Media coverage and social media buzz DO sometimes deliver an instant spike in traffic, downloads and/or sales – but their main value is, unlike performance marketing, not as an immediate sales channel or driver. That CAN be the benefit, but should not be the goal.

Their main goal is instead brand-building, awareness, familiarity, and gradually educating your target customers to “know, like and trust” your brand as a result of seeing and hearing its name repeatedly over time.

“Don’t get confused,” advises the podcast Embracing Marketing Mistakes in a recent episode on PR measurement. “PR marketing is not performance marketing. PR is brand marketing and reputation management – the most important thing in business. It’s more long-term. You are building the brand.”

Mark Ritson, an influential UK marketeer who runs the marketing mini MBA, says, “Brand marketing drives sales but performance [marketing] doesn’t build brand. Marketeers should separate the two.” He also recommends a budget split of 60% for long-term brand-building and 40% for sales promotion.

Marketing theory says that PR and buzz are best viewed not as a sales or direct-response channel but as one of the earlier “touch-points” in the “customer journey” – and the cumulative process of getting consumers to know and trust you enough to buy.

It advises that you typically need an average of seven, eight or nine such touch-points before your customer is ready to buy. The traditional marketing “Rule of Seven” suggests that the number is seven, but more recent studies by Google indicate that target customers today require 11 interactions with a brand before they even properly notice it.

In our age of information overload, the old Rule of Seven has become the new Rule of 11 and states: “People notice something for the first time when they see it for the eleventh time.”

Marketing theory also classifies PR, guerrilla marketing and buzz as forms of “demand generation” – as opposed to “demand capture” and immediate conversion – and says that the ROI on investment in demand generation will typically take nine+ months to show up in the pipeline and revenue.

Precisely how many such customer touch-points you need before your target customer will download or buy will in practice also depend on factors such as product-market fit, while the speed and extent to which traffic converts to instals will also depend on factors such as UX and design.

The role of PR and buzz is not therefore to drive instant downloads, for which paid acquisition is a more reliable tool. Then again, even with paid acquisition, which IS meant to generate instant sales, target consumers often have to see, say, a Facebook, Instagram or Google ad six or seven times before they buy.

(The other problem with paid marketing is that, yes, it can be powerful accelerant, which is also pleasingly measurable. It can also, however, become not just a commodity, where the brand with the most cash wins, but also eventually an addiction with ever rising costs and diminishing returns. Such addiction can prove fatal – and does to many startups.)

PR’s role, as a recent post on Glean.info, a media monitoring and measurement tool, put it – is “to build brand awareness, increase trust and attract the right kind of traffic:

“While Google Analytics provides information about your organization’s own website, it offers limited worth as a measurement tool for public relations.”

“The principal goal of PR is typically not to increase website traffic.

“PR’s main goal is usually to build brand awareness, increase trust and attract the right kind of traffic.”

PR and paid social ads work hand in hand – and complement each other

PR and social buzz will help bring general awareness around your brand, but they do so in a different way to paid ads.

PR and buzz will impact brand awareness, familiarity and relevance but – unlike paid ads – they will not typically provoke a direct response (even though they occasionally do).

But they should, as mentioned, complement, support and enhance paid ads.

PR and buzz are also valuable at two stages at least of the “sales funnel”

1. At the top of “the sales funnel”, in the form of raw “Awareness”

This means that lots of people will, as a result of this coverage, convert from never having heard of your brand to now having heard of it – and, indeed, noticing that it’s doing lively, interesting things.

A proportion of these people will also, as a result of this coverage, either check out your site, either by Googling it or, when there is a link, then via the link.

2. In the middle of “the sales funnel”, at the stage of “Consideration” …

… which means that when potential customers are, say, considering and choosing between different suppliers, they are, according to marketing theory, more likely to choose the one they’ve heard of and been reading about and which sounds familiar than the one(s) they’ve never heard of.

PR is valuable at both the top of the sales funnel, when it comes to creating awareness, and also in the middle of the funnel, when it comes to consideration and evaluation.