PR and Retail Media Trends 2021

PR Retail Media Trends 2021

PR and Retail Media Trends 2021

It’s been a difficult yet transformative year for UK retail as the public were forced to switch to online shopping solutions through multiple lockdowns.

But as restrictions relax, what trends and opportunities should you be planning for?

PR and Retail Media Trends 2021 has expertise from those on the front lines of retail alongside those in PR, comms and research to report on the current state of the sector. It covers the trends that will need to be factored into campaigns for brands looking to recapture and retain the modern post-pandemic consumer as well as how to navigate recovery, both in-person and online.

Read the full report for:

  • The impact of coronavirus on the UK retail sector and the lasting effects of lockdown on consumers
  • Lessons from lockdown and catering to the new ‘empowered’ customer
  • Trends that will shape future retail PR and communications campaigns
  • Tips from those in the retail PR space for connecting with a changed consumer landscape

Fill in the form below to download the report.

Judith Lewis SEO PR webinar

The latest Google update – what PR professionals need to know

Remember when Google used a cute animal like Panda or Penguin to signify that it was changing its algorithm?

Sadly, those gentler days are behind us, but Google still announces a core update around four times a year. These are significant changes that Google makes to its ranking algorithm that affects a large number of indexed web pages.

Knowing when Google announces core updates and what those updates are is important for PR professionals because of the potential impact on the visibility of your website, or your clients’ websites in the search engine.

This was just one of the areas of SEO that search expert Judith Lewis covered in our recent webinar to support the publication of our free SEO best practice guide for PR.

Here’s a summary of some of the questions about SEO and PR that Judith answered:

What is the latest Google core update and what do PRs need to know about it?
“The Google core update focuses a lot on expertise, authority and trust (EAT) which is explained fully in the guide. We also link to the guidelines that Google’s human quality raters use.

It’s a complex area that’s all about how you demonstrate EAT to Google. Google is tweaking those dials and really bumping up the emphasis that it’s placing on demonstrated expertise and authoritativeness, which is finding mentions about you on other sites.

So PR is all about establishing EAT and the latest Google update is actually increasing its valuing of EAT.

There are two more updates coming, so this will change over time. and I’ve seen that clients of mine are fluctuating, they’re going up, they’re going down, it’s like a roller coaster! So right now the algorithm update does still seem to be finding its level balance. I’m seeing more US search results in the UK, so I’m thinking it’s still rolling out, but this core update is really focused on quality.

Later this month is a long announced update to website speed.

Basically if your website is not fast and it does not pass ‘core vitals’, you will lose out to other people who do. So Google will rate you against your competitors in the search results, and you will go down, if competitors websites are faster and more efficient at delivering web experience to people.

‘Core vitals’ is later this month, and then in July we have another core update coming. So, this one was about more about quality, and the next two are going to be about landing page experience, and then more on quality.”

What are the differences between ‘follow’ and ‘no follow links’?
Do ‘no follow links’ in online coverage and do they have any impact on search engine visibility?
‘No follow’ and ‘follow ‘are technical attributions that are put on a link, and it’s a little bit more code techie, but don’t be put off by it, it’s a checkbox in WordPress. So if you’re working with bloggers or influencers, they can select the Checkmark, and that will make all of their links on their blog nofollow.

What does that mean? Well, it tells Google, not to pass any points from the origin page to the destination page.

However, from a human point of view, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a follow or nofollow, it is still a link. And that enables someone to go from where they are to where your clients information, or your information is.

I obviously would prefer a follow link, because it helps with search ranking. But I will accept the follow or nofollow link, because we’re pushing our clients or our company’s information and details out there and so any link is good because it draws the readers back to our websites.

If you don’t get a link in coverage, do citations or mentions of your brand or organisation help with SEO and search visibility?

It does help.

A citation – where there’s no link but a mention – is incredibly important for Google, because the more of those that you get, the more the increase of perception that Google has that there is something important about that company or that organisation going on.

It increases the words around the company and increases the relevance of that company name to those to those pieces of content. What’s happening is Google is seeing the word that is a brand and it recognises the brand usually because it’s usually in a URL or something similar and then it looks at the words around that citation. It looks at these words around the brand and increases the relevance of those words for that brand.

Google is already recalculating what that brand is possibly relevant for now. It doesn’t have as big an impact as when we get a link – a link is, is the key – but it does increase Google’s perceived relevance of those keywords of the brand and how popular the brand is.

Update ‘Vince’, many years ago was all about brand and rewarding brands. So the better that you can establish a brand, the better it is and citations are part of that because not everybody gives you a link.

If everybody gives you a link it looks artificial. If some people don’t then it looks much more natural and Google is more likely to trust it. Therefore if you get a citations with no link, it’s good, and it does help people.

Do shares on social media and closed or private social networks/communities like Facebook Groups or Guild have any impact on SEO or search engine visibility?

I think the problem is that people’s perception of links is that all links help Google rankings, but in my opinion, all links help people – and that’s the most important thing.

In closed ecosystems like Facebook and Guild links don’t necessarily impact on Google’s rankings but when someone is talking a lot about something, and links are being shared a lot, whether they’re shared through Guild, WhatsApp, Facebook or Instagram, they will reach a critical point after which people will start to blog and write about them.

And journalists may pick up on this ambient noise, and publish something with either a nofollow or a follow link.

When that happens, then Google will possibly increase the ranking of that page, because we’re increasing the perceived relevance of that page to that topic. Even though a nofollow link says to not pass any points, it still helps Google contextualise what a target page is about.

