A hard-core marketer who became fascinated with technology, Viktorija shares her story with us. In her opinion, recessions allow us to recharge and build better products, better systems, and better measurements.

Introduction

1:03 I was a journalist and really, really ambitious startup that was creating the first mobile payment system in the world, outreached to me and asked me to join their team and I fell in love with the tech industry like momentarily, like in, I don’t know, it took me 12 days to just absolutely fell in love and I decided to stay there to stay in the tech industry. And I started as a social media manager in the what we call digital marketing field now.

And it was really, really interesting times because then Facebook almost had no limits on the reach meaning that the metric everyone was using was likes and the likes back in the day really mattered. Absolutely it mattered because like meant that your content is going to be distributed to the person’s network who collect your post or video or image or been, or whatever and I think that what happened then everyone just learned that like equals reach and from there, it’s really, it’s really hard to go back. It’s really hard to start thinking about engagement metrics.

So basically that was one of my first interactions in digital marketing and I loved it.

First Interaction with data

2:33 I was always curious to understand, understand the metric that my fantasy metric that I call. So what, so that’s so what metrics means that whenever you release any piece of content doing any PR or any outreach, I’m trying to understand, okay, what’s happening after so for me it was never, never because I, I needed to report the data, but I just wanted to understand if my work is valuable if I’m doing valuable things because otherwise why are you even, you know, creating something, it’s just a waste of waste of effort. But then talking about reporting metrics, if you go to probably any board of directors that a SAS company, the most interesting metric for them is going to be revenue not the PR metrics.

And that’s where the challenge comes in how to attribute the revenue to our certain analyst relations or public relations and it’s really one of the biggest challenges in the market that exists right now.

Favourite Campaign

3:54 We used the technique pretty often that is commonly known as a news jacking or now as a trans jacking. One of one of the first things I do when I joined the new company and I did 2.5 years ago when I joined the cast AI. On the first day I installed a brand monetary platform like immediately it was free version. Doesn’t matter because from there you start to understand if your efforts are actually, you know paying off without, without that visibility, you cannot move further.

And then the second thing I do, I install the same brand monitoring platform on my competitors because then I can have the full visibility, what they are doing and then react and react immediately.

Favourite metric

My most favourite metric is what I like to call. “So what” metric?

So meaning how to understand the impact of the, of the pr and analyst relations and communications.

Challenges in communications

5:06 The biggest challenge we come across is to understand the value of communication channel. So for example, there is an influencer. It has a lot of views. What does it mean? So then we use some tools to analyze the audience inside. If it’s engaging enough if they have a lot of comments, if the audience is loyal to the influencer, that’s 11 of the biggest challenges.

Another similar challenge in the pr because the big brands that doesn’t mean the big reach and that’s the common misconception about that. So for example, you can take Forbes or New York times. It doesn’t, it doesn’t matter if you, if you are featured there, if that article is not appearing somewhere at the top, then then it’s, it’s really hard to understand the value and the value becomes to be more reputational than transactional.

That’s another challenge how to create your media strategy to reach them to reach the relevant media, not only for the reputational perspective but also for what I like to call transactional perspective.

Role of PR in marketing

6:25 So now everyone is talking about the fact that you need to reduce your budget, you need to reduce your spending because the recession is here.

But the smart companies what they are doing right now, they’re just trying to take over the markets, they’re just trying to find the ways to grow, using, using the opportunity that More influencers are available, maybe journalists will be less loaded with announcements of 500 million funding rounds and trying to use that opportunity for growth. So for example, we are in the it’s really interesting because sometimes you are in the market that that is not declining and we’re currently in that market, our service because we offer the cost optimization, our service demand for our services actually growing, meaning the similar tools that offering cost optimization, actually not cutting their marketing expenses and you would say 11 could say that, okay, there is no chance for me to benefit from the market situation.

But there is there is more place in industry, there is more space, more keywords uncovered, more journalists that we know today grew during the last recession, all of them.

Because it’s a break. It allows us to recharge and it allows us to build better products, better systems, better measurement than before. It’s just really normal. I’m saying just let’s not panic, let’s measure everything. Let’s send those metrics to our boards.

And we will be all right.