The D Factor
The Intersection of Data, Planning, and Measurement.
Data, measurement and reporting. Three words that an outsider looking in wouldn’t typically associate with Public Relations. Increasingly, data is becoming a key partner in driving results and awareness, as well as telling a compelling story and creating cut-through for a business.
Our PR Account Director, Amanda Francis, attended PRmoment’s “The Intersection of Data, Planning, and Measurement” conference, to enhance her own knowledge of how data can help drive strategic decisions in public relations and gain results. Let’s see what she took away from the day.
The power of data
The power of data-driven storytelling was a prominent theme. Two speakers gave the brilliant example of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s success being down to the AI character Data as omnipresent in each episode’s narrative; driving the storytelling and helping make the series the smash hit it became. When protagonist Jean-Luc Picard ventured out alone in the ‘Star Trek: Picard’ series, it was arguably a commercial flop. Why? Because it was missing Data. This analogy applies when telling a story through any channel. Data is the very foundation for creating compelling narratives, and PRs hold the key to achieving this through our ability to translate complex data into simple, relatable narratives.
The secret is identifying the human aspect and emotional connection to make the story engaging, understandable and most importantly, relatable – it’s all about finding the proof points to drive it. By analyzing audience behavior, trends or market conditions, data has the power to offer insight into potential client behavior and enable PRs to tell stories that engage with their target audience. Yet again, data offers the solution.
When data meets strategy
As all seasoned PRs know, a brand’s campaign goals must be supported by compelling storytelling to achieve results. This is where several different aspects of data can come into play, not just as a supporting act, but in a starring role. Through the precise segmentation of the target audience, PRs can craft stories relevant to specific groups, ensuring messages are tailored and effective. Alongside this, analyzing past campaigns, audience engagement and media coverage are all great ways to enable PRs to make evidence-based decisions which, when coupled with some intuition and market knowledge about how a story may land, is a recipe for success!
Emotion is the driver to achieving engagement – but to understand emotion in a PR story, we need data to help build personalized communication by enhancing the emotive connection between brands and their audience. Through understanding audience preferences, interests, and behaviors, the right messages can be crafted to speak directly to individuals. Data is therefore integral to a brand’s success, beyond PR alone. When integrated with marketing, sales and customer experience, data insights can be leveraged across all aspects of communication to tell the same story in a different way, to multiple audiences at key times.
It was clear from the event that all speakers were aligned on one important message – the marriage of data, strategic planning, and measurement is essential for effective storytelling and the creation of a robust campaign. When data is the backbone of a strategy, campaigns are not only creative but also grounded in evidence and insights. The winning formula for not only impressing clients but achieving success.