If Google was struggling up to that point, and then somebody blogs, even if it’s a nofollow link, then it will instantly help Google understand it better – and that means that it could increase in rankings, simply because Google understands more.

Here’s the video and the Q&A with Judith is from 43:17 seconds.

Want to add SEO to your PR and communications strategy or to get the very latest SEO tips specifically designed for PR practitioners?

Download our free educational SEO best practice guide for PR

Vuelio has the world’s most comprehensive media database, providing up to date contact details and preferences of >1million journalists and content creators. Learn more about this essential tool for successful coverage generation and linkbuilding by requesting a demo

SEO best practice guide for PR

SEO best practice guide for PR

PR and SEO are more connected today than ever.

Modern PR practitioners require much more than a basic understanding of search. Yet there are very few search marketing resources specifically tailored for the PR and communications sector.

And when you Google for SEO advice, how much can you trust that what you find will contain the very latest information about what impacts search rankings?

To help address SEO knowledge gaps among PR professionals, we have published a helpful, bang up-to-date educational resource for the sector.

We asked international search expert Judith Lewis to write a free 60+ page: SEO best practice guide for PR.

Judith explains why this guide is needed: ‘These days, SEO is as much a part of PR as PR is a part of SEO. SEOs and PRs are increasingly overlapping in what they do. All PR professionals can help deliver exceptional SEO by adding a small amount of additional knowledge.

‘This guide was designed to help PR professionals understand the seemingly impenetrable world of SEO. It will help them better reshape and refocus their offerings to not only continue to excel at what they are already doing, but to regain ground lost to SEOs.’

Download the free SEO best practice guide for PR here

Want to learn more about SEO? Do you have questions about how to align SEO to your PR and communications strategy, or do you want to hear about Google’s latest algorithm update? Judith will be on hand to answer your SEO questions in a free webinar.

Learn even more about SEO. Sign up for the ‘SEO best practice for PR’ webinar at 11am BST on 9 June, with Judith Lewis here.

Why is PR and SEO so closely linked, and why produce this SEO guide for PR professionals?

Two of Google’s most important ranking factors are natural extensions of what most PR professionals do on a daily basis: content creation and generating coverage.

In the agency world, search marketing agencies have evolved over time, adding content marketing, social media and creative services, and wrapping this up with what many call ‘Digital PR’.

Digital PR is a tactic focused on generating content and stories that will not only generate coverage online, but build links. These agencies back up that offer with measures to highlight the commercial impact of the coverage and links, such as sales, leads and other valuable and measurable ‘conversions’ for their clients.

As the relative importance of links to SEO has increased over the years, digital PR is a natural extension of Search Marketing or a Digital Marketing agency’s services. But digital PR and content marketing is much closer to traditional PR territory than the more technical elements of SEO or Paid Search Marketing.

As a leading provider of tools and services for multichannel PR, communications and marketing professionals (Vuelio, Pulsar and ResponseSource), we’ve designed this free guide to cover one of the core skills required in many modern PR and communications roles – Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

Who should read the SEO best practice guide for PR?
Developing SEO knowledge and skills is not only important for PR agencies developing a broader range of services for clients, but also for in-house communications teams.

Many companies approach SEO and public relations as separate activities. Either running activities with different teams or working with multiple agencies. For in-house PR professionals, a little knowledge of SEO can go a long way in terms of PR planning, execution and measurement aligning to marketing and digital activity in their business or organisation.

The good news is that it is easier than you might think to combine a PR and an SEO strategy.

The guide is not just an excellent primer on SEO for beginners.

For PR and comms professionals who already have a good handle on SEO, Judith Lewis provides some advanced SEO tips to help you move your knowledge on.

What does the SEO best practice guide for PR cover?
The guide covers:

  • What is SEO?
    Information about search engine rankings, what visibility means in digital PR, and the concept of search ‘demand’.
  • How Google works
    The technical side of search engines, covering spiders, the index and how Google sees expertise, authority and trust.
  • How to build a PR SEO strategy
    The signals search engines look for, the technical bits you need to understand and the important elements for success.
  • Keywords, content and on-page essentials
    Delves more deeply into the kind of research currently possible to understand search demand, how to meet that demand and do it in a way rewarded by search engines.
  • Advanced SEO
    A deeper look at advanced SEO elements that could help the content you are creating stand out in search engines.
  • Link building for PRs and communications professionals
    One of the most popular topics in digital marketing and an area where digital marketers overlap with PR and Comms professionals.

SEO best practice guide for PR’ is free and can be downloaded here.

Learn from Judith Lewis, one of the world’s leading authorities on SEO in this free ‘SEO best practice for PR’ webinar, 11am BST on 9 June. Register here.

Bank in London

Barclays dominates the launch of the Vuelio Banking Comms Index

Today, Vuelio launches the Banking Comms Index as an industry benchmark. Using Vuelio Media Monitoring and Analysis, the Banking Comms Index is a free weekly resource that compares the Share of Voice of the UK’s top retail banks.

Share of Voice has long been used as a key metric in both PR and marketing, with evidence to show that increased Share of Voice, leading to ‘Excess Share of Voice’ – where a brand’s Share of Voice is significantly higher than its market share – can lead to growth.

The Banking Comms Index measures the earned online media coverage of 21 top retail banking brands and selected challenger banks in Britain. The coverage all appears in Tier 1 publications, with a reading list including national news and financial trades.

Barclays has dominated over the last three weeks in top spot, while challengers, including Starling Bank, Monzo and Revolut manage to take a bigger share of voice than more established brands like First Direct and Bank of Scotland.

