You have a public relations job working for a successful tech company, so how come they are so stingy when it comes to approving your budget?
Your office is modern, your laptop is new, there are three different kinds of coffee machine, but you are left alone to fend on your own with reporters, press releases, interviews, events, presentations, the blog, and the other blog.
It’s not that they don’t care for media: they are proud of every article.
It’s not that you don’t have metrics: they have seen your reports.
It’s not that they don’t see you are overworked: you all stay in the office together until late.
It seems like you agree on everything but there’s something left unsaid, blocking your budget.
And that’s exactly right!
What’s left unsaid is exactly how much your public relations program contributes to the business goals of the company.
Because everyone around you has an intuitive grasp of the power of the company story to drive the business forward, you don’t talk about it.
In the meantime, business is all your marketing counterparts talk about.
And they get the budget.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to start acting like PR alone will achieve every business goal.
But let’s face it: when was the last time you sat down with the boss to learn how close the business is to the quarterly sales goal, or the annual growth goal?
Just quietly asking the business questions, as if you were a reporter?
Come to think of it, you are the ideal reporter for that specific situation: they can share every financial detail with you because you are part of the team.
You might have even edited the monthly business email report from the boss!
Well, that business information needs to be right at the top of your public relations budget request.
At Verb, we would call those business goals the “outcomes” of your public relations program, as opposed to the “outputs:” coverage, press releases, blog posts, ads, and all the traffic, engagement, and other deliverables of your program.
You can try to map out exactly what share of the revenue comes from your program, but you don’t need to.
What you need is constant, recurrent agreement from the boss about the outcomes you are going for, and how those outcomes connect to the behaviors your company expects from its different audience segments.
Week after week, month after month.
By the time you make your next budget request, it will be obvious to everyone why they need to approve it.
With our new weekly subscription, you can get Verb Company’s newsroom to take care of your “output:” the blog posts, the press releases, every editorial product you need. Let our team of writers and editors who come from the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, CNN and other news organizations, handle that. That will give you more time to go over the business goals—the outcomes—with your boss.
Count on Verb. We are writers.