What Is Performance-Based PR?
You’ve probably heard of performance marketing. Performance marketing is driven by results. When you hire a performance marketing company, they get paid when specific actions are taken, like when a lead is generated, a sale takes place, or someone clicks on a button on a website.
It’s not hard to understand why clients love performance marketing. As the famous quote goes (alternately attributed to either U.S. businessman John Wanamaker or UK industrialist Lord Leverhulme):
“Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.”
With performance marketing, you come closer to knowing which half is wasted, if not precisely which half.
Performance marketing works in a digital space, because through a combination of social media, digital ads, analytics, and ecommerce, one can track a customer from initial marketing to the final sale.
The success of performance marketing leads many to wonder whether “performance” can apply to public relations as well.
The Marketing Predictability Spectrum
All marketing and PR efforts can be placed on a spectrum of predictability. On one end, you have highly-predictable marketing like digital ads. Somewhere towards the opposite end, you have PR.
You may feel tempted to argue exactly where outdoor vs. TV vs. social media should be, but that’s not the point. The point is that digital advertising is more predictable than PR, and this makes it difficult to create “performance PR.”
However, that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try.
What is Performance PR?
Performance PR or performance-based PR is, as I define it:
PR services that are highly predictable in terms of deliverables, cost, and timing.
Got a better definition of performance-based PR? I’d love to hear it, then I can quote you instead of myself, since quoting oneself is awkward.
Performance PR, therefore, would tell a client:
What they’re going to get
How much it’s going to cost
When they’re going to get it
However, this is easier said than done. Mark Macias of Macias PR writes in Forbes that, “Contrary to what some people believe, publicists don’t just call a reporter and say, ‘Hey, I have a story idea for you.’ And the journalist responds with, ‘That’s great. I have a three-minute segment block open tomorrow morning. Can your client come to our studio?’”
But what if a PR firm could do exactly that?
How Performance-Based PR Works at Canvas PR
I got into PR after writing for Forbes and other publications. I was motivated to jump in because I was receiving several hundred pitches every month from PR firms, and 99.9999% of them were terrible. I mean, they were really, really bad.
Receiving these terrible PR pitches made me think, “If I’m getting these terrible pitches from high-priced NYC PR firms, how hard can it be to run a PR firm?”
I got into the PR side of things by partnering with someone who offered me performance-based PR services, which I then resold to my clients. I then began to build up my own connections so I could offer PR services without having to pay a middleman. Because I started out offering performance-based PR services, it only made sense to me that I would do it that way myself, partner or no partner.
Today, Canvas does almost exactly what Mark says isn’t the way publicists do things. I happen to agree with Mark—most publicists don’t do it the way we do it at Canvas, and the ones I talk to don’t believe it even when I tell them what we do.
Here’s how we do it:
A client comes to Canvas and says, “I want to be in Forbes.”
We gather some basic info about the client, verify they’re legit, and once they’re verified we tell them we can get them into a Forbes article.
The client pays us a flat fee for the Forbes article.
We collect details from the client about what type of article they would like to be in.
We work with the client on headlines.
Once we have a headline we think will work, and that the client approves, we take it to a writer at Forbes and ask, “Hey, if we get you an article about XYZ, would you publish it?” Now, we don’t just approach any old Forbes writer. This is a writer we’ve worked with many times in the past, whom we know, and who knows and trusts us. We already know they’re going to say “Yes” before we approach them.
Once we get the writer’s approval, we write the article and get it approved by the client.
We then send the article to the writer at Forbes. Sometimes they ask for extensive changes. Sometimes they make extensive changes on their own. Sometimes they make very minimal changes. After all, we’ve already worked with this writer and know their voice and what they want.
Then the article gets published.
If the article doesn’t get published within 90 days, we give the client two options:
Get a full refund.
Keep working with us as we keep trying.
Sometimes the article doesn’t get published within 90 days because we try multiple times and different writers are slow to get back to us and we run out of time before we can get it published. Sometimes the topic of the article isn’t something anyone wants to take, in which case that was a bad call on our part for taking it in the first place. Whatever the case, the client can choose a full refund or keep working with us, and they generally keep working with us with rare exceptions (it’s also rare that we hit the 90-day mark, our average is closer to six weeks and sometimes it’s one week).
Is performance-based PR the same as performance marketing? No, because we can’t track exactly what happens to a client’s sales based on that article. Too much of the results to through non-digital channels, or may show up years later. However, I think we’ve gotten as close to what you can call performance-based PR as possible.
The one way we could make this even more performance based would be to take payment only after we get the article, but we’re not going there. Why not? Because we’ve been burned too many times by delivering exactly what we promised but then not getting paid. On the other hand, no client has ever not been able to get a refund from us if we didn’t deliver within those 90 days.
In his Forbes piece, Mark says, “If a publicist agrees to work for free and get paid only after they secure publicity, you should take the offer. In fact, I’ll hire that publicist and pay them after they secure placements for our clients.”
We may be charging upfront instead of after the fact, but it works out to the same thing. Maybe that’s why so many PR firms outsource to us and our white-label partnerships make up 90% of our business. Mark, I hope we hear from you soon! 😊
Whether you’re a PR firm looking to white-label our services, or looking for performance-based PR for yourself, Contact us or check out our pricing:
