PR firm Bospar has published findings from its new study – “PR & Marketing in The New Normal” – which aims to determine how COVID-19 and other events of the first half of the year have impacted B2C and B2B decision-making.
An overwhelming majority of Americans (88%) said that seeing placed stories through PR activity would drive them to visit a company’s website. Nearly one in five Americans (19%) said they only needed to see a story once before being driven to visit. And nearly a quarter (23%) said they needed to see the company in the news twice before visiting. By the time a company has appeared 10 times in news 85% of Americans say they would visit the company’s website.
An overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) said seeing placed stories through PR activity would even drive them to purchase a product. One in five Americans said they would make a purchase on the second or third time they saw the company in the news. By the time a company has appeared 10 times in the news 86% of Americans said they would buy it.
Americans ranked placed PR news stories (41%) as their #1 source to read before buying a consumer product. That was followed by Consumer Reports (40%), friends (40%), family (34%) and the manufacturer’s website (34%).
When asked what they look for when about to buy a product for their business, PR-placed articles ranked first with 34% of Americans, followed by: friends (23%); family (22%); analyst reports from the likes of Gartner, Forrester and IDC (21%); coworkers (18%); peer review sites like G7 or TrustRadius (15.2%); social media commentary (12%); press releases (12%); awards (11%); and white papers (9%).
“It may seem self-serving for a PR agency to publish a report that says ‘PR Works!’ but that doesn’t make it any less true,” said Curtis Sparrer, a principal at Bospar. “I think my favorite statistic of all was the distaste for white papers. Who has time to read those anyway?”
