4 ways to drive leads and measure success through smarter use of your PR coverage

Views on the value of PR, and the best ways to measure its success, continue to evolve. While visibility remains important, it’s no longer the sole benchmark of success. Businesses need PR to go further, supporting their marketing and sales efforts in a way that creates real, measurable value.

This is where the amplification of coverage becomes vital. By extending the reach of your PR activities, you can ensure that your message reaches the right audience and supports your broader business objectives.

The opportunity for smarter PR

PR is often the starting point for shaping a brand’s reputation and generating awareness, but its potential doesn’t stop there. A well-placed article, a thought leadership piece, or an award win can be incredibly powerful – but only if the right people see it.

For many businesses, this is where the process ends: the coverage exists, but it’s not actively shared or leveraged in a strategic way. The result? You miss opportunities to capitalize on all the hard work that has gone into generating that piece.

The challenge isn’t just getting coverage; it’s about making that coverage work harder. This means amplifying it through the right channels and ensuring it’s aligned with your broader business goals – whether that’s generating leads, nurturing prospects, or building stronger client relationships.

As Stephen Kenwright, director of strategy and digital marketing at Ride Shotgun, shared with me: “Marketers are always under pressure to diversify, adding more and more channels to the mix but, since budgets are shrinking, this is seen as a nice-to-have.

“When we plan ahead, though, it doesn't have to be more expensive – we can repurpose assets and get more out of them. The excellent ROI Genome study by Analytic Partners demonstrates that ROI increases when more channels are used, even if the overall budget stays exactly the same. Put crudely, 1x PR output + 1x SEO output will usually outperform 2x as much PR in the same campaign.”

Fortunately, taking the great work you’re already doing in PR and making it even more effective isn’t as complicated as you might think. It involves a few key components.

1. Targeted outreach

Rather than merely hoping your coverage finds its way to the right audience, accurate targeting ensures it gets there. By using multiple channels to reach your core target audience, you can share your PR success directly with decision-makers, potential clients, and key stakeholders. This increases visibility and ensures the right people are engaging with your message. If done right, this can be a key driver for your sales team.

2. Maximizing social media

Social media, especially LinkedIn, offers a powerful way to extend the reach of your PR. Rarely used to it’s full potential by key decision makers within a business, it becomes an uphill battle for marketing and comms teams to ensure they are achieving maximum reach.

By tailoring your content to specific platforms and audiences, and ensuring the use of individual as well as business accounts, you can really ensure you are reaching target decision-makers int he best way.

3. Aligning PR with sales and marketing

PR shouldn’t operate in a silo. By aligning your PR activities with sales and marketing, you can create a more cohesive approach that supports business goals. For instance, PR coverage can play a key role in nurturing relationships, providing valuable content for email sequences, or enhancing your account-based marketing efforts. It can become a more casual ‘keep in touch’ style approach, rather than a hard sell, which tends to resonate better with people.

4. Measuring impact

The ability to measure PR’s impact has long been a challenge, but all this activity makes it possible. By integrating your PR activities into your CRM or marketing tech stack, you can track metrics like engagement, lead generation, and even conversion rates. This gives you a clearer picture of how PR is contributing to your success.

The role of SEO and links in driving website visits and leads

We know that the holy grail for Digital PR / SEO is backlinks, but while brand PR and digital PR are coming closer together in approach (and often use similar media relations techniques), the objectives will not always be achievable together.

It never hurts to include a relevant link in an article, but many publications have editorial guidelines that restrict their use, so when you are trying to land coverage in your target publications, this can’t be a condition to include them and your only focus.

When media coverage does include links to your website, it improves:

• Visibility in search engines: High-quality backlinks from credible publications signal to search engines that your site is authoritative and relevant, boosting your rankings more than coverage without links.

• Referral traffic: Readers of the coverage can click through to your website, driving visits from a highly engaged audience already interested in your message.

• Lead generation: Optimized landing pages can capture inbound leads, turning PR success into measurable growth.

However, in the absence of these links, there is still a huge value to your PR coverage, and Google does recognize mentions from credible publications, even if there is no link. By ensuring that PR coverage is repurposed into SEO-optimized blogs for your website, you can ensure that the impact of coverage is maximized. These blogs target keywords that align with your audience’s search intent, driving organic traffic and positioning your brand as a thought leader.

When combined with a robust content-sharing strategy on social media, links can create a seamless path from awareness (seeing the coverage) to consideration (engaging with your site) to conversion (filling out a lead form or downloading a resource).

Setting up for success

As we look ahead, it’s clear that PR’s role is evolving. To stay ahead, businesses need to think beyond coverage and focus on amplification – ensuring their PR efforts are aligned with their goals, reaching the right audiences, and delivering measurable results.

By taking this approach, you can transform PR from a visibility tool into a growth engine – one that doesn’t just tell your story but drives your success.