I spent my last semester of college working part-time for an architecture firm and was incredibly thankful when the company offered me a full-time job upon graduation. As the communications coordinator, I worked on the marketing team, reporting into the CMO. It kickstarted a trend over the next 16 years where my career has taken me in and out of marketing teams.
I’ve held marketing titles, where I’ve still overseen communications, but also website management, social media, new business, and many other jobs outside the realm of a more “traditional” communications role. I’ve worked at companies with no marketing teams and then I recently wrapped a year-long engagement back in an in-house role overseeing all things communications for a data-driven marketing team, frequently collaborating with revenue marketing and product marketing.
Because of my career bounces, I have always thought of myself as a marketing-leaning communicator. And I know that I excel as a communications executive because I can think like a marketer. Thriving on numbers, marketers are inherently data-driven, which is ironic for me. Math is not my proficiency, and it’s most certainly the reason why I didn’t major in Marketing in college. I only needed to take Statistics to earn my Communications degree (although I’d say that class has served me well!). It’s because my brain can make sense of data. It’s not that complicated, it’s fairly easy to source, and percentages are even easier to work with.
That’s not the only reason why I think communications professionals are better off for being able to think like a marketer. Thinking like a marketer will help you prove the power of communications. Why? Because communicators create impact with words, but marketers prove impact with data.
It sounds like the perfect marriage. Yet all too often, communications and marketing fail to co-exist, which creates unnecessary business silos that lead to disjointed external stories and only leaves marketing with a seat at the table. To reverse the tide, here are my recommendations on how you might bridge the gap between communications and marketing.
Stop relying on meaningless metrics.
I know, it’s a hard one to hear, but it’s the most important step. As a communicator thinking like a marketer, you can make your programs more measurable, but you have to rely on the right metrics.
Remember in my first post where I referenced the “do more with less” mentality? When marketing teams face budget cuts, they immediately look at the line-items that aren’t proving value because they’re spending too much money relative to the customer deal value that’s coming in. When you can prove that what you’re spending is returning tangible business revenue, you create stickiness. PR has always struggled to prove its impact, while marketers, I think, are notoriously rigorous about proving theirs.
I’ve seen far too many “recap decks” that show that PR teams did a lot of stuff. Do you know where those decks go? Not very far. Talking about all of the things that you or your team did proves how you spent your time, but it doesn’t show how your time impacted the business. But a recap deck that shows how the 27 pitches, 2 press releases, 3 bylines, and 4 journalist briefings that also produced a demo or even led to a sales lead? That data is the valuable material you need to demonstrate that PR needs an investment because it works.
So how do you get there?
Start by integrating traditional marketing metrics into your communications strategies (even if it’s not reciprocated)...and embrace the new measures of communications success.
We often design communications programs to build brand awareness – and there’s a ton of debate on how measurable brand awareness even is because PR has always been “impossible” to track. But it wasn’t until I was back in-house, working side-by-side with our digital team, that I was reminded of the beauty of the UTM.
It’s a very specific example, but marketers run everything in UTMs. There's an inordinate amount of time spent creating parent/family campaign architectures and setting up sophisticated tracking systems so that every single click to the website can be sourced and defined as best as possible.
To evolve PR from always being “impossible” to track, I recommend adding UTMs to your press releases so when you syndicate them to the wire, the clicks (however small) are traceable. One thing you may not always think about, especially when moving so quickly pitching, is to also create UTMs for your links shared with journalists. The value in being able to understand who clicked what from where is pretty valuable – and helps you prove that the brand awareness you’re creating is actually driving your audience to your brand.
On that note, I also suggest you find time with your digital team (or dig into Google Analytics yourself) to understand how many non-paid leads your company is earning. Tracking these on a weekly basis helps you add more complexity to your communications impact story, and also helps you understand the opportunity areas to “double tap” on to drive even more leads. For example, if you’re seeing a surge early in the year around planning, it might be a signal to increase planning-related content and programs, or even incorporate similar topics into your external programs. If an audience is coming to you for a topic, it’s likely they’re looking elsewhere too.
When you start taking advantage of data signals like these, you’ll start to realize how much easier it becomes to begin to prove the impact of your communications programs in advancing business growth. And this is going to be critical over the next 12 months as communications becomes more absorbed into marketing. But you’ll have to catch my third post next week to hear more about my predictions for communications this year!
# # #
