I am lucky enough to currently Chair the PRCA’s Technology PR Group in the UK. Our basic remit is to look to ensure the best interests of the tech PR community are represented within the PRCA and it’s also just a good chance to get together with senior peers in the tech PR community and swap stories, talk about the current climate and the industry.
One thing we did decide was that there isn’t a great deal of statistical information around on the PR industry in general, and certainly not on the tech sector specifically. And so we thought a useful exercise might be to commission an external market research agency (the lovely chaps at Vanson Bourne agreed to help us out – www.vansonbourne.com) to ask some very basic questions of our combined client base. The results, we think, are very interesting indeed (and, I hope, useful). The research has been covered today in UK PR Week.
Ever been asked how much of the overall marketing budget is spent on PR? I know I have been, by a lot of big clients. Well, according to our research UK technology brands spend, on average, 17.6% of their marketing budget on PR. Which is probably around the region you thought, right? It’s nice to have a real answer though, isn’t it?
Now, I have no idea if that is how much companies *should* be spending on PR, nor whether a clients expectations of PR might change if they found out they were spending more than this average, or less. Those are discussions for us all to have on the basis of such findings. What I do think is that it is good to *have* some numbers to discuss and debate around, both amongst ourselves in agencies and, hopefully, openly with our clients. It is always good to start conversations from a position of knowledge and to reach conclusions that are backed by evidence.
That’s just one interesting finding. Others include the fact that 25% of marketing budgets now appear to spent on some form of Digital outreach (that’s a lot of budget out there guys!), that the average CEO/MD in a tech firm dedicates 0.8 days to PR per month (this goes up the smaller the firm) – is that a little or a lot I hear you ask. I don’t know, what do you think?, and that those firms who do spend money on ROI tools and measurement (50% of respondents) dedicate 3.7% of the overall PR spend to it.
I’d be interested to know people’s thoughts on this first bit of research from our little Committee, and to hear what you think would be good potential areas for further research. Should we drill down into some of these areas further? Or look at something else? What would help you in conversations with clients or just simply from an agency perspective, either within the PR industry only or in comparison to the other marketing disciplines?
Grant
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Haha, that would indeed be a quality Stat, Steve. Unfortunately it’s not
. The two are separate figures – so marketing is spending 25% of digital ‘stuff’ and 17.6% on PR. As per reply to Pinny, unfortunately we simply didn’t have the space in this initial survey to really drill down on either of those statistics.
I admit its all very top line in its findings, but hopefully the Group and others can use these numbers as a base for further, more in-depth research into those component parts…
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