Updated weekly, the Index will provide an archived comparison, as well as insight into the biggest movers and shakers. The monitoring in Vuelio also allows for further exploration to see how these retail banks compare on key issues in the media, whether that is ESG, financial policy changes or a breaking scandal.

Oliver Grant, senior consultant and financial services specialist at Vuelio, said: ‘We are thrilled to launch the Banking Comms Index that will, week on week, give a snapshot of how these major retail banks are performing in the press. Share of Voice allows brands to benchmark their earned media coverage against the competition in a meaningful way.

‘We will also use our proprietary data to regularly analyse the retail banking sector and see how each organisation tackles the big issues, from the pandemic and Brexit to advances in governance.’

PR survey

PR Survey: Communicating in a pandemic

Lockdowns, tiers, levels and restrictions: 2020 continues to present challenges to the whole of society. And while vaccine approval news is encouraging, the expectation is for the return to life without Covid to still be some time away. 

Comms teams continue to be at the coalface in this crisis, navigating the rule changes and Government announcements on behalf of their organisations, clients and stakeholders.

But what are the biggest challenges and where are there opportunities? How will lessons learned this year affect your strategy next? And how are you proving your success to colleagues and at board level?

Vuelio is delighted to be working with the PRCA on the Communicating in a pandemic survey, giving comms practitioners a chance to answer these questions and benchmark themselves against their peers in real time.

Every question you answer will instantly compare you to your industry colleagues, and once we’ve gathered enough answers you’ll receive a personalised report to help you plan for 2021 and beyond.

See how you compare, click here to take the survey now.

Engagement with healt comms through COVID 19

Engagement with health comms through COVID-19

Engagement with healt comms through COVID 19

 

Throughout COVID-19, every aspect of public health has had to respond and adjust to new responsibilities. Communicators have been thrust into the spotlight, absorbing extraordinary pressure to manage a huge variety of stakeholders while navigating a ceaselessly changing media, policy and care landscape. 

In Engagement with health comms through COVID-19, we analyse how audiences responded to official NHS feeds on social media, how conversations shifted during different stages of the pandemic and the media’s reaction to the developing crisis.

Information and data is presented from Vuelio, ResponseSource and Pulsar to give a complete view of the excellent work carried out by health communicators in a tumultuous 2020.

We also picked up five lessons that you can apply for planning healthcare communications moving forward. We hope you find it useful.

Deliveries in lockdown comms

ParcelHero’s coronavirus comms strategy: turning the front door into the front line

This is a guest post from David Jinks, Head of Public Relations at ParcelHero, on the importance of keeping agile in a fast changing environment.

I could start by spinning you a yarn about how ParcelHero had an emergency comms plan already prepared for the impact of a near biblical plague. The truth is we didn’t and, be honest, you wouldn’t enjoy reading a puff piece as much as hearing the gory details about how we learned from our initial comms mistakes.

ParcelHero is an online parcel price comparison site; effectively, we’re ‘Compare the Meerkat’ for parcels. Simples. Of course, being a home-delivery courier company meant we were one of the first to experience the full impact of the coronavirus.

Key to our media strategy as an e-commerce business is building brand awareness and (here’s where I’ll be kicked out of the Monday PR Club) link building. Old skool releases and pitches are at the heart of this plan. Looking back, our first release on the subject was 27 January: ‘Should shoppers question the safety of Chinese parcels?’. In retrospect, it’s an odd release – partly ramping up the scare to attract journalists and partly downplaying it – because some regular users were already experiencing problems with stock coming in from China. It got good traction but, at the time, it felt like an annoying distraction from my beloved 2020 PR plan, which had been so many weeks in gestation.

I clung grimly to that plan throughout early February, in the blind belief that no story could be bigger than Brexit. It wasn’t until 25 February that I smelled the coffee and tearfully chucked it away. Our release that day on ‘Ten steps to reduce the impact of Covid-19 ‘ was lapped up by an increasingly nervous business press. It had lots of prescient tips but still featured a not-in-front-of-the-children intro that soothingly gushed ‘…many health professionals are saying it is unlikely to have a greater effect than many typical global flu outbreaks’.

Let’s spare my blushes and move into the next stage. Without teaching Grandma to suck eggs, bad news sells and big numbers make big headlines. As the epidemic developed, we forecast on 3 March that e-commerce’s market share would double to 40% ‘if the coronavirus becomes an epidemic in the UK’. That secured us a good splash in the Mail and lots of business press. In a social media double-whammy, Facebook even used the prediction in its LinkedIn presentations. Again though, look at that qualifying ‘if’

Just before lockdown, ParcelHero had been booming, as people shipped food to loved ones in isolation and ordered thousands of hand sanitisers. However, when lockdown started on 23 March, bookings fell off a cliff. Stores were closed and even those with websites had little confidence they could distribute orders safely.

We hit the press, emphasising that couriers were still picking up directly from doorsteps and businesses could stay alive selling solely online. By the second week, ParcelHero was experiencing Christmas-level peak volumes and that’s been the case ever since. ‘The front door becomes the front line’ – our key message that was picked up by many journalists – underscored our efforts to standardise rules to replace signatures as proof of delivery.

Increased bookings led to their own complications, however. 50% of international parcels are flown in the belly-hold of passenger flights and, suddenly, they were all grounded. Customers wanted information. Now. Our carefully laid social media plans were swiftly abandoned as Twitter became a key tool for Customer Services.

