The world of marketing lives by the mantra “if you can’t measure it, don’t do it”. There are plenty of models in place to measure digital and direct marketing activity but what about other ‘top-of-the-funnel’ activities? How do you measure PR success and prove the effectiveness on the bottom line? Here’s how, at EC-PR, we use RESULTS to evaluate and quantify our clients’ PR campaigns.
R is for Retrieve those clippings
The easiest way to evaluate successful exposure is to track the volume and quality of ‘press clippings’ (and in a digital world we don’t just mean paper). At EC-PR, we track the what and where on a monthly basis and provide our clients with monthly, quarterly and annual comparisons.
E is for Extract impressions
Once we know where your brand is being represented we can calculate your reach. We simply multiply the number of clippings by the total circulation of the publication. It’s not an exact science – not everyone who views the content will actually read it – so this is where great content is required.
S is for Social interactions
Who’s talking about you across social media, what conversations are happening, are they positive/negative or neutral? We measure engagement, review it, and watch for changes. If positive social mentions of your brand increase after a PR campaign, you know you’ve got it right.
U is for Unique content
Press clippings and impressions are not enough – it is not a case of ‘spray & pray’.
You want quality in-depth coverage in the hero publications for your industry. We pride ourselves on developing topical, thought provoking ideas that interest the media, translate to the consumer and align with our clients’ communication strategy.
L is for Love those leads
The sales team can become your best allies in measuring PR effectiveness – by using their direct contact to ask prospects how they heard about your brand and services. They want PR to provide brand awareness and lead generation, so incentivise them to provide the insight that improves your ability to do just that.
T is for Traffic
Align your PR campaigns with digital marketing messaging (right down to those infamous ‘keywords’) to optimise your natural and paid search. It can be difficult to directly relate what traffic resulted from which action but measuring the volume of web traffic you get pre- and post-campaign is critical.
S is for Surveys
Ideally, you should do a pre- and post-campaign survey to measure a campaign’s effectiveness. But when budgets are tight, a dose of common sense is required. If you can’t afford to do it for every campaign, could you run an annual survey? We’ll also find other benchmarks (like the Interbrand index) to measure long-term effectiveness.
The purpose of PR campaigns is to get you visible, valued and understood. But we do more than drive audience behaviour and invoke their curiosity in your brand. We also provide insights on how to improve, which is only possible when you measure RESULTS.
