How to measure the impact of your PR with Darryl Sparey, co-founder of Hard Numbers

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On the PRmoment Podcast this week with me Ben Smith we’re talking to Darryl Sparey, co-founder of Hard Numbers about how to measure the impact of your PR

Darryl believes the opportunity is ripe for communicators everywhere to accurately measure their results through sales software like Hubspot and the like.

And today Darryl is going to give his insight into the techniques and tools that he’s found most useful in taking that approach.

Hard Numbers is a B2B tech PR firm with a fee income of £1.4 m in the last financial year and 18 employees. Darryl co-founded the business in 2020 with Paul Stollery.

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Here’s a summary of what Darryl and I discussed:

3 mins Are most B2B PR campaigns still not properly integrated with the sales process? Aren’t we a bit beyond that now? 

4.30 mins Why PR people need to spend more time with chief revenue officers

6 mins “PR measurement is (mainly based on) content analysis, not what impacts the business.”

8.30 mins Darryl talks about the wonder of the B2B space: you can target content specifically to your buyer.

10 mins Why B2B PR firms must have read-only access to their client’s CRM and Google Analytics - otherwise they can’t do their job.

12 mins Darryl's advice for PR people: “Ask the CRO/Head of Sales: What are the most commonly held reasons why you don’t win business?”

14.30 mins A discussion of the best CRM, data and business intelligence tools

13 mins How to cost-effectively bring your data together from multiple sources

15 mins The customer’s data journey will enable you to see the content ecosystem that they operate in and the cost per acquisition of the content.

18 mins “Did that activity lead to an opportunity in the CRM and did it close?”

19 mins Darryl’s PR: sales impact tools of choice: Google Analytics, paid media channels, the clients CRM, the agency CRM (Darryl uses Hubspot), Google Data Studio, Databox, Microsoft’s Power BI.

23 mins Everyone has access to the tools: the secret source is how you bring them together in an accessible dashboard.

25 mins Darryl’s most popular impact KPIs: Leads, leads and leads

27 mins How to link content to results: links, links links

28 mins “50% of our coverage for a client, as a minimum, must have a link - if it does we can do all the clever measurement stuff. If you don’t have a link the measurement is a lot harder.”

30 mins “If you don’t get a link (in coverage) to demonstrate a referral traffic, you can use branded search stats to help show the impact of a campaign”

31 mins Why Darryl is trying to move PR down the funnel!