Why is personalization at scale important in public relations, and which of the 8,000 martech platforms will deliver your pitch?
Today, I'm going to talk about the Second Golden Age of Martech (or marketing technology) and how technology can enable personalization at scale. I'll share with you some thoughts on personalization at scale from McKinsey, as well as discuss Muck Rack, one of the 8,000 martech platforms we have today. We all want to offer personalized information to our customers and the media, but the real challenge is how do we do that to more than one person at a time? The answer is technology.
Before this all sounds too complicated, the reason I'm sharing about what technology writer Scott Brinker calls the "Second Golden Age of Martech," which is driven by three trends (ecosystems, experts, and engineers), is that public relations is no longer just about general relations as I have posited in our SPEAK|pr methodology. Personalization has three broad categories: internal, partners, and external or audiences. Within these audiences, there are, again, individual preferences. Consumers and businesses, in fact all people, have got a choice of what they listen to, what they watch, and what they read, because our devices give us ultimate freedom to decide what we receive and when we receive it.
Three trends driving the Second Golden Age of Martech
When I grew up, we had one TV and only three channels, yet we still watched TV regardless of what was on, just to sit in front of the television. My daughters, Amity and Halo, if they don't like what's on the TV, they go on their iPads and watch whatever they want to on Netflix, Apple TV, TikTok, or YouTube. The attention of our consumers, partners, and our staff is no longer captive within the same channels as it used to be. This is why the challenge has been personalization, but at scale. It used to be that we all got the same information at scale through traditional broadcast, print, radio, TV, signboards, but now, that's not the case. So, in order to have a business that is talking to more than one person at a time, our challenge as business owners is to develop messages that are appropriate, appealing, and compelling to many people simultaneously. This is what we call customer journeys.
Customer journeys apply to individuals and organizations, and in PR terms, they also apply to journalists. That means we have people that already understand our company and may be about to do business with us. There may be those who are unaware of us, and they need a different level of information about our company. Mapping out what this customer journey is a central part of public relations and any sales campaign. When you think about it, there are many parallels between the sales campaign that one would have for consumers or businesses, if you're in B2B, and what we need to sell to the media, which is why our stories and our companies should be compelling enough that journalists would want to invest their time and take the effort to learn, write, and publish or post information about our company to their communities.
In a 2018 McKinsey report, the authors, Julien Boudet and Kai Vollhardt, talked about the central role of data. They said that personalization at scale, whilst it sounds intimidating, is easier than many marketers think, but we have to start with data, and this also applies to public relations. People often turn to agencies, because they believe journalists will already have a relationship with the agency. They may well do, but the dynamism now in the journalism field around the world has changed. The importance now of influencers, not specifically journalists, has meant that it's a more fragmented and challenging role. Therefore, we need to look at how we can get the messaging to be relevant to our individual audiences by looking at the data that we create.
The McKinsey report focused on big companies and talked about a customer data platform with a 360-degree view of the consumer, partner, or any audience group. That's fantastic, but most of us don't have the bandwidth nor the capacity to create such a complex system. So, we can start with some relatively simple information. When we're thinking of performing media outreach for clients, as we look at the digital footprint that the media, the journalist, or the influencer has, these people are publishing often at scale and volume. From there, we can find out what they're writing about and identify any patterns. Before doing a media interview with a client, read the articles that that journalist has written before, so you can get into alignment between what that journalist is writing and thinking, their skill levels, and the client's desire to communicate their message.
Journalists are constantly sharing information about what they're interested in through what they publish. This creates a trigger for the media relations work. There are trigger events when journalists do things at a particular press center or when they publish a certain story, and those can be tracked, creating opportunities to reach out to them with our own specific and relevant content. A report by Blue Shift on consumer marketing found that triggers are 497% more effective than batch emails, which are the ones we send without any particular trigger or event. They also found that mobile push triggers are 1,490% more effective than batch push notifications. In other words, if I bought something and then I get an SMS saying, "You've purchased this item. You may want this," it's going to have a much greater impact than a generic SMS. In marketing, one thing we can look at is these trigger moments, so we can start to track where these individuals are at in their journey. If it's a journalist, we'll be able to see what they've done and what they're interested in, and then we can share with them what we think is going to be interesting information to them.
