Far from just another buzzword, actionable insights can bring big results to your PR efforts, whether used to help form a strategy, improve a campaign, or react to events taking place in close to real time – such as a spike in brand mentions.
More and more, PR professionals are relying on data to influence their efforts, from strategies to campaigns to responses to brand mentions. There’s plenty of data to rely on, such as earned media coverage, content performance, links gained, and more. Some organizations may employ data scientists or specialists to interpret this data, but plenty of PR pros are learning to read, understand, and translate this information themselves to better inform the decisions they take.
This means getting actionable insights from data is now a key challenge for anyone working in public relations to ensure everything they do provides the desired results. To do this, you need to understand what you’re looking for, where to find them, and how to use them.
What Are Actionable Insights?
Actionable insights are pieces of data that indicate a clear action to follow to address an issue or maximize an opportunity.
Data is more important than ever, especially in an increasingly digital world, but data on its own isn’t enough. You need to understand the data to know what to do with it. With the right tools, you can measure a range of metrics to help improve your strategies and campaigns. In the PR world, an actionable insight may be related, but not limited, to:
- Improving pitch responses
- Improving content performance
- Identifying a brewing crisis
- Capitalizing on brand mentions
Once you identify a change, such as a gap in your reach, a drop in impressions, or a spike in brand mentions, you want to be able to act on it quickly and effectively.
Turning Data into Actionable Insights
Knowing how to identify actionable insights is the first step to using them effectively. You have to be able to collect and understand the data available to you to make an informed decision about what you should do.
Turning data into actionable insights can be done easily by following these steps:
Step One: Understand Your Goals
To get actionable insights from data, you need to know what you’re working toward. Understanding your business goals, which helps define your team or department’s goals, will help you make sense of the data you collect and what you should do with it.
Take the time to understand the business goals that have been set and what needs to be done to achieve them. You should do the same with your PR team’s goals. This will help you identify what to do when you have the data.
Step Two: Invest in Skills and People
Understanding and interpreting data is a skill. While some tools make it easier, PR pros have to understand what the metrics mean and how they apply to your efforts and the broader business.
Whether you opt to hire someone who has the necessary data analysis skills or upskill your current team, those skills are essential to understanding the performance of any PR efforts and implementing actions to improve your results.
Step Three: Track the Right Metrics
As mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of data you can track, analyze, and act on. This makes tracking the right metrics essential; otherwise, you’ll spend your time on actions that don’t help you achieve your goals.
PR teams need to focus on metrics that prove their efforts are contributing to the business goals identified in step one. Tracking the right metrics ensures everything you do will have an impact on the results that matter to your organization. These can cover:
- Media monitoring metrics (coverage, sentiment, reach, audiences, and more)
- Social listening metrics (brand mentions, engagement, impressions, sentiment, for example)
- Website analytics (such as sessions, users, and conversions, to name a few)
By making sure you track the right metrics, you can spend more time understanding the data and making actions that contribute to improving your PR efforts and achieving the targets and goals that have been set.
Step Four: Analyze the Data
The right data is just one part of the equation. You also need to analyze and understand what it tells you to really make the most of it.
Whichever tool or source of data you use, you need to make sure it’s telling you what you need to know. The totals or current numbers for any given metric can be good for internal reports when used correctly, but on their own mean little. Comparing to a previous period, such as the previous week, month, quarter, or year, will give you a benchmark of what happened previously compared to now.
Think back to what has happened in these respective periods, too. A bigger campaign in the previous period may have a larger influence, so simply seeing lower numbers doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything to worry about.
Analyzing the data you collect means looking at the context as well as the raw information and understanding what it means.
Step Five: Identify the Next Actions
Once you understand your data, you can create actionable insights to address any decreases in the metrics you’re tracking or take advantage of any momentum you've generated.
An actionable insight is clearly and easily identified from the data you have. This makes it simple to carry out the right actions to address what you see.
Here are a few examples PR teams may come across:
- Fewer responses to pitches – Ensure your campaigns are relevant to the journalist(s) you’re pitching to. Focus on the quality of your content and add as much value as possible
- Fewer pitches being sent out – Source a wider list of journalists to pitch campaigns to
- A drop in organic traffic to your website – Check for pages that have seen a drop and refresh the content, ensure relevant keywords are being targeted
- Increase in brand mentions – Study the mentions and conversations to discover the sentiment behind them and engage where appropriate.
These are broad strokes. The data you have may indicate something more specific you can do, but the action should be specific to the data you have to make sure your actions will address those changes.
While the data, and your analysis of it, should indicate the areas you should focus on, you may need to refine your actions over time to get the best results from what you do. This is good practice in general, as the industry changes regularly and you need to keep trying new things to make sure you are reaching the right people and delivering your message in the most effective way. If you don’t see the results you want right away, refocus and try again, doing something different and refining your actions each time to be more detailed, thorough, and specific.
Put a timetable or plan together to carry out those actions with your team, so everyone knows what you’re doing and what the actions involve.
Step Six: Measure the Results
Once you’ve taken action, measure the results carefully to see the impact of what you’ve done. Some actions may result in an immediate change that you can attribute to what you’ve done. Others may take a bit longer to show a change. Make a note of when the action was taken so you can see in your tools what happened from that point.
You want to prove your efforts are benefiting from the actions you take based on the data you have, ultimately proving ROI or reaching a goal set by the business leaders.
Use the Right Tools for Relevant Actionable Insights
Turning data into actionable insights is easier with the right tools so you know exactly what the data is telling you and what you need to do with it.
CisionOne is a great example of a tool that can provide the data you need to carry out an action. It combines features that help you understand the performance and impact of your PR efforts as well as acting on them, such as:
- Media monitoring lets you see brand coverage, showing you the reach of your campaigns and where that coverage is
- Media analytics show the performance of your campaigns, allowing to adapt your approach for future efforts
- Social monitoring ensures you know what conversations are happening and in what context, letting you respond appropriately.
By using some or all of these functions, you can track the right metrics to get accurate data on your PR efforts and complete the actions needed to address or capitalize on whatever the data tells you. You’ll see improved results soon after.
Find out how CisionOne makes it easy to get actionable insights by scheduling a demo with one of our experts.
