To make sure that your PR campaigns are working. It’s necessary to measure your Public Relations Return On Investment to analyze its success.
But in order to do that, you will need to establish your goals and check if you have achieved them. And we will do just that, but first we need to talk about PR measurement.
PR Measurement
PR measurement helps you in checking if your PR efforts are worthy or if there are changes necessary. For instance, if you are in the middle of a PR campaign to improve your brand awareness but you notice that it’s not giving you the desired results, you will have to change it before it’s over.
Key Metric of Public Relations Return On Investment
But just what are these key metrics that you should keep an eye for? Although most marketers didn’t think that measuring PR campaigns was possible or even reliable.
But these days, PR KPIs can even be monitored in real time and implement changes if needed.
And among the many metrics that are available to test your PR success, you might also want to take a look at social media listening. It is mandatory to be aware of what others have to say about your brand and services.
This will not only give you an idea on where you stand but also get insights on how to better improve your products and position yourself as the brand authority.
Moreover, you should also check how your contents are doing. If they are successful among your audience and if the contents you are creating are good enough that it’s bringing in traffic to your site, or leads that are relevant for your PR campaigns.
You might also want to check if your SEO efforts are working which includes a web page that is optimized, mobile friendly and others. Failing to check these metrics can prove to be fatal to your company.
Media Outreach
To start, the term media outreach simply means how you are putting your story in front of people who have the means and platform to tell it to a wider audience.
This is important as this is an effective way to brand yourself. In fact, a lot of news stories that you may be reading today have been carefully planned and executed by media outreach campaigns.
So how can we do this?
1. PR Mentions
One good way to measure your PR achievements is to search how many articles there are that mention your brand and products? In other words, you will need to count just how many journalists have picked your press releases and distributed them?
But simply knowing the number won’t tell you much. You should also analyze if those publications have contributed to your brand’s awareness or if you are getting a better image to the public.
2. Media Impressions
In order to check your media impression, you would need to choose one of those press clippings and have it multiplied by the number of copies that the publication has sold.
And this would be the exact number of impressions you’ve made on a particular press clipping. Just note that it will be necessary to add the numbers if you had more than one press release published to add the numbers.
Brand Reputation
Your brand’s reputation is very important. It increases your customer’s loyalty, it builds confidence in the market and will help position you as a leader in your space. But how can we get this data?
3. Reviews
One of the key metrics to see how well Public Relations return on investment are working is to check your brand’s reputation through by researching the number of reviews that has been written about your products and services. You also need to check if these are positive or negative reviews.
Being aware of what your customers are saying can help give you an idea of what others think about your products and services. It’s definitely a wonderful feedback source and will undeniably give you a clear impression of how your customers view your brand.
4. Brand Mentions
Apart from reviews, it’s also worth monitoring just how many people have mentioned your brand online. You can use tools like Google Alerts and it is advisable to be alert and know when and where your brand’s name is being mentioned.
It would also help you to take action in case someone were to attack your reputation and spread false accusations about you, your employees, brand and products.
5. Referring Websites
This metric tells you which information your website traffic comes from. This can be controlled with Google Analytics.
Although tracking referring websites is not an exact science. But you can get an idea just how much traffic you are getting from which platform. And perhaps create contents from there.
Content Audit
When it comes to achieving your content marketing goals, the first impulse is always about creating and distributing new content.
However, your contents are often buried and are rarely revisited and reused. This is really unfortunate for some as updating and repurposing existing content can be an efficient content marketing tactics.
This is where Content Audit comes in, it helps you identify which content can be improved and can be repurposed into other formats.
A content audit is when you systematically analyze and assess all the content on your website. And the final objective is to reveal strengths and weaknesses in your content strategy and to adapt the content plan to your current marketing goals.
6. Engagements
With regards to your content, surely there are posts that are performing better than others. So why not take a look at your audience’s interaction with your content and say it was originally an article.
Why not create pitches, infographics, videos, pictures, e-books and others to reuse and republish your content.
7. Social Shares
Social shares is the amount of times someone has shared your content. This happens along with engagement, you can check your social share per piece of content and on the channel as you check on them.
8. Branded Search
Branded search is checking just how many times people have typed your brand’s name into search engines in order to visit your site? This is opposite to referral traffic as it informs you about direct traffic that is generated on search engines.
9. Bounce Rates
Bounce rates talks about the number of users who have visited your site and left without taking any further action. That’s to say, it gives you the number of visits to your site that immediately left.
It’s important to know it especially if your objective is to drive your visitors to your website and its other pages. But if you have a website that’s a blog or is not a landing page meant to sell or drive people to others but simply share information, a high bounce rate would be natural.
10. Community Growth
Community Growth is an interesting KPI as it evaluates just how well your community has grown. Nowadays, it’s typical to have a community of followers. But depending on the platform, there are different ways to assess your community growth.
The key benefit of community growth is that you encourage an open dialogue with your customers and help them start conversation with each other.
So rather than simply pushing information to them, you are gathering these loyal customers into a space that can talk about your brand, share great customer experience that can encourage further loyalty and conversions.
Always Check Your Metrics
So those are just key metrics on measuring your Public Relations return on investment that you should to see if your PR campaigns are working or not. It’s easy to gather these data but making the changes can take a while and patience. Don’t rush it and trust the numbers.
UP NEXT: Questions To Ask Before Hiring A Public Relations Agency