Nonetheless, by 15 April, our comms was firmly proactive rather than reactive. We caught the public mood with a release stating: ‘It’s no longer a sin to order non-essentials online’. From then on, the thrust was all about looking forwards.

So, what turned the tide from that dreadful Lockdown Monday to us gaining multiple new links and national coverage in the FT, Express, Sun and Mail? Driving our success was our ability to adapt our message to fast-changing circumstances, even if it meant ditching our existing strategies and entire social channels.

Looking forward, we’ll be taking the lead in issuing advice as regulations and market conditions change. We’re currently focused on encouraging all our business users to ‘lock-in your lockdown wins’.  Who knows, one day, not so far in the future, I may be able to return to Brexit. Now, where did I throw that 2020 plan?

David Jinks was a guest on our recent webinar, Moving from Crisis to Recovery, along with Liz Slee, Head of Media at Enterprise Nation and director at the think tank The Enterprise Trust. Listen to the recording here

Comms leaders recovery

PR and comms leaders prepare for recovery

PR and comms leaders are increasingly focused on recovery in Q2 according to the Vuelio Barometer which analyses themes dominating the public posts of 897 heads of and directors.

The Vuelio Barometer of PR and Comms Leaders shows that ‘Recovery’, which includes the terms ‘return to work’, ‘learn from’ and ‘get back to’ among others, has become more important since the start of lockdown and most recently accounts for nearly two in five (36%) of all online discussions among PR and Communications Leaders. This was up from being the main topic of less than a quarter (23%) of conversations in Q1.

Social media debate among PR and Communications Leaders about ‘Action’, including the terms ‘we’ve decided’, ‘start’ and ‘we need’, in contrast has decreased over the same period. In Q4 2019, two thirds (67%) of all conversations were about action. This fell to less than half (45%) of all social media conversations among PR and Communications Leaders in Q2 2020.

Over the same period, non-COVID-19 topics focusing on the community and outreach – such as Charity, Employee Wellbeing, Green Business and Institutional Trust – declined. Trust fell from accounting for one in seven conversations (14%) in Q4 2019 to just one in 20 (6%) in Q2. Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 dominated, increasing from half (50%) in Q1 to accounting for two thirds (65%) of all social media conversations among PR and communications leaders by 20 May.

Analysing which recent PR campaigns had cut through to grab the attention of industry leaders, the Vuelio Barometer found the most successful was ‘Clap for Carers’ which throughout Q2 accounted for four in five (81%) campaign conversations. In contrast, the Government’s ‘Stay Alert’ campaign was referred to in just one in ten.

Natalie Orringe, chief marketing officer at Vuelio said: ‘Our analysis of the online conversations of PR and Communications leaders reveals since Q1 2020 a shift from debating what action has to be taken to, in Q2, discussing how recovery can be managed. It demonstrates how the industry is turning from responding to the implications of COVID-19 to focus on the proactive, sustainable strategies needed to enable businesses to recover. There can be no doubt COVID-19 has reshaped the industry and continues to account for nearly two thirds of all social media conversation among communication leaders.’

Based on this insight, Vuelio has developed a range of products designed specifically to support organisations as they move from crisis management to proactively managing reputation for recovery. Packages on the Vuelio Recovery Hub include ‘Get up and Grow’ to help small to mid-sized companies kick start their PR programme; ‘Re-start-up’ for mid-sized businesses to maximise the effectiveness of their communications; and ‘The Full Works’ for large, complex organisations that need to accelerate their communications.

Are you caught in the PR software loyalty trap?

We’re creatures of habit, so changing the tools we use to be effective at our jobs seems like a big hassle when we’re under increasing pressure to deliver on a daily basis.

Much like bank accounts, we end up sticking with what we already use even if we know we’d be better off switching.

The benefits of reviewing alternatives to your current PR software provider include getting more value out of your investment, more accurate and reliable data, and saving precious time on day to day tasks.

At Vuelio, we understand how challenging this can be so we do everything we can to make it easy for you to switch to us from your existing media monitoring provider.

Move all your contacts and lists
We work with you to map your existing data into Vuelio wherever possible so you can import your contacts and lists.

For your monitoring, we’ll find ways to improve your brief and keywords to get even better coverage results.

We take the pain out of learning a new platform
It might seem like a challenge to get your team up and running on a new platform, but we’re with you every step of the way with a dedicated implementation consultant and online screenshare session to get you set up and all of your users can hit the ground running.

You can also join our regular online Vuelio Masterclasses for a deep dive into each module.

Help portal and live chat
We provide self-service support with guides and faqs on all parts of Vuelio, plus live chat support when you need an extra helping hand.

Support team
Contact our support team via live chat, phone or email during office hours (Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm) for a swift response.

Vuelio’s research team are on hand to answer any data queries for you, whether you want to double check a detail on a contact or need some extra information, you’ll get a response the same working day.

All Vuelio Political clients are assigned a dedicated policy researcher who specialises in your policy area. They conduct in-depth research and keep you up to date with any news and changes in major policy areas including health, education, environment and transport.

Valuable content:
As well as dedicated support and advice, our clients have access to our full range of valuable content. From thought leadership pieces to best practice advice, we’ll keep you on top of your game:

Daily Covid-19 briefing
Monday PR club
PR Pulse
Media Bulletin – journalist moves and media news
• Regular journalist and influencer interviews and pitching tips
Point of Order Newsletter
White papers
Webinars
Events (virtual and, hopefully soon, live)
Yoga every week

Ready to check out how we can help you deliver on your comms strategy effectively? Get in touch for a demo.

