The Public Relations Blog

4 ways to measure the success of your public relations messages

Public relations professionals craft messages for audiences, which we call outputs. Outputs are what a company releases and communicates to its target audiences. News releases, social media posts, email blasts, blog posts, and events are among the many ways PR professionals create outputs that appeal to target audiences.

And what you should ask your PR firm before finalizing your PR plan

If you’re new to using public relations to build your brand, then starting a PR program can seem daunting. Luckily, it’s easier with the help of a trusted PR firm and a PR plan. A PR plan should be the road map that your PR firm (and your team) uses to create a successful PR program. If your firm doesn’t utilize a PR plan, it’s difficult to evaluate its success and to know that your company and your PR partner are on the same page. Don’t blindly follow your PR firm. Educate yourself on the elements of a PR plan and know the questions that you should be asking to create a successful PR program.

It’s not good enough to have a public relations campaign. You must have a goal for your campaign and metrics to prove how it will benefit your bottom line. Measuring the success of your PR campaign proves the worth of the campaign and why it matters. However, measuring incorrectly could really do some damage, so make sure to avoid the three biggest measurement mistakes made in the PR industry.

Public relations, like anything else, has its own vocabulary. When you’re working with your PR team to plan a successful campaign, it helps to know the meaning of terms that PR professionals use. The terms outputs, outtakes, outcomes, and impacts are important elements of a PR campaign that you should know.

When designing a public relations plan for your company, Axia Public Relations starts with your goals and objectives. Then, we break them down further into inputs and activities. This is the first part of creating an effective PR program for you. We’ve created a scenario around Twidget, a fictional company, to illustrate how this process works and to help you understand what we mean by inputs and activities.

How you can properly vet a company before doing business with them

We were in the final in-person pitch with a prospective client. The client was a tech company that had developed a negative reputation online for its fast-paced growth because it had hurt some feelings along the way. While the company earned this reputation, the managers saw the errors of their ways and wanted to get a better handle on the company’s reputation after improving its operations and culture.

You do have the time, money, and data to measure public relations

The reasons for incorporating measurement and evaluation into your company’s public relations strategy are many:

• You know actual metrics behind reach, impressions, items, mentions, and engagement to understand the effectiveness of campaigns.
• You see which media channels certain audiences are most responsive to.
• You can predict future trends for better planning and agile response.

Applying the PDCA/Deming Cycle to public relations for strategic growth and improvement

Using measurement and evaluation (M&E) is a process that takes deliberate planning to thoroughly implement. It’s more than lifting some data from your analytics software and hoping to do better next month. Our previous blog posts discussed the difference between measurement and evaluation, the importance of knowing your purpose in this process, what kind of measurement data to collect and how to create SMART goals.

4 tips to be sure you’re measuring your social media efforts correctly

Just because everyone is doing something wrong doesn’t make it right. This is especially true when it comes to measuring social media efforts for your company. With these tips, you can learn the correct way to measure and get the most out of your social media.

With the increased emphasis on quantifying the results of public relations actions, having a solid grasp of the fundamentals of measurement and evaluation is essential in making wise decisions around the use of data. Although many people put them together, measurement and evaluation are separate concepts. To be most effective, you must remember that they’re distinct tasks at different places within the framework of data collection and analysis.