As we wrap up another calendar year, hopefully chock full of business success, it’s a good time to reflect back on what worked and what didn’t. In fact, most clients expect some form of measurement, whether it’s managed by an agency, an in-house staff, or both. For PR practitioners, however, measuring the effectiveness of programs is a difficult task. Primarily because there’s no “silver bullet”— no perfect single tool or utility to get it done. So, with no widely accepted standard accepted standard for doing so, how do you accurately measure PR?
It really comes down to what you’re trying to measure. For example, if your goal is to increase general awareness of a company, brand, product or service, you will most likely measure the number (and percentage) of media placements in target publications over a specific period of time. If you’re striving to increase call-to-action, you should be measuring the mechanisms in place to generate response. An online “click now” or “book to order” campaign, for example, should be measuring specific website traffic for the given URLs.
Once you know exactly what you’re measuring, based on your program objectives, you can seek out specific tools to help you out. In the second example above, for example, Google Analytics would provide a quick and easy way to gather measurement data.
In today’s social media world, it’s getting a bit easier to leverage built-in tools to see how well you’re doing. An increase in “likes” on Facebook, number of followers on Twitter, or comments to your weekly blog demonstrates engagement—and an important sign that you’re hitting your target audience with the right content and messages.
Of course, traditional media monitoring still has its place in PR measurement. In fact, most PR agencies and their clients emphasize publicity results and the number of clips they generate. This remains a predominantly manual, “heavy lifting” task to measure success but can provide an accurate quantitative (volume) and qualitative (message relevance, tone of coverage) analysis on your PR effectiveness with target outlets and audiences.
Because PR measurement is such a broad concept, these are just a few examples of how you can achieve some form of tangible measurement. Yet while measuring specific PR programs is necessary and valuable task, at the end of the day—or year—your success will hinge on how well PR helped move the corporate sales needle. In our next post, we’ll provide some examples of this type of true end results.