Personalization at scale requires agility in the organization across functional teams. It's for companies and clients to recognize who's going to be the best person to recognize those triggers and understand what the media or the potential partners are interested in. Many clients treat their agency as a distribution service, possibly to help with content creation, but they don't think of their agency as an integrated part of the team which, as I shared how marketers are often young and in their 30s and are selling to people in their 60s and 70s, it creates disparity between the people delivering the message and the people receiving it.
One solution to that is for companies and people contracting, either internal or external, to allow an understanding of which people in the team or organization are closest to the trigger events that they can raise an alarm or create action. Let's say you have people in the organization that are interested in sporting activities. Why not let those people be the internal alarm system for opportunities to promote the company at upcoming sports events? The next question is, how do we do this at scale? Well, in my technology applications directory for public relations, I've listed over 100, and these are available here. The 2019 edition of Scott Brinker's Marketing Technology Landscape lists 7,000 marketing technology solutions. In 2020, this list apparently grew by 13.6% to 8,000 martech solutions. That's everything from PR, sales, management, CRM, online support, and so on. In other words, there is a solution for pretty much every problem you're facing. The challenge is finding the right one.
Scott Brinker's 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape with over 8,000 martech platforms
Clearly, technology, data, and the analytics are important. The companies that just go to martech on its own, however, will find as I have when I worked with a company on outsourcing some of my back office administration that I was being asked to change my business system to fit their martech solutions. In the end, I said I didn't want to do that. I had my own workflow and business process. I'll find the solution that meets my own work processes.
One company in America actually claims to help with the personalization at scale for journalist relationships. It's a company called Muck Rack, and they have what they call a public relations management platform. Companies like Muck Rack, Cision, Prezly, and Prowly are helping us as entrepreneurs access a vast amount of information; in their case, 10,000 journalists, which we, otherwise, could never collate on our own. In the case of Muck Rack, the journalists themselves showcase their pitching preferences right on their portfolios. They basically say what kind of stories they're interested in and how to pitch to them. If journalists as we see at Muck Rack are actually giving their personal preferences in order to save themselves time and receive impactful stories, then our job of creating the content for these journalists has become so much easier.
Muck Rack claims to be the only media database that offers journalists the ability to control their own public profile. Certainly, some of the other ones I've looked at like Telum Media and Cision are research-based, while Prowly finds journalists' contact details by searching the web with AI and bringing back social media profiles. For 10 years, Muck Rack has allowed journalists to state their preferences, such as what time of day they would like to be pitched at, whether they would like to respond typically to a pitch or they don't, how long they'd like the pitch to be in terms of word count, etc. There are some tools there as well that enable you to share that information with your team, which is great, especially with collaboration being essential. You can work from a unified platform, and you can also store your own data and then share them.
With Muck Rack, you can send and schedule personalized pitches by customizing the email content for each person, tracking who's engaged, and managing the follow up. You can create batches for journalists that are profiled both by interest and by style of approach. This is personalization at scale that is the holy grail now in consumer marketing. In public relations, as we have more and more dispersed and fragmented media or unofficial media like influencers, bloggers, and so on, it's impossible to have a relationship with them all, unlike before when we had a limited number of media with a lot of time and the old PR long lunch, which is legendary. There isn't even time for an espresso anymore.
With this Second Golden Age of Martech, as Scott Brinker calls it, where there are ecosystems, experts, and citizen engineers, I'd like to add the fourth element. That is entrepreneurs, because ecosystems, experts, and engineers don't have anything to say on their own. They're waiting for the content that entrepreneurs can share, and it's the content that's key. It's the stories, as I've mentioned, like the model for storification with Park Howell. It's the entrepreneurs' stories that ultimately are the fuel for the martech engines. Personalization at scale is something that we can all do as entrepreneurs and small business owners by using the technology which is in abundance today. If I can help in any way to help you select, shortlist, or interview people that you find interesting, I would love to help to you do that. You can send me on [email protected].
This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.
Cover Photo from Digital Ready