PR Moment recently published an article asking, “is PR data deficient?” I submitted some comments that weren’t used, but I thought I would build out on that question and examine the art of writing reports for PR purposes. 

I’ve been in tech PR and comms for 26 years, and one of the absolutely essential skills I developed early on was how to interpret data to understand what that meant for forming compelling narratives.

PR Moment asked if PR is data deficient. In my experience, the larger agencies will often have someone dedicated to data, with the associated skills around Excel, GA4, etc., but, certainly, everybody in PR – regardless of seniority – needs to understand the basics of what data tells us and how to craft stories around that.

Research as a coverage generator and sales tool

There are several benefits to conducting research:

• To establish or cement your position as industry experts
• To gain valuable customer or market insights and guide strategy
• To use as a sales tool in the field
• To generate coverage
• To use as social media content

In my experience, the key driver for conducting research is typically to generate media coverage. It’s a short-term tactic but can be repeated annually to build momentum as a market bellwether. 

The research process

During a typical research process, a client or their PR agency will decide upon a topic they would like to explore, and their budget will determine the size of the field and the scope of the questions.

At a basic level, options like Survey Monkey offer PRs templated questions with swift responses. Partnering with a specialist research company is more expensive, but they can assist with questions to help get results that will drive stories. They may also analyse the results and generate a basic report, should that be included in your fee.

If conducting consumer research, you’ll need several hundred, if not thousands, of responses to make the field ‘valid’ and get a viable range of statistics. Multi-territory or regional focusses are great, as they open the possibility for geographical comparisons. You can probably use a smaller field for specialist positions (e.g. 250 UK dentists).

After the results, the PR consultant’s job is to extract the key themes and messages and recommend how to best present those findings. This will typically include a report, social media assets, and a launch press release. Often, results might be given as an exclusive to a publication.

How to conduct valuable customer research

Here’s a step-by-step best practice guide to conducting research, assuming close communication and approval from the client at every stage: 

1) Be clear on objectives: What is the overall narrative that you’d ideally like to present? What are your key messages and how will your questions support them? Who and where is your target audience? What kind of outcomes are you expecting, and are you ready to pivot if data doesn’t support them? It’s also worth thinking about timing. Could you pin your research to a key calendar event so research is ready to come out when the media agenda is most receptive? 

2) Choose your research partner: Will you use a self-service option or partner with a research company? If the latter, brief them clearly on what you aim to achieve so that they can consult you on how to make the most of the survey.

3) Analyse results: What stories emerge once the results are in? Have more than one person look at the data to see if different people spot different trends. Double-check the figures to make sure they’re consistent. If there’s no standout story, what then? Always have a plan B; there’s probably something you can use. 

4) Draft the report: Work with a specialist copywriter and a graphic designer to create the report. Make sure the main points stick out. The report should contain:

• Index
• Executive Summary
• Foreword from a client-side spokesperson specialist (also think about involving a third-party specialist, who may add gravitas for a fee)
• Key data stories – use boxouts to focus on topics and pull out key stats with graph
• Conclusion 
• Call-to-action 
• Credits and methodology 

5) Have a content plan:  How will you present your findings? You’ll have thought about this up front, but now the report is drafted, think about what social assets you can create from the findings and whether you can drip-feed these out to keep that interest coming. Also, remember to revisit the stats whenever relevant to the news agenda.

I would say this, wouldn’t I, but always partner with an expert content consultant, copywriter, and designer to make sure that your report has the full impact it deserves. If you don’t have a specialist content consultant or copywriter, please drop me an email.

To address PR Moment’s original question, is PR data deficient? Here’s what I submitted. I’d be interested to know what you think. 

“I don’t think that PR is data deficient. A great deal of our work relies on surveys and reports as both sales tools and coverage generators. However, the responsibility of leading the data side of PR does tend to fall on someone with a data or content remit. While we definitely need those particular specialisms in every agency, every PR consultant should understand data – for example, survey results usually arrive in Excel – and know how to interpret it. This means understanding the communications purpose of a study, how to choose the scope of audience, how to phrase the questions, how to work with survey companies, and how to spot the trends and stories in the results. And it doesn’t end there; PR pros need to learn how to present that data in an audience-friendly way and work with graphic designers to bring the stories to life.

