This blog post was also published on
Donncha Hughes' blog, earlier this month when he asked me to write a guest post, thanks Donncha. Donncha is a fantastic mentor, trainer and business advisor to SMEs and startups, offering a range of services, see his website www.startuphughes.com.
I get asked a lot about Public Relations (PR) Evaluation by clients and potential clients who are somewhat skeptical about the benefits of PR and how it will help their business. It’s understandable , particularly in times of tighter budgets, that clients need to justify the costs involved. Here are my thoughts on the topic……………
Public Relations is an intangible, and it is therefore difficult, not impossible, but difficult to measure. How do you know if a particular success in your business such as an increase in sales (the most commonly mentioned one), can be linked to PR? The short answer is you don’t know for sure but there are some key things to remember when embarking on a PR campaign which will assist you in determining its success.
It’s critical to set out your objectives at the beginning of any PR campaign and know what you want to achieve. If you do this, you will at least have a benchmark against which to measure your successes. For example, if an objective is to increase sales, then a good way of determining whether you have succeeded is to track leads. Ask new customers how they heard about you and you will soon begin to determine if its your PR which is assisting in the generation of sales.
PR is about building reputation, one PR hit wont necessarily do this on its own. One ad is unlikely to either by the way. PR works best if carried out in a strategic fashion, over a period of time, preferably 12 months and in conjunction with the other elements of the marketing mix such as Advertising, Direct Mail, Direct Selling etc.
Part of that strategy will be identifying your target audience, key messages and the publications and media which you wish to achieve publicity in to reach that audience.
You can collate the clippings yourself, being mindful of copyright issues, or employ a press cuttings agency to assist you in collating media coverage in those target publications and media. Over a period of time, you will see how many hits you have achieved and where.
If you wish you can see what this coverage might cost in equivalent advertising revenue, ie if you purchased the same amount of advertising, how much would it cost you?. You will see that PR is often more cost effective in terms of column inches.
Key message content is also a good way of measuring the effectiveness of a PR campaign. Part of your PR strategy will be to have a set of key messages which you wish to convey to your target audience. You can analyse your media coverage for those messages and see if you are managing to get them across.
Technological advances are also continuing to transform the media landscape in which we operate. The new media channels such as blogs , Facebook ,Linked In and Twitter have helped to generate a proliferation of media. On the one hand, this creates opportunities, on the other it presents a challenge in terms of measurement. Many of these platforms have measurement tools inbuilt which enable you to see who is viewing your Linked In profile for example or how many people have ‘Liked’ your Facebook page and ‘Retweeted’ your Tweets. See
www.measurement.ie, details of a recent conference which may also provide some useful insights.
In summary, here are some tips for measuring the effectiveness of PR :
1.Set clear objectives
2.Be strategic in terms of the publications & media you target, have a clear message
3.Monitor your media coverage
4.Compare your media coverage to equivalent advertising spend
5. Measure the effectiveness of your PR across all media, traditional and new media
6. Ask your customers where they heard about you
Any further queries, don’t hesitate to get in touch, I am on 087 122 0119.
