Why is your Digital PR report being ignored?
We spoke to Digital Marketing and SEO managers to reveal why they might not be reading Digital PR reports that make it into their inboxes and there were two key themes.
Its value isn’t communicated from the offset
Stakeholders often won’t read reports if they are not perceived as offering insights that are of value to them. When this is the case, we often see that the introduction or delivery of the report isn’t engaging enough.
Your reports are too long and lack visual aids
The other reasons were that reports are too long, sent too frequently, or lacking visual aids. This shows that the format and providing useful insights are at the heart of creating a report that will appeal to your stakeholders.
How to get teams to engage with your report
Here are some key questions to consider when developing your Digital PR report to increase engagement with your wider teams and stakeholders.
Does it provide valuable insights?
As mentioned, ensuring your report is providing information that is important and of value to your stakeholder is key.
Your report should be structured as a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end that works to assist next steps and recommendations. Your recommendations should consider all the data collected to develop a strategy that addresses any shortcomings and works to maximise success – providing those valuable insights.
Does it demonstrate business impact?
One way to increase the value of your report is to tie your outputs with the wider business objectives. Whether this is to increase brand awareness or website traffic, demonstrating how your link-building efforts are impacting the wider business will pique the interest of the stakeholders that set them.
How clearly is it formatted and structured?
Being given a thirty-page spread or a bunch of block writing will instantly put someone off reading a report. Splitting your report into relevant sections, preceded by an executive summary and table of contents, is a great way of encouraging the reader to invest in your report and instantly pinpoint what will be of interest to them.
Does it include informative visual aids?
Ensuring your data is presented clearly will assist the reader with navigating essential statistics. Data visualisation is the best way to demonstrate impact, trends and outliers related to your link-building strategy. However, presenting too much data in your report can have the reverse effect and serve to overcomplicate rather than highlight key metrics. Focus on displaying insights of significance to your stakeholders and avoid overcrowding one table or chart.
Minh Tran, Multimedia Designer here at Builtvisible, sheds light on the importance of visual aids in your report “Data visualisations help to present the whole picture or an important part of a report. It makes it easier for the reader to identify interesting patterns and trends that could be better explained with visuals rather than text. It can also help break up long-form text to convey data in a way that is compelling and optimises the reading experience.”
Three ways we approach Digital PR reports to cut through
We know that reports with just link numbers and screenshots of ‘shiny’ publications and placements aren’t enough to justify why a company is investing in Digital PR.
For Digital PR to be successful, it has to be tailored to each business’ needs, and in the same sense, so does your reporting.
Whenever we work with clients on reporting, there are three ways we ensure we cut through and that our client’s Digital PR reports get read by their internal stakeholders.
- Speaking to key stakeholders to understand what insights will be of importance to them. This guides the reporting and monitoring process from the get-go and ensures insights that may be of value are not being overlooked, and ensures that the strategy is tied back to wider business objectives.
- Benchmarking current performance so that we have something concrete to compare to. How can you know how impactful links have been if you don’t know what the current state of play was on performance before starting?
- Quantifying the impact of changes as a result of your link-building efforts is arguably the most critical aspect of your Digital PR report but can also be the most difficult to demonstrate. We created SEOCausal, a tool powered by data science, that helps us understand the relationship between optimisations made (such as link building) and the impacts that they drive.
You can read more about SEOCausal and how we use it to track the impact of links built in my colleague, Dan’s, latest piece.
In conclusion, producing well-structured reports with concise and valuable performance insights will encourage your teams to engage with its content.
Through having a robust reporting process in place you will be able to ensure that no important insights are missed or downplayed, demonstrating the value your Digital PR strategy is having on the wider business.
