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The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, iHear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com from advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.
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Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
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Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing. Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast. Benjamin Shapiro welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host Benjamin Shapiro and today we're going to discuss the evolution of pr. Joining me is Jerry Towsley, who is the head of marketing at BusinessWire, which is a global leader in press release, distribution and regulatory disclosure, providing secure and accurate distribution of market moving news. And today Jerry and I are going to discuss PR's role in marketing. But before we get to today's interview, I want to tell you about what I'm listening to. Ever wanted to sit down to a candid conversation with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands? The Current podcast is your chance. On the current podcast you'll find exclusive interviews with the experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising and they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to the current@ww, the current.com or anywhere you get your podcasts today. All right, here's my conversation with Jerry Towsley, the Head of marketing at BusinessWire. So I want to move on to the second topic that we have today where we've been talking about PR's role in marketing and I want to shift now to talking about the landscape of PR tech. So let's play a little game here called Navigation Sensation. Give me the lay of the land. Right? I'm looking at the map. We're at the Disney World of Marketing. Tell me what the lay of the land looks like when it comes to PR tech these days.
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Are we in the Animal kingdom or in the Epcot center right now?
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Total aside, my wife who works for Old Navy is currently at Disney World and I am taking care of our four and seven year old child. So the idea of looking at the map and seeing all the fun things you can do really hits home. And she's out living her best life and I'm cleaning up the dishes she's doing.
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Her navigation sensation is what she's doing.
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She is navigating sensationally.
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Let's talk about the tech stack of pr. You gave a prelude to tracking and analytics. And when I work with a PR agency, I let them know up front, look, I want a dashboard. I want to be able to track our activity and track its impact in our other activities. So there's media monitoring. You want to be able to monitor the media landscape. There's some big names in this area. Meltwater is a big one and they provide analytics as well. So you need to be able to track that. Critical mention is another one. They're big in the PR space. And then there's, you mentioned relationships a little bit ago, which is just so important in the world of pr. A tool like Muckrack is a big name. We have a partnership with Muckrak and that's how you build those relationships. You identify journalists, you do outreach to journalists, you build ongoing relationships. What topics are important to them. You talk about the landscape of pr. That's the landscape of journalism that you can have at your fingertips with a platform like Muckrack. Newswires need to be part of your tool belt of PR as well. And what we ultimately what we sell is distribution in a very, very targeted way. And you need to be able to do that because press releases can be the genesis for the other opportunities within pr. They're not the means to an end themselves. They should be the start of something bigger. So you need the media monitoring and analytics, you need media management, relationship building with journalists. And then you need a newswire like Business Wire to start your news, to plan your news, to get your earnings releases out there to the right audiences and create engagement that can create the opportunities with the other platforms.
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I want to reiterate what you're saying, but I want to reorder it.
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Sure.
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Because I kind of think linearly in terms of the tech stack, where to me the relationship building component is first, understanding who the journalists are, understanding what they're writing about, figuring out who you want to build that relationship with. I've heard of a tool called Just reach out as well for sort of down market for more startup PR where you can find what are podcasters talking about, what are they Interested? Who else did they interview? Like, how do you get in front of the right people and sort of do your pitching? Then you have your news wires and distribution, which is. Okay, I actually have something to say. There's been an announcement. I know who I'm going to share it with. Let's also push it out ourselves. And then the last piece is the media monitoring, where. Okay, I now have relationships with the PR reps and the writers and the podcasters. Hopefully we've pushed out our own message to every place that it can go and now let's figure out how it worked. Is that the right top of funnel, bottom of funnel? When you're thinking about PR outreach, I.
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Would say yes, but they do also come into play at different points. But if you want to think about if you were just starting to build a PR program, understand the landscape, build relationships with journalists, and then move into distributing your news and then monitoring and analytics. Yes, but they can also interject themselves in different ways. And you know, let's be honest, all the platforms have a suite of tools that might come into play at different times, at different depends on the size of your organization and what are the tools that you're looking for. But the short answer is yes, that's probably the top of funnel to the bottom funnel order.
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Yeah. The customer journey is not linear and the PR journey is not linear either. The thing that pops to mind when you say that is, hey, we had our press release. We realized through our monitoring that somebody wrote about the press release or republished it. And now we want to build a relationship with that person. Let's go check out what else they're writing about. And all of a sudden you're using your tools in a different order. But let's move on. I want to ask you an impossible question to answer. Are you ready?
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Sure. Sounds fun.
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I want you to look into your crystal ball and tell me in the future, how is artificial intelligence going to affect PR tech?
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Man, if I knew the exact answers, I'd probably be on a different podcast.
