Next PR senior media lead Kasey Christolos tells Doug Simon that the PR industry has good reason be optimistic.

She says that a recent client survey conducted by the agency found that "55 percent of marketers said their budget will stay the same and 24 percent actually said their budgets will increase in 2023."

To make sure that clients keep a clear awareness of PR's value, Christolos says "it's really important to help connect those dots between PR efforts and top of the funnel marketing awareness. I think one of the biggest misses I see as a PR pro is when people aren't connecting ROI to what internal marketers are being measured on internally in terms of the KPIs and what they're really seeing as efforts that move the needle internally."

Christolos also stresses the importance of "creating a clear line of communication between the PR team and the sales team. If that clear line of communication doesn't exist, if there is no relationship that is built between those teams, you're really going to see a miss in terms of sales teams' ability to maximize the PR efforts."

Another place where PR pros often drop the ball is by "not maximizing the ROI of a media placement by extending its lifecycle beyond sales." Christolos suggests "recommending to your client to maximize PR wins, like media placements and award wins" by strategies like "tagging a reporter or the media outlet and social posts or if the reporter is sharing a media article, resharing and engaging those posts, providing social copy to employees for their personal channels." She also says that "utilizing a newsroom" is key to getting out the word about agency wins and media placements.

She also says that communicators need to confront a relatively new acroym—FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). "Fear, uncertainty and doubt is something that many internal sales teams and marketers are very used to hearing. The best way for communicators to really deal with and help counteract FUD is by continuing to invest in PR efforts even during tough times."

The problems a recent crytocurrency client at Next faced showed how agencies can help clients get ahead of the curve on FUD. "That client was perfectly stable in terms of having minimal exposure to the crisis at hand. But they were getting an extreme amount of FUD from everywhere, What we really led with was transparency and stable communication. And through that, we were really able to position that brand as the de facto leader in that industry."

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D S Simon Media helps clients get their stories on television through satellite media tours and by producing and distributing content to the media. The company also produces live social media events.