The Key to Measuring and Understanding the Success of PR and Communications Programs
Much has been written and discussed over the years about how to measure the value of PR and communications. The truth is, measuring a PR program’s return on investment has always been more difficult than, say, measuring the direct return on an advertisement, a direct mail campaign, or other easily trackable paid program.
And yet, we know today that earned and shared media is significantly more impactful—and trusted—than typical paid (advertising) investments.
At The James Collective, we’ve evaluated these measurement tools and created a process that measures both outputs and outcomes, while understanding the need to measure short term successes (click through, impressions, sales, etc) and also build long term awareness, brand equity, and marketing pull.
When considering how to measure your company’s PR and integrated marketing communications efforts, the first step is to understand what type of results you should measure.
In general, we break these down into earned media (i.e. magazine coverage, newspaper article, unpaid influencer post, etc), paid media (advertising, paid ambassadorship), shared media (shared social media content, reposts, etc), and owned media (a company’s blog, newsletter, and other controlled channels).
From there, set meaningful qualitative and quantitative goals that are specific to your company or program. Your quantitative goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely), and the qualitative goals should be tied to certain messaging or long term brand equity building.
For PR, goals can include target publications/stories, number of impressions, increase in impressions, social media engagement, increase in engagement, increase in click through/traffic, increase in newsletter sign ups and sales, etc.
We also look at measuring outputs and outcomes, with the understanding that PR takes time and balancing both outputs and outcome enables companies to track both the short term wins and long term effects of their PR strategy.
When considering your outputs, ask yourself:
Did you reach or engage your target audience with the messages you intended?
Upon reaching that target audience, what effect was seen in your business? DId website traffic increase? Did you attract more newsletter sign-ups, or grow your social media following? Did you track an uptick of sales?
Ultimately, setting—and more importantly, tracking—an array of goals in your marketing communications programs will not only allow you to assess the impact of your efforts, but more importantly, ensure that you’re being efficient, intentional, and smart with your investment.
Ready to jumpstart your business' PR and marketing program? Get in touch.
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