Public Relations Measurement and Monitoring

 

Public Relations professionals play a huge role to help a business or individual build a positive public perception through various channels including traditional, social media and in-person engagements. 

A brand’s reputation is the most valuable asset and has to be protected and nurtured. That’s where begins the job of Brand Measuring – PR handholds its clients in a situation that threatens their integrity and protects their reputation in the community. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of PR strategies cannot be measured quantitatively and as a result, many public relations practitioners fail to effectively monitor and evaluate the implementation of their tactics. Therefore, practitioners should try to implement even the most basic procedures to understand what works and what doesn’t.

Although decision-makers need assurances that their brands’ PR investments will generate a good ROI, measuring PR results can be challenging. Here are some ways to monitor how communications campaigns are making progress towards achieving corporate goals:

Social Media Monitoring and Measurement 

Digital and social media have become a key player with regard to PR. Most campaigns on online channels focus on creating content that their target audience want to talk about and share on social media platforms, increasing the importance of measuring the impact of social media. Social media measurement tools have evolved extensively with many ways to measure social media ROI. While measuring awareness of and engagement with your brand through the number of likes, comments, retweets, replies and shares still holds value, however, the real pay-off is measuring how these likes and shares turn into sales.

While tracking URL shares, clicks and conversions measures traffic driven to your site; share of voice can be measured by tracking activity to understand where your brand falls in the hierarchy as compared to that of competitors.

If social media mentions of your brand increase after launching your PR program, you can stop wondering “does PR work?”

Website Traffic 

Monitoring website traffic before and after a Campaign launch is the excellent way to evaluate PR professional’s performance and helps determine the success of the PR campaign. The increase in number of visitors to your site enlightens part of the story. Website traffic monitoring can be done easily with the help of Google Analytics. This tool provides details by analysing demographics like age group, location and ensures if the message has been conveyed to its target audience. Besides, back links can also be used to improve website traffic and can upsurge the popularity with both search engines as well as its viewers.

While, a rise in new unique visitors indicates growth of brand awareness, monitoring returning visitor numbers is also equally important as it indicates that brand trust has developed. Content such as blog posts, infographics and videos play a big role to keep your audience engaged and encourages return visits to your site.  

Goal conversions is another important web metric. Whether they are e-commerce transactions, subscriptions or form completions, conversions help you to track the ROI of PR. With the right target audience, PR campaign should increase the number of conversions or qualified leads.

Market Surveys

Research is highly important to tracking a PR campaign’s success. Before you begin your PR campaign, it pays to survey your market to check if they’ve heard of your brand and offerings.

While PR professionals use market research to gather necessary information on market trends and potential opportunities when planning a campaign, it’s also worthwhile to conduct surveys during and afterwards to measure how awareness, attitudes and perceptions have changed. Awareness statistics that trend upwards will certainly prove the value of PRactivity.

After completion of your PR campaign, survey your markets a second time to check whether awareness statistics are trending up.