The marketing world has become increasingly data-driven. Just ask anyone who has innocently searched for a product online only to be inundated by ads for said product in their email, social media, visits to websites that accept advertising, and even in their dreams. (OK, the dreams part isn’t quite true yet — although I hear Google and Amazon are working on it.)
The one segment of integrated marketing that has been less cut and dry when it comes to measuring outcomes is public relations. While agencies have always tracked results, the ROI of media exposure that you earn (rather than buy) has never been as straightforward as measuring exposure and lead generation from marketing and advertising. With digital marketing, an email campaign and most other marketing strategies with a CTA, there’s generally an immediate, easily traceable action taken by prospects.
With PR, though, there is often no immediate action for readers to take (although sometimes readers are so impressed by a thought leadership article, for example, that they check out your website based on its inclusion in the "about the author" information).
PR is typically leveraged to build visibility and credibility — maybe you or someone on your executive team is quoted in an article or contributes a vendor-neutral thought leadership piece. The goal is to create awareness so when the time is right for a purchase, your company is included on the shortlist. But how do you measure that?
PR has always been difficult to quantify, let alone track. Fortunately, today there are tools to help measure, track and assess. Following are three steps you should take to leverage a data-driven approach to measure the success of your PR campaigns.
1. Align PR measurement with business goals.
In our data-happy age, there are all kinds of metrics you can track, but it's a good strategy to focus on the ones most important to your business.
For example, you may want to measure how much media coverage you're earning versus your competitors (“share of voice”). It’s important to not only grab more share of voice than your competitors, but to ensure it’s the right kind of attention.
Look for media monitoring and analytics tools to measure not only share of voice, but also the current sentiment — neutral, positive or negative — and whether it changes after launching your campaign.
If one of your PR goals is to reach specific decision-makers to increase awareness, you can track media outlets that mention your company/products/services. Multiply that media coverage by the total circulation of each outlet and weight by the importance of the media outlet by your target audience.
Another approach to see if your efforts are moving the dial on your business goals is to do a pre-campaign survey of your market, focused on brand awareness. Once the campaign is active, survey your market again to see if statistics are trending up.
If you start by aligning your PR goals to your business goals, you’ll get valuable guidance that can make a real difference in the business.
2. Establish what you’re going to measure before launching the PR campaign.
Nothing is less effective than setting goals after a campaign has launched. In PR, it’s particularly crucial because you don’t have as much control over when placements land. Unlike marketing campaigns, it’s up to reporters and editors when the thought leadership articles or quotes from interviews with your thought leaders will run in media outlets.
It’s just like taking a trip. If you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t want to start driving before you set the GPS. You could be starting out in the wrong direction entirely. Determine what you want to measure, and then put the mechanisms in place to do it.
3. Set your KPIs.
Once you know what you want to measure, you need to know how success will be defined. And you must be sure all stakeholders agree.
Some common KPIs include:
• Web traffic changes on days when PR materials (press releases, thought leadership articles, thought leadership quotes in articles) go live.
• Coverage by type of activity.
• Share of voice.
• Positive/negative/neutral coverage.
• Traffic to landing pages vs. engagement (e.g., a request for more information and/or downloads of high-value marketing materials such as a white paper or case study).
• Social media shares/retweets by month.
• Social media @ mentions or hashtag use.
It's best to start by focusing on three to five metrics that most closely align with your business goals or that you believe will help you move the needle. You can always reevaluate and change them later.
Show Me The Data
If you’re not ready for a subscription-based media monitoring and analytics tool, Google Analytics has a lot of free tools. For example, you can use Google Analytics to measure web traffic when PR materials go live.
You can also use UTM codes to see how much web traffic a specific placement drove. To do this, simply create a custom URL to a homepage or product page with the UTM code embedded in a link, and include it as a hyperlink for PR efforts such as press releases and social media. Google Analytics will track where users come from if they click through to a page on your website using a link with the code.
Evaluate, Rinse And Repeat
The purpose of data-driven PR measurement isn’t to determine if PR is "right" for your organization. You should already have made that decision before the campaign launches.
Instead, its purpose is to help ensure your PR campaigns stay on track and that you’re optimizing your program to deliver the best possible performance based on your business goals and KPIs. If it is, great! Keep up the good work. If it isn’t, determine what needs to change, and then pivot.
Finally, remember that business goals change, as do audience perceptions. Evaluate the structure and performance of your program constantly, and you’re far more likely to create PR wins for the organization over the long term.
