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Awareness has been thrown around as a core PR objective for decades. Ask four people what it means, you’ll get four different answers. Ask how you measure it, and you’ll get a further ten. And that, right there, is the thing that kills a PR programme before it’s even started.
Of course, it's important that people know your brand exists. However, in B2B, being a household name shouldn't be the ambition. You need to get in front of the people who truly matter, and the folks who influence them.
So this starts by asking the right questions. What do you need them to know? What do they currently think of you? Why should they trust you? And what action do you need them to take?
We’ve stuffed ourselves by making the job too small
Awareness is “top of the funnel” in marketing speak. The goal is to get people to notice you and then hand this off to marketing and sales. But this takes a narrow view of how people behave. We don't suddenly buy something as soon as we hear about it. And in B2B, your buyer's job is on the line if they make a mistake. There also might be months, quarters, between hearing about you and needing you. And we don't stop needing confidence in a business as soon as we've heard its name. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Once we've heard about a brand, we're looking for clues that it is credible, that it can do what it says it does, that it understands the market challenges in which it operates.
Knowing what a brand does and understanding what it is are two very different things. There may be doubt that you can deliver. They may even like you, but struggle to convince the six other people involved in the buying decision.
And that's the role PR has to play. That continues into customers’ knowledge, understanding and confidence. And what happens when the boat is rocked and a customer loses confidence? Or if a partner starts questioning your product? Or if something goes wrong and it escalates to a crisis comms situation? The default brief of "awareness" does not cover that.
And there's an additional issue. Awareness so often becomes shorthand for "get some coverage, tot up the reach and put a big number in the monthly report". This doesn't tell us anything of what has actually changed.
The strategic role isn’t new
A colleague shared a GeekWire article about Microsoft’s communications shake-up while I was mid-writing this piece.
Microsoft is moving comms out of marketing and into its corporate, external and legal affairs organisation. Satya Nadella also wants engineers, sellers and partners to play a bigger part in how Microsoft tells its story.
This feels familiar. At NEC, I sat next to legal, I reported to the head of strategy, with a direct line into the president’s office. Marketing was two floors down. I’d venture down there, mostly to speak to presales, because that’s where much of my speaker bench came from.
It makes sense. Communications needs to understand the business strategy, the decisions being made and the risks involved. It needs access to the people who know what they’re talking about.
What interests me in Microsoft’s approach is the emphasis on the people closest to the work helping others understand the business. The engineers, the sellers, the partners. People with something useful to say, and the experience and expertise to back it up.
That’s a much bigger job for PR than getting the company name into an article.
Who is actually shaping your reputation?
A buyer might read about you in the media. They could ask an analyst. They might listen to an "influencer", speak to a peer or ask an LLM.
What are they hearing in those places? Is it accurate? Is it what you want to be known for? Is there enough evidence to make it believable?
Those are questions PR should help the business to answer. You can't have a prospect associate you with an old product, or doubt your ability to support an organisation that looks like theirs. Raising awareness doesn't identify any positioning challenges we are solving. More coverage could simply end up reinforcing the wrong perception. And with the way information flows today, that gets pretty tricky, fast. Shared media, the LLMs - things move into the public record in almost the blink of an eye.
A better brief makes a desired positioning strategy explicit. If your prospect sees you as only serving small businesses, but you want enterprise customers, you need to use PR to build confidence that you can deliver. Now we can work out which people need convincing, whose judgement they trust and what evidence they need.
Awareness a BS metric
AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework recognises awareness as a short term objective. But you can’t make the leap from exposure to awareness to, "that was a bloody brilliant success".
Exposure is often measured in "reach", which takes a publication's total audience as a proxy. A slightly absurd claim to suggest everyone who visited a site in a month saw your headline. Even more of a stretch to suggest they clicked through and read the full article.
Even if they did, it doesn't tell us what they took from it? Did it contain your key messages? Do they trust you more? Do they understand you better? Or if it was actually the people we care about reaching?
Share of voice is is another distribution number PR tracks, but every PR person worth their stripes knows you’re at the mercy of a competitor’s massive M&A announcement or a crisis. And again, what does it really tell you of the impact your programme has had?
So what should we measure?
Start with the business goal and select measures that help you understand whether you’re making progress.
- Relevant visibility and positioning: Are you appearing in the media, analyst and influencer conversations that matter? Are you being associated with the capabilities you want to be known for?
- AI visibility and accuracy: Do you appear across a defined set of relevant buyer questions? Are you mentioned, recommended, cited and described accurately?
- Audience perception: Do buyers remember you? Understand you? Trust your expertise? Would they consider you? Establish a baseline and repeat comparable research to track change.
- Meaningful engagement: Are the right people visiting, returning, downloading, enquiring or starting conversations? And where do they go after their first engagement with the brand?
- Target-account progression: Working cheek to cheek with ABM and sales provides more value than a vanity metric. Has the work helped open a conversation, answer an objection or secure a meeting?
- Commercial contribution: keep track of communications activity alongside qualified opportunities, pipeline and wins. Are there correlations that can be made? There are ways to measure without overclaiming.
Placing an article with the right message in the right place at the right time, and giving a sales person useful ammunition, can be magic. But we need to record how it helped, rather than just adding another clipping to the report.
Tools such as Agentcy can help sort the evidence from the noise: the sources, storylines and associations around a business. To understand what buyers believe, you need to ask them. To understand what happens commercially, you need access to the teams and systems recording it.
Why is this such a tough nut to crack?
This is nothing new. It’s a nut that has been hammered over and over. I don’t doubt there has been effort.
But it’s hard to crack when organisations silo comms from digital, marketing and sales.
PR can see the coverage, but often cannot see website data, customer data or even sales data. You can't prove impact without a fair shot at seeing the evidence. Better measurement is only as successful as the teamwork that goes into it.
We also need to make sure we don't overpromise. You can see how a brand is represented via public facing channels. But you cannot see what a potential buyer, or customer believes or feels about a brand. There's also a lot of snake oil around GEO / AEO / AI visibility right now. Let's be straight, if your brand appears in 40% of the AI answers you are testing against, it does not mean you have reached 40% of your market. Equally, if an article is used during a successful sales conversation, it doesn't mean PR can take all the glory.
The buyer journey is messy, twisting and turning. Sales, paid, product, existing relationships - these all contribute.
A proper PR brief
- What does the brand need to be known for? Is this accepted right now, or does something need to change?
- Whose confidence do you need to gain? Do they trust your expertise? Does everyone that influences a decision have faith in you?
- How do you earn that confidence? Where do you need to be seen and who influences your core audience?
These are concrete planning questions that enable you to get a decent strategy on paper, deliver against it and measure. Awareness can be an objective, but it isn't the strategy and it does not define the value of PR.
The next time a brief says “raise awareness”, ask the next question: What do we need the right people to understand, believe or do differently?