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Just polish the crystal ball, everything will become clear.
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The low hanging fruit is the generative content.
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Right?
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PR is all about content. So whether you're in the agency world, the corporate world, the newswire world, whatever part of the PR world you're in, there's different approaches to the generative. There's very simple things. There's white labeling, there's things built on top of the big tools that are out there. That's part of it. Where? I'll tell you where BusinessWire thinks it's going and what we're focusing on is more on the research and analytics side. There's huge improvements that can be made in PR analytics with the power of AI. No one knows exactly what they are yet. There's different things that are coming, coming to life. Right now we're in the midst of building our own solution that's focused more on the research and analytics piece, the generative content. You can go out, you can use anything you want to generate your own content. Yes, if you know how to format a press release, fine. Or format a story or whatever, that's fine. But how can you know what's going to reach the right people and harness the power of AI to do that? That to me is more exciting as a marketer to do that. And then on the back side, so there's the research piece, but then the monitoring and analytics piece. And how can you use AI to integrate your PR analytics with your demand gen analytics? There's a lot of different ways to do that, there's different tools, but AI can take that to the next level and beyond.
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I know a little of this is hypothetical, but walk me through that. The connection using AI from your PR analytics to your demand gen, in your mind's eye, what does that look like?
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It's all about timing. So if you've got your events happening in pr, how can you know without a certain amount of guesswork or manual data manipulation, how can you know how your PR is truly impacting your lead acquisition, your lead conversion, your depth of engagement in your digital marketing? How can you track it more effectively to your other channels than we're able to do today? Which takes a lot more of a marketing ops, hands on approach, which is great, but there has to be a way to up the accuracy, up the insights because that to me is the true secret sauce is how is that engagement in your PR ultimately leading down funnel, not in your pr, but down funnel in your sales and marketing funnel to actual revenue and closed one business? And where can you show the milestones that align with your PR more effectively with more confidence? That's what we want to provide to our clients at Business Wires. Like, hey, when you make that announcement or that quarterly earnings release, whatever, how can we make sure that we can help you show how that's impacting your marketing goals overall? And I don't have the answer on how exactly that can be done most effectively yet. But in six months from now we'll probably have more insight and there'll be even new levels of AI that can.
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Be used for that, I'll go totally off the reservation here. There's the post published bounce, right? Hey, I published something through Business Wire and it got picked up by all these different properties and it happens relatively quickly. So at 11:38am On November 14, there was a marketing activity that happened. And using artificial intelligence, can you tell what is coming through on organic traffic that is likely to have been influenced by that marketing activity, which we cannot necessarily track as a direct conversion. So to me, either that's artificial intelligence or just staying on top of your numbers and watching things happen in real time. There is a way to understand the impact and artificial intelligence will help us with that as well. I want to move on to something that's sort of a follow up to that conversation. The secret sauce. There's some crazy mad scientist ways to be able to understand what's happening with pr. Some people are sort of very calculated with the pre and post launch and trying to do attribution directly with your PR impact. And some people just say I'm doing this stuff and I'm going to hope it works and I'll count the beans at the end of the day. What's the recipe for you for measuring the impact of pr?
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The secret sauce is actually to me, a blend of sauces. It's kind of like people who like their ketchup blended with their mayo for their fries.
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We do ranch and we call it Kranch.
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There's two parts. There's what I was just describing, but above that it's engagement tracking and there's media monitoring and what I just call the buzz factor. Are you able to get some buzz? Are you building relationships with journalists and what are the results of those relationships? What kind of splash can you make? That's the published bump that you get. And do you see a deeper engagement with your. If you look into Salesforce and it can extract that data, do you see a deeper engagement with prospects? Is sales having different conversations because of that earned media? You have to be able to track that and quantify it to the best of your ability and then follow it downstream. To me, the secret sauce is connecting that bounce to revenue and showing the correlation and also showing are you impacting the time to revenue, the time to close? Is PR helping to increase the velocity to revenue in any way? If you take six months off from pr, does your time to close and that velocity tend to now stretch a little bit? So can you increase your speed in marketing by getting that increased visibility that you didn't know when it was going to hit? When you put your plan together. But when it does hit now you're seeing some things really start to happen and how can you create more of that? So my secret sauce is the bump to the close and how you can tell that story.
