When You Can’t Get Your Head Around the Data: Phone a Friend!

One of the best pieces of advice we heard from a brand at the recent PR Week Measurement Conference was, ‘The Data & Insights team is your friend.’

We’ve seen this in action. Working with PR teams eager to use their audience data from earned media coverage to best advantage, we frequently hear comments about not being good at statistics or finding charts hard to interpret. Many PR professionals are anxious when confronted with advanced analytics.  Charts and graphs bring people out in hives. They recognise the need to grasp the insights but need somebody to translate.

Of course, we’re happy to support with this. Sometimes, though, it takes somebody who understands the organisation from the inside.  The Data & Insights team are accustomed to working with other Marketing functions, including advertising and performance marketing. They can interpret the data using the specific language the organisation uses to speak about success. For example, they can explain

• How the insights feed into the way brand tracking metrics are used internally

• How the data supports business KPIs the C-suite cares about

• How the data might fit within econometric modelling, to compare PR outcomes to those delivered by advertising and other promotional activities

• How the insights elaborate the findings of other competitor analysis.

More importantly, they can help PR teams dive into the detail of reading the charts, supporting them to become more fluent in using terminology like ‘X axis’, ‘trends over time’ and ‘index’.  They can explain why it’s important to use independent data sets to look for relationships or what differentiates a genuine statistical correlation, as opposed to two lines on a graph that look as though they’re moving in broadly the same direction.

Insights professionals have learned how to communicate results to avoid over-taxing their internal stakeholders, while making sure that important details are not lost in over-simplification. They love data and are usually delighted to be allowed to interrogate a new type of business intelligence. Their eyes and brains are trained to see patterns and trends at a glance, and they can usually summarise the key outtakes from a slide in a sentence or two.

Next time you’re faced with a media effectiveness report that is harder to digest than the traditional metrics, don’t give up. Learning to speak confidently about data is a skill that PR teams can’t afford to ignore. Building a relationship with the people in your organisation who already do this, day in, day out, shows a willingness to embrace and drive change. It’s also an opportunity to get PR data included in the internal analysis that makes an organisation tick – an imperative for being taken seriously as a function.

If you need support generating or interpreting PR measurement data, drop us a line on hello@metricomm.com or complete the form below.