Starting his career in consulting, and working for 6 years with fortune 1000 clients in different parts of the world, Andrew decided to venture into entrepreneurship and founded two different companies before joining TheoremOne. He discusses how “share of voice” as a metric plays a very important role in PR and Communications.

Check out his story:

Introduction

0:41 I started my career in consulting, working with Accenture and Deloitte getting a lot of great experience, working with Fortune 1000 clients all over the world after five or six years. I decided I wanted to try to start my own company.

So a couple of colleagues and I started an international leadership development firm focused on millennials. We were all millennials, we’re looking for more global experience and that was really the vein in which we watched that first company, we loved our idea.

Unfortunately, the market did not, and so it was ultimately unsuccessful. And before I went back to the corporate world, I thought I would give it one more try.

And so I’ve always been a sailor in my whole life and decided to launch a scaling company, also focused on millennials, getting groups of people to go around the world, taking very exotic trips.

That company was a lot of fun. It was very successful. Ultimately as I got older, it came time to settle down a little bit and that’s how I found myself working here at the TheoremOne and actually one of the individuals I took sailing was instrumental in helping me get my first role here and it’s been almost six years.

First interaction experience with data and insights?

1:57 So I think going back to the beginning of, when I started here at theorem one, my first role was in business development. This company had existed for over a decade purely on word of mouth and referral business. They had never really tried to grow through doing outbound sales. I was part of running those first experiments. And to your point when you’re running experiments, measurement is a very key component of that. And so we wanted to evaluate the types of campaigns were doing based on, on the spend, on the success, what kinds of leads we were getting?

Were they qualifying, were they moving through the funnel?

And so all the data points along the way were instrumental in measuring what campaigns were successful, which we’re not where we should allocate resources, budget and so on as we move forward as part of my journey that actually morphed into more of a marketing type role.

We realized that because our product is is very customized, it’s very expensive.

The sales cycle is long. The outbound sales didn’t make as much sense as trying to drive more inbound interest. So we started doing that through marketing mechanisms, advertising, thought leadership, putting together a lot of content and trying to get people to be aware of our brand of our offerings and to get to come to us and in the last couple of years, that’s more even further into a public relations effort.

We found that it’s a lot better to have someone else talking about you versus you talking about yourself but by one comment about all of this, is that all of the experiments that we would run, whether it’s in sales marketing or public relations, it’s all about measurement and you have to know is a given program achieving the goals that you set for it.

Is it efficient in terms of your resource and budget, spend.

And that really helps determine where you allocate resources down the line and what programs continue, which programs will eventually shut down?

Favorite campaign from a PR & comms perspective

3:56 One campaign that jumps out at me is last year we launched a new subsidiary called TheoremOne Orbital this was a space and satellite program that was very exciting, essentially helping companies to digitally transform with the use of satellites.

It’s very exciting.

It affects all industries because it was so exciting, we got Forbes to take an interest in helping us to launch the new offering which was to date one of our biggest pieces of press that we’ve ever had between Forbes publishing it in its own amplification and our ability to promote it through our channels as well.

We paid a lot of attention to the traction that that got all the metrics that I just mentioned really popped off the chart in terms of you know, getting people to, to our site to reach out to us seeing spikes in our, in our site traffic and impressions that we had never seen to date.

So that’s the one campaign that was very well designed from the get go and executed perfectly and had a great effect for us.

Challenges in communications where data proved like a hero

5:01 To be honest, what I can tell you is that there’s different types of media placements that we’ve experienced. There are amazing placements like getting into Forbes. I don’t need to explain.

That’s a perfect fit for our brand and that’s the perfect type of media outlet. However, there’s a lot of smaller placements that we get where the feature won’t necessarily be about us completely, whereas we’ll just get a quote or something small like that and whereas these don’t have the big glow effect of Forbes, what they do have are mentions and they’re easier to get.

There’s a higher volume of them and you get a back link, hopefully most of the time.