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I heard a couple different things from you. One was when you're measuring pr, there is a pre marketing activity measurement that has to happen, which is what do the relationships look like? How are we getting in connection? How many people are we reaching out to that potentially could write about us? Then are they publishing? Great. There's one conversion rate from contacts to publishing. And now you're looking at all right, when it was published. When did it get published? Can we figure out some sort of way to attribute the effect of PR to individual leads and then track them over time? And since this is secret sauce, we're going to actually change it to what's the recipe. But the reason why I want to do that is you're like, all right, you attribute that. Somebody saw our press release and they saw this news story that a journalist wrote about us and we put that little flag in our CRM in Salesforce and it says this was a PR effective lead. Now all we have to do is see if they buy something. Well, there's a proofing period, to use a bread metaphor. You mix all the stuff together and then you have to let it rise before you put it in the oven. Talk to me about the time frame because I think that's one of the most misunderstood things about PR is it's an incredibly effective demand generation tool. You're just reaching a bunch of people that aren't necessarily in market right now and you have to wait six months or a year for them to convert. How do you think about the proofing time? The time you have to wait to measure and analyze a PR campaign?
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I would say the only thing that matters is if you stay committed to it and you see that metric just continue to grow. You have to have a body of time to be able to go back and look at it and say over six months to a year. We think this amount of visibility through PR compared to last year. So I've been at Business Wire about a year and a half. We're just starting to build up that type of data and say year on year on year. Now with PR in the mix, look at our time to close, look at our increased lead velocity, look at our volume of leads coming in incremental at these intervals, and that we can tie to PR the amount of time I'm going back into my pre Business Wire days. It can be actually pretty quick. It depends on are you selling a service that is typically a longer sales cycle? Are you selling a more transactional type of effect? In a past life I was able to see an uptick in conversions and converted sales in six weeks or less. I think in a more professional services environment, yeah, it's going to be measured in months. But are you going up and to the right as you continue in that time to close metric, as you continue a consistent PR program, How can you measure that on a consistent basis and say it's increasing the more we increase our visibility in market? So I don't know that I have a specific answer to that other than a little bit of patience and gather up some aggregate data over time and your story should start to emerge.
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I think it's my and most people's problem with PR as a channel is it's so reliant on belief over time. It is that if we continue to invest in pr, it will improve our reach, build more credibility, lower our cost per acquisition. But maybe those things are happening over that same period of time without the pr. How do we know that it's the PR driving? There's so much that I just have to believe that being out there and being present is what's causing the business results. But because it is an indeterminate period of time where it's very difficult to say we did PR for six months and then we didn't do PR for six months and measure the difference, nobody ever does that because if it's working, they don't want to turn it off. And if it wasn't working, then there was no difference anyway. I just fundamentally think that with channels like pr, some people have seen it work at different companies and associated the increase in their performance with their PR efforts. So they continue to do it because they have that belief. And then some people aren't believers and they give up too early and don't see it manifest. And that's probably part of the problem in their marketing mix. Jerry, any last words that you want to say to marketers about the use of pr, about Business Wire's role in pr? Any last words?
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I think you just touched on the important one that I actually had in my notes to wrap up is that you do have to believe I have friends in the PR agency business and they say some of their most challenging clients are the young companies, the startups who are on a fast timeline and want to turn things around and expect instant results. It doesn't happen overnight. You have to build, first of all, you have to build those stories and those narratives. That takes a little bit of of time. And then you have to build relationships with journalists and the media. That takes a little bit of time. The results will pay off. Have a consistent program, have those channels that we talked about, have the technology to be able to place, distribute, track, monitor and analyze and it will pay off. So look at it as a lot of short term work for long term benefit.
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I think of PR and earned media in generally very similar to own media in one regard. A little of it is pretty much worthless. A little consistently can be incredibly valuable. You post one blog post, no matter how good it is, chances are it's not going to make a difference. But if you post blog posts relatively frequently over time you're going to start building results. PR is the same thing. It is not a short term gain. It is a primarily brand channel that will grow over time the more, you know, invest in it. And I think that the more that we think about not only the effectiveness of the channel, but the realistic timeframes and evaluation, the better we understand as marketers how that fits into our mix and why we should continue to invest in things like pr. Building contacts, building relationships, creating content. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Jerry Tousley, the head of marketing at BusinessWire, for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Jerry, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. Or you could visit his company's website, which is businesswire.com A special thanks to the Current Podcast for sponsoring today's interview. If you're looking for candid conversations with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, then give the Current Podcast a listen. On the Current Podcast, you'll find exclusive interviews with experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising, and they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to the current@www.thecurrent.com or anywhere you get your podcasts today. Just one more link in our summary that I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where you can both find our episode summaries and also apply to be our next guest. You can also find the Mar TAC podcast on YouTube. And if you'd like to contact me, you can find my link to my LinkedIn profile under Benj B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit Ihearything.