How to convince leaders to spend more on PR

Whether you work in-house for a single brand or with a variety of clients at an agency, your budget—along with the budget of every other department—is under constant scrutiny.

If you’re unable to quantify and justify the value of PR, you risk being on the proverbial chopping block when it comes time for your CFO or client to dole out budget dollars.

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Compared to digital marketing metrics, such as click-through rate for an ad or the open rate of an email blast, public relations metrics are more difficult to measure because they are typically not so direct and immediate. For example, a potential customer may see an earned media piece on an influencer’s blog that doesn’t influence them to make a purchasing decision until weeks—or even months—later.

When there is an overabundance of potential metrics on the market—most of which don’t actually help in measuring the value of PR—how do you sort through the noise and determine which will help make your case for a bigger budget?

Metrics that matter

Prior to beginning any PR campaign, you must set measurable goals and objectives.

Think about the overarching goals that matter to your organization as a whole. What activities and (more importantly) results drive this company forward?

Any smart business person will want to know what return on investment they can expect before making a purchasing decision. If an organization is investing in PR, help them to understand what results they will see and how it relates to what matters to the business.

Once you have these goals and metrics in mind, find the most effective ways to track them and deliver the results to your executive team.

Once you have an idea of what to measure and how to go about it, then comes the fun part: finding a way to communicate those results to your CFO in a way that is meaningful.

Be a storyteller

Through every pitch you craft, piece of content you publish and social media post you share, you are painting a picture of your brand’s products or services to potential customers.

Your expertise and skill shouldn’t end there.

Use what you’re good at to help your CFO understand the value of PR. Treat your boss as your audience and find unique ways to demonstrate value and success, just like you would for any other pitch.

Conduct interviews

Interview people across the company, from front-line sales leads to HR representatives, to get anecdotal information on how a PR success helped the department reach their goals.

• Did it translate to increased sales? Remember: Earned media campaign results are not always direct and immediate. Measure sales data over time instead of looking for a sudden spike and dig deeper to determine where that boost came from to track a correlation.
• Did your company receive a higher number of job applications? Perhaps you recently launched a brand awareness campaign to aid in recruitment. Check to see if the HR department has noticed an increase in the quantity or caliber of applicants and if it has led to a recent hire.
• Were you able to effectively overcome a crisis? Unlike the above campaigns, maybe your recent PR efforts have been targeted at reducing the spread of a major brand crisis. In this case, you’d likely be measuring the lack of your brand’s presence in the media. Has there been an uptick in brand sentiment amongst your target audience since your campaign launched?

Show what the increased budget will go towards

When asking for a larger PR budget, it’s not enough to simply showcase that your existing efforts are working.

After all, to someone who’s only looking at the bottom line, if you’re able to effectively do your job with what you already have, why do you need more?

Go one step further and provide information on exactly what you’d be able to do with your increased budget.

Remember that brand crisis we were just talking about? Maybe it’s not going as well as you thought, considering your limited PR resources. Demonstrate to your CFO and other executives how a larger public relations budget would help you to combat negative sentiment and turn the conversation about your company around in your favor.

On the other hand, maybe it’s having to compile all these statistics and stories that is truly limiting your resources. Public relations professionals are doing a lot of tedious and time-consuming tasks that could be automated, such as copying and pasting media clips into a spreadsheet or manually creating charts and graphs for a big budget presentation (hint, hint).

Show your CFO exactly how PR workflow software could help you to save money in the long run by freeing up you and your team to do more high-value work, like brainstorming story ideas, crafting quality content or pitching the media.

Sift through the noise to find data that matters

You know you’re going to need to bring your A-game if you want to get a bigger PR budget.

You have an idea of what metrics you need to measure, how to do so and how to present your findings to your CFO. It can be overwhelming.

Let’s face it, there is an overwhelming amount of data, dashboards and reports out there for PR pros. What you really need is an interface that is simple to understand and makes your reporting quick and actionable, saving your precious time and money.

Jessica Lawlor is the features editor for the Muck Rack blog. A version of this article originally appeared on Muck Rack, a service that enables you to find journalists to pitch, build media lists, get press alerts and create coverage reports with social media data.

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