And that’s where data really can help show the value of these small replacements in that because you know, someone was quoted or one of our members of our team was quoted people are cooking that, that back link to come to our site to see what is and we can measure that traffic and that shows the impact that even smaller placements can have, especially because they happen in bundles, there’s a higher volume of them.

And so even though it’s not a Forbes, you can still see spikes and website traffic and outreach people read them. People click, you can measure it and that’s why data so helpful in that regard.

Favourite metrics

6:23 In my role, which is I would say half pr half in marketing from the marketing side, website, traffic is an important one to us and we’ll dissect that into a few different layers.

What we really like to track month to month is how long people are spending on our site, how many different pages they’re going to on each visit.

This is especially helpful if they’re coming to our site from a back link that we got in a media placement because that article that we got quoted on could be about a very specific thing but once they get to our site, if they’re poking around and visiting a number of different pages that shows genuine interest, especially if that person then chooses to engage with us by filling out a contact former or call our number. That’s very, very helpful as well from the pr side impressions are big as well.

So to help justify our pr efforts, it’s really helpful to see how many impressions given article is getting of those impressions. How many people are clicking on a link are coming to our website? Are we seeing a spike in web traffic on the day that are sir, an article drops?

That’s all very important and I would say possibly the most compelling metric in the PR realm is share of voice. So we started we had never done PR before, so we’re almost starting from zero. So it was fascinating to see with all of these efforts you know, as a whole holistically, how can we improve sharing voice from starting at almost zero.

And that was very compelling for our leadership to kind of convince them to continue to invest you know, my time others time resources and budget continuing the PR efforts to go from not being discussed at all to being discussed quite a bit specifically in regard to our competitors share of voice.

The combination of that data certainly paints a great picture, awesome, awesome.

Evolution of PR & comms in coming days

8:22 I think it’s more important than ever. In our particular case we’re still a small company.

We do incredible things for incredible clients. We build digital products that don’t exist that are game changers for companies in their broader industries and I’m still surprised that not many people know our name and I think that PR and comms is gonna be a critical tool for us to continue to get our name and our reputation out there, it’s about storytelling and as I mentioned, telling stories about yourself can only go so far. It’s important to get others interested in what you’re doing and to get them to tell your story, for you.

I think that that’s important. So we do that through, you know, going to conferences, speaking at events like that, but pr is a very important part of that and I look forward to doubling and tripling down on our efforts in the coming years.

Dream metric

9:21 I would love to get more inside the head of a perspective lead or a prospective buyer of our product, but they view a piece of our content, whether that be an ad, whether it be an article, what makes them choose to visit our website or not and if they do visit our website and they leave quickly, what made them do that. So we talked about the bounce rate a lot, We’d love to know more about what causes someone to do. So, anything that can give us more of an idea of what a perspective leader buyer is thinking, what turns them on, what turns them off about our company, our brand. That’s the sort of data that can help us to very much, just perfect the type of content, the type of messaging, the type of stories that we’re putting out there Okay, in the next six months to one year, this is assuming you have a pr team and I find you don’t have a dedicated pr resources.

My two cents

10:14 I know a lot of pr and comms professionals who get a big list of journalists and send out the same message to all of them.

I would encourage new comms professionals to have a bit of a higher touch, spend more time reading what your target journalists is actually writing, be in contact with them on a more regular basis. Not only when you’re asking for something and asking them to cover you, read their articles and notes about them, ask them questions, share you’re your thoughts, your feedback, establishing that regular cadence is how you build a real relationship and stay on their radar so that within time is right. You’ll be there for them to reach out to cover you, which is what you, what you really want. So I would encourage the new professional to, to spend the time studying and reading and putting in a higher touch for with regard to promote your company, and building those so important journalist relationships because in our experience, that’s how we were able to secure our first big replacement with Forbes.

It was it was that sort of approach. So, that would be my number one piece of advice.