According to Buffer, 82% of PR pros don’t know how to evaluate the ROI of their PR campaign. Back in the day, the PR metrics that professionals had to track were limited to press clippings and press articles. Any good PR pro knows that the effectiveness of their work has shifted significantly in the past decade. Our earlier blog talked about the different PR measurement tools that brands and organizations can use. With digital and social media now being an integral part of PR, the number of likes, comments, retweets, shares and replies helps measure the effectiveness of a campaign.
Is your website worth a visit?
A primary avenue that provides a bird’s eye view of how well (or terribly) a campaign is performing is tracking your website visitors before and after a campaign launch. Quite simply put, a rise in new visitors indicates s growth in brand awareness. While this doesn’t necessarily convert into sales, it increases traffic to a brand’s website and helps them reach the right target audience.
Do you need to up your social media game?
We all know that most customers prefer to raise issues on social media. Unfortunately, the speed at which feedback comments, posts, ratings, videos and images get distributed places a heavy burden on brands. The only way to stay ahead of the curve is to answer EVERY complaint across all channels, every single time.
With 75% of consumers feeling empowered to interact with brands through social media, they have more means than ever to hold a brand accountable for their products and services. On the flip side, if your PR campaign is not sparking any conversation at all, it could spell trouble for your brand. This simply indicates that the quality and quantity of content wasn’t relevant or interesting enough for people to like, share or leave a comment. A surefire way to measure the success of a campaign is to consider the number of new followers and monthly post reach on all your social media channels.
Is your brand worth talking about?
According to an article by Walker Sands, when it comes to media impressions, the best way to understand it is to multiply the number of press clippings by the total circulation of the publication in which it appeared. So for example, if your article as featured in Forbes, which has a total circulation of 5 million, your brand thereby achieved 5 million media impressions!
But that’s not all. Merely mentioning an article isn’t enough. The quality of content, the key messages and takeaways from the article need to be monitored. If your press coverage isn’t resulting in valuable content, it fails to meet its end goal of positively answering the ‘Does PR Work?’ question.
After all, actionable content helps create a better brand image in the mind of potential customers and drive your sales figures up!
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