Target measuring PR performance

How to measure your PR performance

Is there an easy way to measure your PR performance?

Measure and review. Measure and review. It sounds a bit dull but in marketing we’re taught to undertake this on a continuous cycle. It’s the only way to prove a tangible return on investment, and justify your marketing spend to the finance team.

The truth is that much of the marketing and PR activity you undertake just isn’t that simple to measure. That means you have to fall back on tactical measures rather than trying to look at the the effect a particular activity has on, say, brand awareness in the longer term. Ah, setting tactical objectives. What does that mean?

Let us explain. Or, rather, let’s use the suggestions that Ken Goften proposes for measuring the effect of PR.
He came up with these in 1999, and there have been some radical changes in technology and tracking since then, such as social marketing and PR. But they’re still valid. We’ve tweaked them a bit to bring them up to date, and selected three (plus one of our own) that we think any business can undertake cheaply and effectively.

Press cuttings
Measure the number of mentions you get in the media. This can be broken down into high quality and low quality mentions. A piece in the FT will probably have more value to you than a mention in a blog.

Define a media equivalent value
A media equivalent value is how much an article might be worth in comparison to paid-for media. Publications will always have a published rate card for advertising, so 10cm by 3 column ad may cost £500 – so if you get a piece in there that’s the same size you could give this a value of £500.

Define a ‘social’ equivalent value
It’s harder to do this with social media. But you may consider a mention in a blog or a tweet to be of value. So, using some free tools on the web, you can see how someone’s blog is tweeted or retweeted, and define its “reach”. i.e. how many people could potentially see that tweet. You can find out the readership of a key publication (say, 40,000 readers with a full page ad costing £5000), and compare that to the ‘reach’ of a lengthy blog – and then assign a value to it. If the reach is 40,000 people, the blog could be worth £5000 to you.

Objective setting
Set tactical objectives for your PR campaign. Monitor and evaluate what happens to see if your objectives are achieved. This may include a financial objective. For example, you may aim to get 2 pieces of coverage in the national press every month but 5 in the three months knifer Christmas; or you may try and get £5000 of coverage in regional press in the six weeks before an exhibition you’re at.

Set these in line with your overall marketing strategy and you’ll have a better understanding of your PR performance.

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