Navigating uncertainty

Navigating uncertainty: the Vuelio toolkit for communicators

PR and comms are playing a critical role in delivering information during the COVID-19 outbreak.

From creating and maintaining consistent messaging, which aligns with brand values, to getting used to new working arrangements, teams are stretched and still expected to provide value to all their stakeholders, both internally and externally.

On top of all this, each organisation must keep up with the latest Government guidelines, which are evolving daily.

Navigating uncertainty: The Vuelio toolkit for communicators has been created to support the industry in these challenging times.

The toolkit includes stats and information on the coronavirus outbreak, including its impact on the media landscape, linked resources to help with everything from virtual events and networking to staying focused while working at home, and it also includes our top 10 lessons to keep your comms effective in a crisis.

It also includes links to our COVID-19 daily bulletin and our next yoga session on Thursday, which will hosted virtually. We hope you can join us there.

Download the toolkit and find out more about how Vuelio can support you.

 

collaboration

Tips for using Vuelio to collaborate effectively

Whether your team is in one place or remote working in different locations, Vuelio can help you keep on top of your comms activity and maintain a consistent message.

Here are our top tips:

Create an Issue to keep track of activity around a topic

Keep your messaging consistent by using the SRM’s Issues module, which has lines to take and briefing tools. You can link all of your media enquiries, releases and coverage to help you see exactly what’s going on around a particular topic and who everyone is speaking to about it.

Communicate with stakeholders

Use the built-in email distribution tool to keep your stakeholders and the media up to date.

Create groups in your Vuelio Media Database or add private contacts and send them emails directly. You’ll then be able to see who you’ve engaged using the email distribution report as well as on each contact’s profile.

Keep track of who is talking to whom

Use the module in SRM to keep track of inbound media enquiries and outbound comms. This will help everyone organise and avoid duplicating efforts with media and influencer outreach.

You can link Interactions to contacts, subjects and releases, assign to a colleague and create follow-up tasks to help manage your team’s workflow effectively.

Automated tagging of coverage

We can automatically tag your monitoring content, making it simple to report on coverage by emerging topics, keywords, brands or competitors.

ResponseSource Journalist Enquiries

While you’re managing new ways of working, the ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry service continues to be a source of great PR opportunities for your organisation. Requests come to you by email allowing you to react to relevant requests, including lots of non-coronavirus content being sought by the media right now, and expand your network.

Measurement and reporting

3 tips to improve your PR measurement and reporting

As part of Vuelio’s Customer Voice series, we host regular focus groups to hear from our clients, track the latest sector trends and make sure we’re delivering what the industry needs.

Our most recent session focused on measurement and reporting, and the impact of PR campaigns on your organisation’s goals. A few clear challenges came out of the discussions along with practical advice to improve best practice.

1. Coverage quality vs coverage quantity
Reach is a common way of reporting on the potential number of people who could have seen your coverage. While reach figures look impressive to the board, on their own they provide little indication of the quality of coverage. For example, while the BBC might have a reach of 500 million, this doesn’t reflect how many of your target audience your coverage actually reached.

Providing context to the success of PR activity is a real challenge. Part of the problem is educating the board how a piece of coverage from an online influencer can be just as impactful as a piece in a national newspaper. The reach figure maybe vastly different but the reach of an influencer/blogger is much more targeted.

Pivoting from quantitative to qualitative reporting means moving away from numbers such as reach and circulation.

2. (Un)Integrated measurement
While PR teams are working closer with marketing and social media teams, when it comes to planning integrated campaigns they are all still reporting separately.

One option is to align PR KPIs with the marketing funnel to demonstrate that what they do helps fill up the top of the funnel and provides marketing with an engaged audience. Another option is to create KPIs together with all related departments to ensure you’re reporting on the same tactics in the same way.

3. Frameworks? Give us practical advice!
The approaches our group took to reporting were similar and everyone had a real appetite for practical best practice advice on measurement and reporting. With all the talk of how to tackle the challenge of evaluating PR in a meaningful way, there appears to be a knowledge gap between those leading the measurement conversation and those on the ground looking for credible methods to demonstrate how PR impacts on organisational goals.

This means if you’re involved in measurement in your organisation or in the wider industry, you need to do more to bring your colleagues, who are often at the coalface, into the conversation. It’s something we’re focusing on at Vuelio and we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can all improve this process. Get in touch and let us know.

Are you a Vuelio client? We’d love to hear from you – get involved in our Customer Voice series.

The Creative Shootout 2020 finalists

Finalists announced for The Creative Shootout 2020

Eight agencies have made it through to the live final of The Creative Shootout 2020 on Thursday 23 January, which will be held at Picturehouse Central.

The eight finalists were chosen by a high-profile judging panel after they had all submitted their 60-second content. The finalists will take to the stage to show off their creative clout for a cause that needs bold solutions: homelessness. This year The Creative Shootout’s charity of the year is Crisis, who will provide the all-important brief on the day, which the agencies will use to create their 10-minute live pitch in the hopes of taking home the top prize.

The eight PR and marketing agencies who have made the final cover a range of disciplines:

  • Alpaca Communications – PR agency
  • Epoch Design – Design consultancy
  • Fever – PR, social and influencer agency
  • FleishmanHillard Fishburn – Communications agency
  • Grayling – Integrated communications agency
  • Haygarth – Brand engagement agency
  • TracyLocke – Advertising agency
  • Wavemaker – Media agency

To enter The Creative Shootout, these agencies had to submit a 60-second piece of content to demonstrate their creativity.  The entry format was open and not restricted to a specific type of content.

