How do you balance the short-term and long-term effects of publicity on your ROI?

The dilemma between short-term and long-term ROI challenges marketers to balance immediate results with brand growth. Pressure for quick impact often leads to tactical strategies, risking long-term brand perception and loyalty. However, balancing short-term revenue tactics with strategic investments in brand building, retention, and analytics can lead to sustainable growth. Educating stakeholders on long-term benefits and using broad metrics for short and long-term impact assessment can build enduring brands.

I like to think of publicity on its own as a dirty word. Publicity equates to presence or being visible in media and is often driven by stunts. It's not enough to be visible today. A brand who is seen should also be heard. And, a brand being heard needs to have clear purpose. Purpose is conveyed best by using thoughtful public relations (PR) strategies. In my experience, defining objectives for a PR campaign is easiest when working from the outside in...start with the person you want action from and then walk backwards from there. Who are they? What insights do you have? What do you want them to think, feel, do? This will inform your next step, developing meaningful messaging to share. Then you can move on to choosing channels.

Before setting out for publicity, you must have highlight your objectives, identify your expectations as well. Either to focus on lead generation, awareness, conversion, activation etc. Most importantly, the method and metrics to measure your progress is equally important to consider.

Defining one’s audience is also critical. Not every message resonates with everyone. Knowing that and then tailoring your messaging can make a huge difference it doesn’t end there, however. Measure and analyze your results and assess how the campaign might have even better.

There are several components to the idea of gaining publicity for a given organization. It'll depend on how much effort is given to controllable publicity efforts within an organization compared with efforts outside of an organization where there would be less control. One critical aspect of the latter is when publicity messages are published by the media on a given organization, which allows their customers, stakeholders, and the general public to form their own perceptions and opinions. Any objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) on the table should be tailored to an in-house controllable publicity campaign for maximum impact while company performance would be a critical metric for a campaign subjected to public scrutiny.

The first and most easily measured results will be internal publicity practices, such as social media efforts on new products, services, and special events. For example, one metric might be to publish a certain number of tweets each day or regular communication with customers via podcasts and email blasts. As for publicity generated outside an organization, examples would include company-related news published by media organizations and reports of quarterly earnings. Although the public perception of these external publicity events might be unpredictable, the metrics could still be measured based on performance, such as the stock price and new products or services. An added bonus would be the frequency of ongoing media coverage.

Make sure your content matches the tone and style of each platform. Usually it only takes a couple of key tweaks to differentiate each platform style and design, however it often makes a world of difference as to how it is received in each space.

Sharing your story with the right audience at the right time always makes a winning strategy. But how do you make that happen? Defining your target customer with the most detail will improve your market research for finding where they are. Once you know where to meet your audience on their terms, your story sells itself more effectively.

The best campaigns feed multiple channels and compliment each other - a podcast appearance leads to social media posts, which leads to a white paper or other content, which leads to a call to action. Publicity is more of a large scale endeavor that utilizes different aspects of marketing - events, media relations, digital, content, growth, etc. If you build a campaign for one channel or a few, you're missing out on multiple touches and guiding the potential client or follower or partner through an engagement process (funnel).

“The competitor to be feared is the one who is focused more and more on its own results” ~ Henry Ford Keep testing your success to improve with every campaign. Even losing battles offer winning strategies.

You don't need to experiment like this. There are marketing and PR organizations - PRSA, CMIA, etc. - who have developed best practices, programs, tools, and technologies that you can use to optimize your strategy before you've even started. Rely on your network and trade groups - most of us have done these multiple times and we love sharing information and helping other marketers excel.

The main thing is you do not have to start from scratch. You can research, take courses, join associations, work with mentors, etc. so that your publicity campaign starts strategically and with best practices in place. You'll find the more you use best practices and the more you use experience, the better results you'll receive and the company you work for will be much happier with the outcome. Experimenting is not only not needed, but a waste of time in the information age.