“In short, no, I don’t believe PR is data deficient, but data skills are valuable and are essential for PRs of all levels.”

The post PR and Data: The Art of Writing Reports appeared first on Eight Moon Media, B2B Technology Copywriters.

Before kicking off any marketing campaign, it’s key to plan. Creating the content and sharing it on social media is the fun part but putting in the hard yards creating a content calendar up front is absolutely core to a successful content marketing strategy.

Let’s look at how to create a comprehensive content calendar.

1)  Set up a Content Calendar Template

I use Excel to create my content calendars. Excel is shareable in Google Docs, meaning the editorial team and other stakeholders can make any edits or comments to the calendar, wherever they are.

Now set up columns according to the content you are set to produce, broken down into:

• Content Production
• Outreach
• Measurement and Reporting

2) Content Production

Let’s look at the content production segment. Per piece of content, this should include:

• Proposed title: You want something catchy here. Experiment with a few titles
• Audience: Who is this aimed at? How will your content help them?
• Personas: If you use audience personas, these will help you get the tone and messaging right for a particular target audience type
• Business objective(s): What are you trying to achieve? Too many marketers publish content without a clear focus on why they are writing it and what action they want readers to take.
• Lead format: What form is this content going to take? E.g. a blog post about some recent research findings supported with an infographic, or a podcast or video
• Keywords: What do you want to rank for or be found with? Do your research. For more, read our post on amazing free tools for copywriters and bloggers
• Landing page: What URL will you use? Have you factored in your keywords here?
• Call-to-action: Be clear on what you want your readers to do, such as ‘Download your free report’ or ‘Get in touch’
• Emotions/Reasons to share: This is really important, why should people care about your content? Make them feel inspired to share by driving an emotion, there’s nothing worse than ambivalence!
• Existing assets: What do you have to hand at the moment that could be revisited, updated or repurposed? What images will you use or source to support this?
• Assets to be created: What needs to be made or curated to support this content? For example, a social card created with Canva?
• Budget: How much will your content cost to create?
• Delivery date: What are the internal deadlines for creation and internal approval?
• Go-live date: When will this content go live? Be sure to look at your website and social media data to understand when your audience is most active. Also, look at the political agenda to check there are no news items that will overshadow interest in your content
• Stakeholders: Who are involved in the process? Are there any external approvals required?

 3) Outreach

Once you’ve established what you want to create, then it’s time to think about where you will share or post the content:

• Influencers: Will you partner with an influencer to co-create an exclusive piece of content? Check out our podcast on influencer relations best practice for more
• Media: Will you send your content as a piece of media content? Or perhaps use it as the basis for further guest blogging content, such as on Medium or LinkedIn Pulse
• Social media: What are your suggested social media posts on each channel? Which channels is this relevant for and what time will you post it (use your audience data)
• Hashtags and emojis: What hashtags will you use in your social media (max two per tweet), and what emojis should feature in your social posts?
• Paid Media: Will you set aside budget to promote your content? (e.g. boosted posts on Facebook, or LinkedIn and Twitter ads)
• Risks: This is one that’s often overlooked: What potential backlash could your content produce? Ask people who are totally detached from the process for their perception of your content and associated social media posts
• Guidelines: Are there any special instructions for social media teams?
• Customer service: If you are promoting a product, make sure your customer service team is aware and staffed accordingly to handle demand?

4) Measurement and Reporting

There is no point doing any content creation if you’re not going to measure its impact and use those insights to continually improve your content. This should include:

• Tracking code: Use a Google tracking code or similar, such as bit.ly, to track behaviour
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): What are you looking to measure and what are the industry benchmarks you should measure against? Think beyond hits and think about inbound enquiries, bounce rates, time-on-site, downloads and more…
• Learnings: What were your takeaways and feedback from your audience? What will you do differently next time?

Did we miss anything? Feel free to leave a comment below or engage with us on Twitter. If your organisation is struggling with its content marketing, or you work for a PR agency and need support to help a client with theirs, please get in touch.

The post How to create a content calendar appeared first on Eight Moon Media, B2B Technology Copywriters.

