
- Allocating resources more efficiently: Nissan track and shift their ‘press car fleet’ stocks by media demand.
- Demonstrating accountability: GE translates PR results into board room ‘speak’
Terence Lyons is an authority on strategic communications management and CSR. He is vice president of Augure in Asia.
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