Creative Shootout founder Johnny Pitt said: ‘With entries ranging from ads to vinyl records, to films and bespoke board games, the entry creativity was jaw-dropping this year. The Shootout exists to showcase the extraordinary talent and thinking in our industry, whilst giving back – and year five looks set to be a blockbuster of a live final.’

At the live final, the finalists will draw straws to determine the running order with each agency having just 10 minutes to pitch their idea to the judges and a live audience of 350. The winning agency is crowned on stage and will get to work with Crisis to see their idea come to life, aided by a £10,000 prize fund – as last year’s winner Wire did with A Plastic Planet.

Matt Downie, director of policy & external affairs at Crisis said: ‘Ending homelessness will require brave people and brave thinking. The Creative Shootout is about just that, and everyone at Crisis is looking forward to seeing what happens in January.’

Vuelio is proud to sponsor The Creative Shootout for the third year in a row and we are looking forward to seeing the creative ideas from all the finalists.

The 2020 judging panel includes:

  • Victoria Buchanan, executive creative director, Tribal Worldwide
  • Kate Davies, head of brand, Guardian News and Media
  • Matt Downie, MBE, director of policy and external affairs, Crisis
  • Nils Leonard, founder, Uncommon Creative Studio
  • Elspeth Lynn, executive creative director, Geometry
  • Johnny Pitt, founder, The Creative Shootout
  • Laurent Simon, chief creative officer, VMLY&R
  • Gary Wheeldon, co-founder, Talker Tailor Trouble Maker
  • Ann Wixley, executive creative director, Wavemaker

Want to attend the live final? Get in touch here.

Measurement

How metrics are helping us prove the value of PR

This is a guest post by Sarah Evans, senior digital strategist at Bottle.

It’s no longer acceptable to say PR has a measurement problem. As an industry we’ve been (fairly) challenged to demonstrate what value our campaigns, our work, that piece of coverage had in real terms. How does that feed into business objectives?

At Bottle, we believe brands grow when their stories flow. To measure the effectiveness of that, we need a blend of short- and long-term metrics. A regular flow of stories being published – audience-first content and coverage, both on and offsite – builds a momentum that cumulatively shifts a larger dial over time that indicates brand growth.

Are your stories flowing?
We still need to keep sight of things like coverage itself, for example: how many pieces, the quality of the sites that are linking, how many unique referring domains link back to your site? These help us keep on top of the momentum and frequency that we’re building. In previous reports, we may have stopped there, however now we know we’re influencing behaviour beyond that initial burst of activity.

Next, we need to look at the immediate impact of that activity. Indicators that our coverage is valuable to its intended audience are things like social shares and comments. If there are any links in the piece, did anyone click on them (and if they did, were they ‘long clicks’ or did they bounce?). If coverage doesn’t have a link, and people like what they see, they’ll have to either Google you or come directly to your website to find out more. Google Analytics (or other website tracking software) can tell you all of this, and more.

How is your content performing? Are people reading and engaging with your content? You can look at this through pages per visit, bounce rate and time on page. Is your content doing the job it set out to do? And what do people do next on the site?

Is your brand growing?
As well as short-term metrics, we also need to balance that by zooming out and understanding how all that activity is laddering up into wider marketing objectives. We may not have sales-led objectives, however a common KPI we look at is site traffic (as a whole, or specifically from channels that we’re most likely to influence with ‘brand building’ activity, like organic search or direct).

These metrics by their nature can take consistent, sustained activity to shift (which is why we set the pace with the shorter-term metrics). Things like the number of people searching for the brand, direct traffic and positions for target keywords, topics and products are all key indicators that your brand is growing in visibility and authority.

Branded searches are a proxy for awareness, and even loyalty if someone already knows who they want to buy from. Direct traffic (although a bit of a messy, catch-all channel) indicates how many people have been to your site before, have you bookmarked, or type your URL in as their destination. A growth in search visibility (or how many times Google has served up your site as an answer to someone’s question) tells us that Google is confident that people will get what they need from your site, in turn driving more organic traffic.

Reporting is empowering
As the boundaries between PR, marketing and SEO activity are merging ever closer, there’s no excuse for PR to shy away from measurement any longer. It’s empowering to demonstrate the value of your work; it unlocks budget, helps us plan the next campaign and sometimes it even makes great case studies. We’ve been influencing these metrics all along, without taking any of the credit. We’re not a direct acquisition channel, but a valid and vital part of the journey. Understanding and articulating the role it plays, both long and short term, is the key to PR’s digital evolution.

Social media tips guest post

5 steps to more creative and effective social media campaigns

This is a guest post by Ellen Morris from Billion Dollar Boy

Effective social media campaigns are all about innovation and creativity, and the more effective your campaigns are, the more successful your business is. Here are five useful steps to create social media campaigns that achieve your business goals.

1. Listen to your social audiences
Listening to your social audiences can give you solutions to numerous problems. Most importantly, it will give you the most accurate insight into what they really want.

Social media campaigns aren’t about pushing as much content as you possibly can for the sake of measuring the effects. They are all about building the right content that will grab the attention of your consumers. This will help you build more engaging content that produces sentiment and real responses.

2. Don’t run away from experts
Consulting experts about how to improve your social media campaign is one of the most efficient ways to make the most out of your efforts. Social media marketers know everything about how this online environment works but, most importantly, how social media users behave.

They can provide extremely valuable insights into specific data that can help you understand how each particular campaign affects not only your business but your existing consumers as well as potential prospects. Take your time to read what they have to say or even talk to them and ask specific questions about how to engage with your audience even more or how to reach a wider audience with the same effort.

