The Public Relations Blog

Communicators are making better use of the data fetched from the frequent measurement of their endeavors

If we’ve learned one thing from Ragan’s Communications Benchmark Report, it’s that upon evaluating the potency of their work, communicators are more impressed with their endeavors in 2021 than they were the previous year. 

The numbers tell a similar story, as 52% of the respondents rated the state of their internal communications as good or excellent compared to only 41% of respondents in 2020.

Monitor your website traffic and gain actionable insights with Google Analytics

Websites are a phenomenal way to present your brand to your target audience. It is a one-stop destination to share your company’s vision and mission. Thus, it is vital for you to thoroughly track and analyze your website and its traffic.

Google Analytics is a popular analytics tool to gauge the nuances of your website’s audience. These include their behavioral patterns, response to the web pages, and the varying trends over time. Let’s dive into what Google Analytics is all about and what kind of data it provides.

How to know if your PR campaigns are financially successful

Are your campaigns really profitable? How can you prove that your marketing campaigns were of value?

Calculating the return on investment (ROI) determines if you’ve been making a profit from your public relations campaigns and helps you identify which PR exercises yield the most buck.

This article discusses ROI on PR campaigns, how to calculate it, and challenges against a perfect ROI calculation.

Three essential tools to evaluate your PR campaign’s success

Measuring, monitoring, and evaluating your corporate communications and public relations campaigns will allow them to evolve and improve. Assess your current strategy to determine if it’s working or if you need to take another approach. 

If you have an unsuccessful campaign and you don’t know because you never measured it, how can you call your company successful? You need to put in the work and measure, monitor, and evaluate your tactics to see if it’s successful and providing an ROI.

Use data to prove the effectiveness of your public relations work.

Traditionally, some people believe it’s difficult to prove how successful a PR campaign is due to a lack of hard data showing how well the campaign worked. However, times have changed. With modern measurement techniques, PR campaigns now have data to back up claims about how successful a PR campaign was.

Data gathered from a PR campaign is vital to any public relations plan. It shows the proof of value for public relations efforts. Hard data lets you, your clients, and other departments visualize what worked and what didn’t. if someone higher up in your company asks for proof for how effective a PR campaign is, data will give them exactly what they want.

Learn why you should make PR campaign measurement a priority with our guest Katie Delahaye Paine.

Guest:

Our episode guest is Katie Delahaye Paine, aka The Measurement Queen, a pioneer in the measurement field for three decades. Her latest company, Paine Publishing, is the first educational publishing firm entirely dedicated to making more Measurement Mavens.

Topic: 

The one with Katie Delahaye Paine on why you should prioritize measurement in all of your PR and marketing campaigns

Use our step-by-step guide for measuring public relations the right way.

Before you can meaningfully explore PR measurement, you have to account for research, planning, and implementation. Research and planning will help you identify the end results, and then you can work backward from the desired results.

Too often, executives and public relations pros want to measure PR without establishing a research baseline.

Under research, planning, and implementation, you have objectives, inputs, and activities. And under measurement, you have outputs, outtakes, outcomes, and impacts. Although most public relations professionals at PR firms and in-house PR staff tend to focus on measuring activities and outputs, efficient and effective measurement goes well beyond measuring activities and outputs.

Let’s start at the beginning. A good framework for measuring public relations and corporate communications begins with objectives. 

Measuring your PR and communication campaigns the right way proves its value

The Barcelona Principles provide best-practice guidelines to measure how well public relations and corporate communication efforts are working. PR isn't sales, yet measuring it correctly helps connect PR to real business results like sales pipeline activity, social media conversions, market share of voice, site traffic, and site rankings. 

No marketing plan is complete without PR. An Entrepreneur article claimed “marketing without PR is like a dream without a goal.” And no marketing and PR plan will be able to prove value if not measured.

No company is safe from crisis as we’ve seen with the coronavirus pandemic. Although your communications strategy and tactics must shift to crisis communications during a time of emergency, it’s still of utmost importance to monitor and evaluate your company’s coverage as it weathers the storm.

You should continue to measure your company communications during a crisis, and you should include these four values in your criteria.

Let’s get SMARTER about PR

By now, you’ve probably heard about S.M.A.R.T. objectives (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely) and using them for PR. We blogged about SMART objectives and how to be a SMART communications pro frequently.

There’s a movement to add ER to SMART objectives and push for SMARTER objectives, and we love it!