With increasing economic uncertainty and shifting consumer spending patterns, big data analytics is becoming a vital aspect of any businesses’ strategy to remain abreast of shifting demands. Effectively using big data can help businesses determine whether they are achieving their objectives and reaching the right target audiences with their public relations strategy.
Understanding how big data analytics can be used to enhance your communication strategy is therefore key to commercial success.
What is big data analytics?
The use of big data is critical across a variety of industries. Technological innovations and the rise of social media have produced vast amounts of data and transformed the way in which companies can use an individual’s digital footprint to inform their own decisions.
What separates big data analytics from other forms of data analysis is that it examines a large amount of data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations and other insights. Using this data can help organisations identify new commercial opportunities, find further efficiencies within their business model, and add value to their company through making faster and better decisions.
From a public relations standpoint, data analytics has revolutionized the way organisations develop their own campaign strategies. It can be used to determine campaigns goals and enhance how an organisation communicates with its key audience. Public relations professionals can harness the power of big data to achieve these goals in a number of ways.
Evaluating success
Earned media forms a vital part of any successful public relations strategy and relies heavily on an organisation building on their customer’s positive experience with them. Previously, the impact of earned media was measured using traditional metrics including looking at publication readership statistics.
However, this fails to appreciate the true impact which a content piece can have on its audience and side-lines some of the useful data which can be analysed around social media engagement. For example, just focusing on the fact that a story featured on a news outlet with 1,000,000 unique online visitors does not provide businesses with insightful information that their company needs to enhance their communication strategy.
Understanding your consumers digital footprint
Using the latest analytical tools, our team at Sapience can gather more information about the impact of earned media and evaluate the audience’s online journey. With over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day by internet users worldwide, breaking through the noise and analysing the core trends can provide companies with a useful window into their consumers habits.
Looking at how many people clicked on an article, their website visits after reading that article, and even how many people bought a product or asked for additional information can also help determine the most effective way to project your voice in a crowded marketplace. Large companies, such as Netflix, has saved over $1 billion per year on customer retention through using big data analytics.
Furthermore, through a combination of data and social listening, our team at Sapience can conduct sentiment analysis to understand how consumers or businesses feel about your business or product. This in turn will allow you to tailor a strategy which reflects the target demographic you are looking to appeal to, whilst also helping to identify areas where there are any negative perceptions about your offering before it develops into potentially negative coverage.
Learning from the past
Trend history analysis is another vital part of determining a campaign’s success. However, through data analysis public relations professionals can determine not just the success of ongoing campaigns, but what could had potentially caused this positive trend in coverage in the past, present, and indeed the future.
By accessing data examining hashtags, trending topics, comments on social media, and what is receiving the most positive or negative reaction on social media platforms – Sapience can create an effective audience engagement strategy and incorporate the lessons learnt from previous campaigns more effectively to deliver future success.
Finding the right mouthpiece
An essential part of public relations is ensuring that your voice is heard in the right place. Therefore, identifying the correct journalist, influencer, or broadcaster is an essential part of building an efficient communications campaign. Without applying effective data analytics, this task can be based around using outdated contact sheets or relying upon manually searching through the internet to search through a journalist’s writing portfolio.
Using platforms such as Agility PR, our consultants can look for journalists around the world which have used key phrases relevant to our clients offering and view their profile across various social media platforms. Looking beyond individual journalists and influencers, our consultants can conduct in depth data analysis into specific platforms which match our clients’ mission statement.
This use of big data analytics enables us to create and monitor the media universe around our clients and track the activity of journalists and influencers across different sectors to ensure that our client’s voice is being heard by the right audience.
Looking to the future
Over the last few years, the use of bid data in public relations services has already transformed the industry and made companies reevaluate their approach to public relations. For our clients at Sapience, big data analytics has allowed us to identify problems within a business’s public relations early on and create a more data-focused strategy based on their individual needs.
However, the ever-changing media landscape is producing new opportunities and challenges for companies looking to build a digital public relations strategy. Keeping track of which platforms your target base is using and understanding the way which they are interacting with your product online, can be a difficult task.
By combining our consultant’s extensive expertise in the field of data analytics with the latest media and social monitoring technology, our team ensure that our clients don’t fall behind the trends shaping the social media landscape.
As a specialist data analytics consultancy, Sapience can help you to identify a company’s niche within the global data economy, and offer support in leveraging insights into competitors, clients and consumer interests. This will help your business to adapt to trends, explore new opportunities and continually improve its processes.
Sapience has successful relationships providing data analytics support to clients across various sectors. These include industry leaders such as M&A advisors Cavendish PLC, investment consulting firm bfinance and built environment developer and investor Kajima Properties.
