Answering the Age-Old Question: How Does PR Drive Leads

A Ketner Group Communications client case study

“How does earned media coverage correlate to sales and help drive leads?”

It’s the age-old question in the PR world and one that will undoubtedly come up during the lifetime of any agency-to-client relationship.

This question has not been an easy one to answer since the inception of the public relations industry. Albeit, it’s been a constant issue that pros across the board have avidly worked to find an answer to.

Our very own Adrienne Newcomb has written blogs discussing how clients can use earned media coverage to drive leads. While our clients have also shared their own personal experiences on how they’ve used earned media coverage to drive their marketing efforts.

As well, various measurement and analytics programs including Cision and Meltwater have become popular in the past decade to help close the gap between PR and sales. Providing various metrics and breakdowns to help PR pros explain how PR correlates to sales.

It’s a tricky scenario. Technically, PR is considered top of funnel in the sales and marketing world. However, if used as part of an integrated marketing plan, it can be an influencing factor in turning the heads of just the right prospect at the right time.

Earning the coverage

This was the very case for our client Larry Waks of Foley & Lardner LLP. A partner at the law firm, Larry represents many clients across food and beverage, distilled spirits, consumer products, fashion, entertainment, media, intellectual property, and mergers and acquisitions.

Dubbed “Lawyer to the Stars” by some of his colleagues, Larry’s innovative and personable approach has made him a go-to lawyer for many in the entertainment industry and allowed him to build an exciting and unique client base.

This includes representing George Clooney, Rande Gerber and Mike Meldman, in the $1 billion sale of the Casamigos tequila brand to global spirits giant Diageo Plc. Larry used his expertise to help develop the recent Garth Brooks concerts at drive-in theaters across North America.

During our recent collaboration with Larry, we helped promote his role in the launch of Travis Scott’s CACTI spiked seltzer. We secured a podcast interview between him and Ad Age’s E.J. Schultz to discuss Larry’s recent work on celebrity alcohol deals and his trajectory as a lawyer to date. The interview was a success—E.J. and Larry had an insightful conversation and great banter, providing for an interesting piece of content that, if leveraged correctly, could be very useful.

Turning the coverage into leads

After the interview took place, Larry and our team worked with Foley & Lardner’s internal marketing arm to alert them of the upcoming article and ensure internal and external promotion from Foley’s channel was ready to go. Meanwhile, Ketner Group worked finalized image and publishing details with E.J.

When the article went live on Jan. 20, the integrated effort between Foley and Ketner Group resulted in Larry receiving an influx of notifications from clients and qualified leads within the distilled spirits space. These inquiries led to new connections and ultimately the start of new business projects.