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Historically, PR was measured by vanity metrics including article clippings, impressions and AVEs. But today, we operate in a fragmented media landscape, which means we must analyze and respond to a much broader set of data to measure performance. And while its important, PR measurement continues to be unstructured and ad hoc for many.
As we discuss in our white paper, Demystifying PR Measurement, your exec team speaks the language of tangible results and metrics. The more you use data to demonstrate your impact on the business, the easier it is to prove your worth and the need for additional investment. But this type of measurement can be challenging due to lack of time, confusion about what to measure or the complexity of bringing it all together. So where should you start?
Start with the end in mind
If you don’t define what success looks like, you can’t set the right goals, strategy or measure performance. What’s the human problem you’re trying to solve? And what’s the business impact you’re trying to achieve? Listen to your audiences — how do they define their needs and challenges? This type of research will help you to frame a solution that resonates.
Tie communications objectives to business goals
Comms teams with clear objectives that tie into business goals (and use consistent metrics to assess progress), get stronger results, while contributing to strategy at the highest level. Your exec team will have goals around reaching revenue targets: acquiring or retaining customers, winning market share, etc., and the comms function should support organizational success in a way that’s clear to you and your C-suite.
Access the right data
To set the right objectives and develop a solid plan, you need access to the right data. Planning must begin with knowing your audience, which is why data has become a critical pillar for winning. There’s an abundance of data available to us now and tech that can help extract useful insights from it. With multiple media monitoring and analysis solutions to choose from, you can leave measurement to the experts while you focus on what you do best — media relations, storytelling and comms strategy.
Establish a PR measurement framework
Rather than a simple collection of metrics, a measurement framework creates a systematic way to collect and analyze the right data to understand performance, extract insights for continuous improvement and demonstrate the value of PR.
Your framework steps might include:
· Content quality: Go deeper than measuring the volume of media coverage. Gauge the quality of your content by combining article relevance, publication authority, social amplification and article sentiment into a single metric.
· Engagement: You’ve got press coverage — but is anyone consuming your content? And if so, how much and for how long are they reading it? Look at the reader’s time on page, scroll depth and unique visitors for each article.
· Influence: How did your content shape the opinions of the reader and impact brand sentiment? You can find this out with real-time survey results from your audience.
· Action: What business outcomes did your content drive, including website traffic, sign-ups, sales and revenue? Understand how many times people (after reading a piece of content) visit your website and what actions they take.
We call these “metrics that matter’’ because they can be tied to the KPIs that the C-suite cares about.
Access our full white paper Demystifying PR Measurement to explore more about how you can use data to showcase your value, success and contribution to your brand.
