Earned media is at an inflection point. Long viewed as a core component of public relations strategies, earned or unpaid media coverage across news, broadcast and other third-party channels is now being evaluated through a more rigorous lens. Business leaders and decision makers have greater access to performance data than ever before, and they are using it to place greater scrutiny on communications investments – and particularly earned media – to understand how those efforts contribute to measurable business outcomes.
For communications leaders, marketing executives and other stakeholders in B2B technology companies, it’s more important now than ever before to adopt success metrics that illustrate how earned media translates to real business outcomes.
The Old Standard
For decades, earned media success has been defined by metrics like impressions, which measure how many people potentially saw a media story, and ad value equivalency (AVE), which estimates the monetary value of news or feature stories by comparing it to what equivalent advertising space or airtime would have cost if purchased as advertising.
While these metrics are useful for showing a brand’s scale and reach, they often lack substance, consistency and quality. Most importantly, they rarely answer the question that matters most to decision-makers looking for real business value from earned media: did this actually influence business outcomes?
That question has become harder to avoid as PR teams increasingly report into sales-driven organizations. C-suite leaders evaluating performance are not just looking for reach. They are assessing pipeline influence, sales acceleration, competitive positioning and long-term market perception. That is where traditional earned media measurements start to break down because they offer limited insight to the key performance indicators that truly move the needle.
How Buyer Decision-Making is Changing Earned Media
Proving earned media ROI begins with understanding the rapidly changing nature of how buyers discover and evaluate brands, products and services. The reality is that most B2B buyers, whether they are executives, managers or technical decision-makers, don’t engage with sales teams until they’re two-thirds of the way through their buying journey.
Today’s buyers are also gathering information from a multitude of new and traditional information sources. Legacy media outlets like CNET, Forbes and Wirecutter still play an important role, but buyers are increasingly leveraging new media channels like Reddit, YouTube, Substack, and now AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for information gathering. As a result, earned media results now carry more influence and have a longer lasting impact, with 82 – 89% of third-party generative AI citations coming from earned media.
To reflect this changing dynamic, earned media needs to be viewed and assessed as more than tool for building early awareness. Instead, it should be evaluated based on how it drives trust, consideration and decision-making over time.
Measuring Earned Media Results Across the Sales Funnel
There are three key areas in the sales funnel that different types of earned media can support, and measuring ROI varies at each level:
Top of Funnel
The focus here is on discovery and relevance. Traditionally, using a share-of-voice (SOV) analysis, which captures how often your brand is being talked about compared to competitors, has been a meaningful way to capture ROI at this stage. However, pairing a SOV analysis with message pull-through, or an assessment of how often your key messages are being reflected in the market, achieves greater depth and clarity.
As more buyers leverage AI for research, it’s becoming increasingly important for brands to measure where and how they are being cited in AI-generated responses. Specialized tools, like Brandi AI, can help communications and marketing leaders gain a better sense of where their brands are being cited – and where opportunities exist to strengthen their presence.
The types of placements and stories that drive impact at this stage are thought leadership, trend commentary, original research, news-driven stories and broader industry coverage that positions your brand within larger market conversations. Prioritizing outlets that allow backlinks to additional content or website pages can further enhance ROI by showing a direct connection between earned media and website traffic.
Middle of Funnel
Here, the priority shifts to credibility and trust. This is where PR strategy starts to intersect more directly with content marketing, helping prospects move deeper into evaluating case studies, product pages and competitive comparisons.
The most effective stories at this stage are customer success stories, executive bylines, analyst commentary and feature stories that reinforces expertise and market authority. The key shift is from visibility to engagement. Earned media at this stage should not only inform, but also actively move buyers forward with insights, considerations and best practices.
Bottom of Funnel
This is where the goal is to win comparisons against competitors and reinforce both pricing and value differentiators. PR’s influence becomes more direct, even if it is still part of a multi-touch journey. Earned media coverage that highlights customer outcomes, third-party validation, analyst recognition, awards, service spotlights, and pricing or value differentiation can directly support late-stage sales conversations.
It is common for prospects to reference articles, analyst commentary or third-party coverage during these conversations. While attribution is rarely linear, consistent patterns in how prospects say they discovered a company, along with deal acceleration after key media hits, provide meaningful evidence of influence.
What Strong PR Programs Get Right
What separates high-performing PR strategies from traditional ones is not the volume of coverage, but the intentionality behind it. Effective programs are designed around outcomes, not outputs. That means earning interviews, feature stories and industry commentary articles that do more than generate awareness – they actively support conversion paths. A customer story is most powerful when it directly links to validation content that supports a buying decision.
This also changes how teams think about media target selection. The long-standing assumption that mainstream publications, like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, are always the most valuable is fading. In reality, effectiveness depends on where your buyers are paying attention. In many B2B categories, that includes niche industry outlets, online communities and peer-driven forums. The goal is not prestige. It’s precision.
Rethinking PR Measurement and Agency Partnerships
For business leaders looking for the best PR and communications partners, it’s no longer just about creativity or media relationships. It is about whether a partner understands business objectives and can connect PR activities to measurable outcomes. The best strategic partners ask hard questions from the start, such as what the business goals are, how success will be defined and how impact will be tracked across the funnel, and serve as counselors instead of just order takers.
Ultimately, proving PR performance requires clarity from the beginning. Success needs to be defined in business terms, not just communications outputs. Measurement must be consistent, not episodic. Reporting must go beyond coverage summaries to show how earned media contributes to pipeline influence over time.
For example, in Airfoil Group’s work with digital transformation consultancies such as Emergn, the focus extends beyond traditional media outreach to building sustained thought leadership and category positioning through earned media. This includes elevating executive perspectives in industry conversations, aligning storylines to core business priorities and ensuring that media coverage reinforces credibility with enterprise buyers over time. The emphasis is not just on visibility, but on shaping how the market understands the company’s expertise, approach and differentiation across complex buying cycles.
Earned media in B2B tech is no longer about being seen. It is about being found at the right moment, in the right context, by the right buyer.
Airfoil Group regularly partners with B2B technology companies to connect earned media visibility to measurable business outcomes across trust, pipeline influence, competitive positioning and growth. Contact us today.
