We have a bevy of great tools and techniques for measuring almost every aspect of marketing, from click to conversion. Yet in regards to measuring public relations, most marketers feel lost.
After all, PR is unpredictable and subject to whims, breaking news, and sudden pivots, right?
Well, not entirely.
Real patterns and trends drive PR the same as any other industry. The analytics are there, too. You just need to know how to use them. But that's the rub. Many people don't know how or what to measure or what even constitutes PR success. As a result, they pour money into PR programs without even knowing whether they're paying off.
Whether you're managing an agency or an in-house team, you'll need a measurement program that gives you visibility into team performance and helps you evaluate the caliber of the results.
So, with the right tools and best-practices, you can track PR performance. Here are seven secrets to knowing whether your PR is working.
1. Benchmarks are the foundation of smart measurement
Any team can point to a certain number of social shares or a tweet by an influencer and call it a "success." But so what?
Results don't mean much unless you can place them in context. What's the usual number of social shares for a contributed article? A blog post? How many bloggers do you normally have to pitch on behalf of a startup before one takes notice?
Setting benchmarks in advance takes the guesswork out of setting PR goals, and doing so helps you evaluate how well the team is really doing. It also helps develop a definition of success everyone can agree on.
2. Your business objectives should always be the center of the PR program
Let's say you've hired a PR team with a great reputation for meaningful relationships in your industry. You want to use its connections to land you keynotes at industry conferences that your target customers attend. Your business objective is to get face-to-face time and build credibility with these specific customers at a grassroots level. You'll know the PR program is working by how many new partnerships or sales come as a result of the speaking program.
Months into the PR plan, you're surprised to see a PR report full of media wins but nothing about new customer engagements as a result of speaking at conferences. That is what's known as a "failure of alignment."
Make sure the team's strategies are mapped to your business objectives and measure accordingly. Metrics on vague ideas like "brand awareness" are useless; you want solid numbers.
3. Software, not spreadsheets, is where real measurement happens
If your PR team still is using a spreadsheet system to track its performance, I can guarantee members are missing deadlines and failing to spot the patterns driving their results.