Following the experts in your business niche is essential to forming decisions that will help you get ahead of the competition curve and engage with your audience in the right way. This is about seeing a bigger picture and where your company stands on a broader level.

3. Work on your customer experience
A customer’s experience is everything in an online customer-centric environment. Talking to your customers and listening to them is the best way to engage with them. Run a survey and ask for their feedback. Find out what they want from your brand.

The feedback you get is valuable information that will help you determine the next best course of action. This will also help you understand how your target audience feels about your industry in general. When you know their opinion, it will be easier to shape your future social media campaigns based on that data.

4. Take creative steps and think outside the box
Social media is not anything new anymore, and users are fed up with boring, standard social media updates. When creating your campaign, you should think outside the box. Here are a few creative social media tactics that guarantee a certain level of engagement:

  • Create a quiz, test your audience’s knowledge about your brand or a specific product you are pushing, and offer rewards for the best participants
  • Create a ‘tag a friend’ contest and offer giveaways
  • Post ‘behind the scenes’ images and videos to further humanise your brand
  • Take advantage of Facebook’s reactions – for instance, you can start a poll and each reaction represents a different choice

5. Follow the right trends to reinforce your brand message
Showing the right content at the right time is a tricky business as there are many factors that determine which campaigns will excel in different moments in time.

What is popular today may not be popular tomorrow and one mistake could endanger your brand reputation. When putting together an effective social media campaign, think about how your audience responds to different content. Shift your focus to the emotional connection with your audience by presenting the right topics that resonate with their current interests.

5 PR tips from the hotel industry

5 PR tips from the hotel industry

This is a guest post from Frank Marr of AM+A Marketing and Media Relations.

Frank has compiled a list of AM+A’s top tips for creating and putting into action an effective hotel PR and marketing strategy, which the whole PR industry can benefit from. From adopting an integrated approach to channelling your inner journalist, every successful PR and marketing campaign should consider these five steps.

1. Regularly update creative strategies
The media, PR and marketing industries are extremely fluid. Regular creative brainstorms are useful for keeping your brand on trend. Launching a hotel or product is easy, keeping it in the press is not. Creating a major annual event or unique promotion will help maintain exposure. Big events should also be supplemented with smaller, tactical ideas. This is a fine line to tread. You want to keep your brand in the media and engaged with customers without bombarding journalists/ audiences to the point of apathy.

2. An organised integrated PR & digital approach
The key to any successful PR campaign is organisation. It’s true that we must react to news and trends as they emerge, but the best campaigns involve a proactive 12 to 18 month plan incorporating key dates throughout the year from national days to major holidays. Creating smaller, six-month plans allows you to regularly catch long lead media and consistently keep your hotel in the news.

3. Build a network of influencers
As social media continues to hold its position, the importance of building a high-quality influencer network cannot be overstated. According to Havas Group’s Meaningful Brands 2019 report, 81% of brands sold across Europe could disappear and consumers would not care. Building a trustworthy brand is therefore vital for engaging consumers. Create a rapport with your influencers, bring them back time and time again and utilise their contacts to create an even greater reach for your brand.

Influencer marketing is still a murky area but there are a few pointers to help you get ahead: to ensure you make the most out of the relationship include looking for an engagement rate of 4% – 6% on posts; define expectations beforehand to ensure they are met; and aim to state what you want before working with them, so if you want 10 photos, ask for 10 photos.

It’s important to research your influencers and ensure they’re a good fit for your target audience to produce content that maximises your assets.

4. Think like a journalist and blogger

To generate publicity for your brand, try to understand what appeals to journalists and online audiences – and what doesn’t. By thinking like a journalist, you can tailor your campaign and present your assets in a way that is far more likely to be picked up. To be able to think like a journalist or your audiences, you should be constantly monitoring media not just within your industry, but a wide variety. Devour the media, find the angles behind features and learn to spot current trends, journalists love anything new and anything that taps into their calendars. Winning the media over is vital to a successful marketing campaign.

5. Maximise your assets and production
Even if you use all of these tactics and create an innovative, well-structured campaign, you cannot succeed if you don’t have the assets in place to maximise your product. Stay on brand and build up a vault of high-quality images, videos, blog posts, graphics, animations, infographics and articles while ensuring any logos and branding materials are designed to the highest standard. This should be your starting point for any successful campaign.

Looking to make new relationships? Monitor the press? Prove and report on your success? You need Vuelio

PRCA

PRCA announces five new fellows

The Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) has announced today that they have appointed five new Fellows. Congratulations to everyone, we look forward to seeing your ideas for the PR industry in action.

Joining the esteemed list are Paul Bristow FPRCA, managing director, PB Consulting; Mark Glover FPRCA, chief executive, Newington; Richard Millar FPRCA, global president, H+K Strategies; Warwick Smith FPRCA, managing partner, Instinctif Partners; Donna Zurcher FPRCA, former managing partner, Instinctif Partners.

Three of the newly appointed Fellows (Paul Bristow, Mark Glover and Warwick Smith) have all been recognised for the work they have done to integrate the PRCA and APPC into the Public Affairs Board. Bristow says, ‘I’m proud to have worked as a public affairs practitioner and to have played my part in creating the Public Affairs Board.’

Glover praised the PRCA describing it as, ‘the pre-eminent organisation for representing the interests of public affairs practitioners’ and Smith echoed these comments stating, ‘It is humbling to be recognised by the industry which has given me so much satisfaction over the years’.