Engagement rates are on the wane, according to a major study, which may cause a few brands to assess their content strategies, but the supposed phenomenon about “Peak Content” being an interesting theory.

In short, is there now so much stuff on the Internet that we’ve passed the point at which the world’s online content consumers can realistically discover, read/watch/listen and share, thus engagement rates have tailed off as our attention is spread over trillions of pages?

But if the amount of content per brand increased 78% in a single year then surely this point would come: there’s simply too much stuff, and a lot of it is probably rubbish.

The problem with engagement rates

Engagement can be a deceptive metric and sometimes something of a vanity metric, plus with the growth of so-called “dark social” apps such as WhatsApp and Snapchat, perhaps culturally people find it easier to share content privately.

Also add to that concerted efforts by Facebook to diminish organic visibility of Page content while pushing brands to pay for access. This is why Paid Media training is so important.

What I’d want to know is the outcome data:

• Are audiences clicking through?
• How long are they staying?
• Are they answering calls to action and giving the organisation permission to speak to them directly by following it on social, RSS or via email sign-up?
• How long did they watch the video before dropping off?

These to me are among the most important metrics of “engagement”, because I know that individuals have actually consumed the content and perhaps taken an action rather than perhaps retweet without even reading. We’ve all done that.

In short, less is more. Is it time you had a content audit and killed off some old content to help speed up your website (Google loves a speedy-loading site when it decides where to rank them)? Let’s get stick to content marketing best practice and remain relevant, interesting and to-the-point for our time-pressed target audiences.

As my former colleague Stephen Waddington says; “There’s enough crap on the Internet already, don’t add to it.”

If you’re interested in improving your online content, we can help you form a content strategy, and we also provide training on Writing for the Web, and SEO training for PR professionals and agencies.

The post “Peak Content” should act as call-to-arms on content marketing – Make it count appeared first on Eight Moon Media, B2B Technology Copywriters.

Writing for the Web is an art in itself and there are three key reasons for this:

1) Attention spans are shorter than ever

In an era where a great deal of content is consumed on mobile devices, our attention span has now slumped to less than eight seconds, shorter than that of goldfish.

If that stat is true and you’re still reading, you’re doing well!

2) We have a global audience 

Our content – once consigned to print, radio and TV in designated geographies – is visible everywhere by people with a good level of English. Many of them are potential customers or advocates.

3) Search engines

When people use search engines they use plain English, whether it’s text or voice search.

The enemy of all these three is corporate speak. [Continues]

Kill corporate speak

Corporate speak is becoming less and less relevant.

I wrote an article for PR Week as long ago as 2008 appealing for an end to corporate speak. As a former journalist, I’ve been confounded by the ways businesses have found increasingly complex ways to describe what they do, as if using expansive language actually makes them sound more professional.

In earnest, the reverse is true; many organisations sound the same. They’re all global leaders providing a wide range of innovate business solutions and services.

The problem is that when we go online, we don’t search for ‘innovative business solutions provider’, we look for ‘accountancy software’ or similar plain English with a view to answer our query.

Plus corporate speak is just plain dull. Companies should be optimising more of their content around how they solve business problems rather than pushing what they sell.

As marketing legend Seth Godin said; “If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.”

This is what people want. And increasingly, as Google gets more intuitive, the people get what the people want served up to them.

Writing for the Web is an art

There’s more to writing for the Web than just plain English, of course.

There are two audiences to impress: humans and search engines.

How we break up copy to make it easy to read is key as we increasingly scan content to get what we need or want from an article.

You’ll notice that my sentences are short and that the opening, above the fold gambit that people are most likely to read is bulletised as a list. This is to impress the human audience. They get what they need.

To impress the search engine is also key. This means doing the search engine optimisation (SEO) housekeeping to make sure that search engines can read and index your copy, and deem it relevant and significant to potential searching audiences.

Data is key to success

The only way we can understand how our content is performing is through regular data analysis and iteration. Are people reading our content? When are they dropping off and why might that be? What is their click path? Are they sharing our content?

These are all questions we need to answer if we want to succeed.

We run training sessions on Writing for the Web. If your business is struggling to articulate its offering online, then please contact us.

The post Writing for the Web: Plain English has never been so vital appeared first on Eight Moon Media, B2B Technology Copywriters.