Why PR effectiveness must be determined by business impact

Today, the Wildfire office is festooned with orange balloons to celebrate our latest award win: the most effective B2B PR campaign, as presented at the AMEC Awards 2018 in Barcelona last week.The title of this award is particularly pertinent to our approach at Wildfire, because it’s all about the impact of what we do. Yes, PR campaigns can be creative and inspiring, but ticking those boxes alone doesn’t mean they will be effective — PR activity must be intrinsically linked to the wider business.At Wildfire, we make sure our innate understanding of a client’s brand, market and audience informs our approach. It’s through these insights that we can deliver compelling campaigns with the confidence they will create real business impact, and our award-winning entry is a case in point.The six-month PR campaign generated measurable results right through the sales funnel, from awareness all the way to action. That’s news and features in target media, traffic to the client’s website (that we could attribute to the coverage) and more than 700 content downloads.Most importantly, we generated not just marketing-qualified leads, but high-intent leads and sales appointments. If you can lead a horse to water, then we’ve taken it right up to the drinking trough.And that’s just one, lovely, shiny example of our approach. In our 2018 client satisfaction survey, which we carried out last month, 95 per cent of our clients agreed that Wildfire has had a positive impact on their business.In a previous blog post following a PRCA Council meeting, I highlighted the importance of proving the value of our work. There are many ways this can be done but ultimately, the effectiveness of PR comes down to the impact to the business. And that’s something we’re firmly focused on.