Both Richard Millar and Donna Zurcher have been recognised as an outgoing member of the PRCA Board of Management. Millar says, ‘Working on the PRCA Board of Management has been very rewarding and I look forward to further working for the good of the industry as a member of the PRCA Fellows’ and Zurcher heartily agrees saying, ‘I am absolutely delighted to have been selected. It is a great honour’.

David Gallagher FPRCA, President, Growth and Development, International, Omnicom Public Relations Group, and Chairman, PRCA Fellows, said: ‘The Fellows have become an essential sounding board for the PRCA and the 2019 class join at an especially exciting time for the association and discipline. Congratulations and welcome.’

On behalf of everyone at Vuelio congratulations to the newly appointed Fellows, we look forward to seeing your ideas for the PR industry in action!

Amec 2019

AMEC Global Summit 2019: Data, algorithms and analytics

In its eleventh year, the Amec Global summit last week in Prague was focussed on data, algorithms and analytics. Panels discussed the future of measurement and the need to link PR and communications to audience behaviour. Conversations were inspiring and reminded the team there from Vuelio of the importance for ongoing development in media measurement.

A core theme of the presentations and workshops across the two days was audience. As the media landscape changes to reflect the dynamics of consumer behaviour, measurement and analysis must do the same. We need models that are flexible so that we can measure what matters to the business.

Fundamentally, this means that rather than working in silos, a more holistic approach is taken to how we consider every aspect of evaluation and how we incorporate data; such as demographic data, internal and external stakeholder surveys and call-to-action engagement. We have to work towards measuring beyond outputs to outcomes of the entire communications input. For too long measurement has concentrated heavily on outputs that do not link to business objectives and don’t provide PR functions with the tools they need to bring to the table which prove the worth of PR.

While media measurement and analysis has certainly come a long way, such as the transition away from AVEs, it is crucial that we continue to develop. In the future, this could mean that evaluation frameworks include:

  • Clever data collection techniques to link influencers to audiences with the goal of linking communications to business objectives
  • Development of algorithms to understand audience behaviour and increase efficiency and accuracy of NLP techniques
  • Continue to use best practice analytics methods, such as the tools and frameworks available from AMEC, to prove the worth and credibility of PR, moving away from vanity metrics.

Find out more about measuring your value with Vuelio

Amec 2019

AMEC Global Summit 2019: Data and measuring the value of communications

The Vuelio team headed off to Prague to join the AMEC Global Summit which, this year, was focused on data and what the acceleration of trends from augmentation to AI mean for the communications industry. Day one included sessions that ranged from the implications of blockchain to how Diageo, Sage and Adobe have transformed their global evaluation frameworks.

There were a huge range of experiences and opinions but there was consensus that far more must be done to improve the sophistication of evaluation. Still, PR and communications professionals, whether agency or in-house, do not invest sufficient time or resource to understand impact. According to the PRCA Census, 26% of the industry admits they do no evaluation.

And this has significant knock-on effect. The industry is unable to prove its worth, unable to provide insights that drive business strategy, which puts budgets at risk and leaves PR the poor relation to all other marketing disciplines. Worse, it directly affects the ability of PR to sustain profile and attract data talent.

The good news is that industry groups are taking steps to help. AMEC recently launched M3, a free-to-use measurement framework that supports PR and communications leads to take their organisations (and clients) along a journey to understand and embed best practice evaluation.

It aligns with our view at Vuelio. Measuring the effectiveness (value) of PR and communications begins with understanding the audience the organisation has to reach and the change sought whether awareness, engagement or product purchase. Only if we think in this way will PR and communications evolve to be considered by its contribution to overall business performance. It is a shift essential to the future of the industry.

Find out more about measuring your value with Vuelio

Cats Protection

How Vuelio helped Cats Protection save time and money

Cats Protection is the UK’s leading feline welfare charity with a nationwide network of over 250 volunteer-run branches, 36 centres and over 100 charity shops that together helps around 200,000 cats and kittens each year.

We spoke to Kate Angel, Media Assistant at Cats Protection, who talked us through the charity’s need for a new solution and explained how Vuelio had saved them time and money. 

Cats Protection’s Media Team promotes the charity throughout the UK and provides PR support for volunteers and other departments. The team sends out a daily Media Update to the network that summarises news stories from print, online and broadcast outlets that have featured Cats Protection or are relevant to the charity in some other way.

The charity uses Vuelio Media Monitoring to source the stories using a list of keywords that is continually reviewed. It also uses Vuelio to send out press releases, for media contact management, evaluation on a monthly basis, and for specific communications campaigns.

The Challenge
Prior to working with Vuelio, Cats Protection used a different supplier that was ‘more expensive and less innovative’. The charity found that it was rarely using the supplier to send out press releases as the method was clunky.

The Solution
Cats Protection got quotes from three suppliers prior to its contract with its previous supplier ending. It was given a demo of Vuelio and shown what it could do – the team was looking for a one-stop-shop, which Vuelio was able to offer. The price was a big factor as well as Canvas, which allows Cats Protection to display its coverage in a modern, visually attractive and user-friendly way. The team is also now able to track the success of press releases and campaigns more effectively.

Benefits and Results
The team now use Vuelio to send out all its press releases and find it helpful to see the tracking of how many have been opened. The contacts and influencer functions are more detailed than the charity’s previous supplier.

The hourly coverage alerts mean the team is able to see coverage when it appears, and the reporting process is much improved with Canvas.

Looking for a one-stop comms software solution to save you time and money? Find out more about Vuelio