Measuring the business impact of storytelling

When I started my career back in 1994, the tools of the trade were a telephone, a fax machine and my brain. Press releases were printed on paper, sent by fax if deemed time sensitive or ‘stuffed’ into an envelope, franked and posted to arrive 1 or 2 days later.

At the time, measuring the success of what we did was rather draconian. Where did we secure coverage? How much space did we secure? Was it positive? Did we get a picture included and the dreaded Equivalent Advertising Value – measured with a ruler, a calculator and the rate-card of the magazine or newspaper.

Measuring the business impact of what we did was anecdotal at best, yet we knew we were having an impact beyond E of the A of the V.

That was often because of the silo mentality of PR and marketing, but more importantly a lack of what I will call ‘Hansel and Gretel’ tools – the ability to follow the path from a piece of coverage into the sales funnel.

Today, in the digital era, binary is all around us. We just need to have greater access and greater means of interrogation.

Thankfully though EAV is dead. Long dead.

Yet, the real measurement of the business impact of PR or storytelling content is still suffocated. Ok, that may be a bit extreme as an observation, but the point is, good stories or news do provoke responses – they may not be immediate, they may not be direct, but the role we play as communications professionals is beyond coverage, views, reach and more.

Each of those points still has what we call a ‘business impact’ but the depth and breadth of measurement can be more sophisticated and robust than it currently is.

Some of the inertia resides in the silo mentality. “PR” does its thing ‘over there’ to support what we do ‘over here’. It should be: ‘how can the storytellers deliver a greater return on investment and a real tangible impact on our business.’

From Awareness to Consideration to Decision-making, campaign content delivered by “PR” can all be tracked through the sales funnel as long as there is transparency and integration between the various gatekeepers within the business.

We picked up the Masters of Marketing Best Automotive Campaign of the Year last November by demonstrating metrics beyond the Awareness phase so traditionally quoted by ‘PR’. The fact is we can say that we delivered over 200 real leads – from content to the door of a sale.

“PR” departments still remain the comparative poor cousins to their “marketing” colleagues in terms of budgets. I believe some of that is to do with measurement. The latter have a suite of tools in which they can directly measure the impact of turning up the dial on spend in this channel or that.

The fact is we should all look at how we measure the business impact of the storytelling we do. Anecdotal is fine, but proof is demonstrable.

I’ll always be biased but the best content, content that lives beyond the printed or digital media, that gets shared, commented upon on social channels and lives and breathes on a brand’s owned channels is still generated by “PR” storytellers. It is also always the most cost effective. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be properly measured and it’s up to us as comms professionals to take our clients on that journey to help prove the business impact of what we – and they – do.