Five lies about PR measurement that can sink your strategy and career

By Julie Wright—President and Founder

Twitter: @JulieWright

Last month I attended the Ragan PR Daily PR measurement conference in Miami. The two-day event was crammed with hot tips and excellent case studies on PR measurement–how to design measurable campaigns, incorporate analytics, conduct surveys and develop metrics that matter.

Businessman pointing graphs and symbols Free PhotoIt is increasingly clear to anyone in the public relations profession that PR measurement is something our industry needs to embrace. With marketing budgets and margins under constant pressure, companies are looking to optimize their investments across paid, earned, shared and owned strategies. Not only does PR need to stack up against highly measurable digital strategies, it also needs to take digital paid, shared and owned tactics under its wing to produce more integrated, measurable campaigns.

After two full days of discussion in Miami, I was even more convinced of these truths and returned to San Diego fired up to confront some of the biggest whoppers about PR measurement head on. So here are my top five falsehoods. I’d love to hear your take on this list and maybe together we can all help move the PR field in the right direction.

LIE #1: PR just isn’t measurable.

If you are in PR and truly believe this, you’re toast. Sure, PR is not as easy to measure as digital marketing, but it is far from impossible to measure!

It requires a little more legwork and setting aside some campaign resources to do it well. But, keep in mind, the gold standard for PR excellence has always started with research and ended with evaluation—a.k.a. measurement.

Don’t believe the lie that PR isn’t measurable. Instead, refresh yourself on best practices in PR research and evaluation.  

  • Read “Public Relations Research for Planning and Evaluation” by Walter K. Lindenmann on the Institute for Public Relations’ website.
  • Check out the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation in Communications and their Integrated Evaluation Framework. AMEC has developed an interactive online tool that walks you through each step in the PR planning and evaluation process. The tool is designed to help support campaign evaluation; however, you can just as easily use it to guide campaign development to ensure you’re creating measurable campaigns from the start.
  • Read how others have designed measurable campaigns. AMEC has an annual awards program and shares case studies about the winning campaigns.
  • Check out the measurement resources provided by the Public Relations Society of America. It has collected all the measurement resources and links you could wish for in one place.

LIE #2: Our campaign goal is to raise awareness.

This is also a lie. As Joseph Ogden, BYU public relations professor, threw down in Miami, “If anyone tells you their only goal is awareness, they’re lying.” No one wants their PR campaign to simply raise awareness. They want their campaign to drive people to take some measurable behavior—to buy a product, drink less soda, visit a destination, attend an event, enroll in a course, submit their email, visit the website, vote, download the white paper or make a donation.

Hold yourself to a higher standard and help your client or boss understand that you do more than just “create buzz.” (Eye roll.)

It’s easier if you start by developing an objective that clearly states the behavior you want your stakeholders to take, by when and how often. Once you know your behavioral objective, work backwards and think about your informational objective–the message or knowledge your stakeholders need to receive and internalize—and the motivational objective—the emotional connection they need to make—to drive them to take the desired behavior.

Once you’ve set your intention from awareness through motivation and behavior, you can start to research your stakeholders to find out what their level of awareness and knowledge is and what motivates them so you can develop your strategy.

LIE #3: PR people aren’t numbers people.

That’s B.S. Don’t be boxed in by this lie. Good PR people are good storytellers, and one of the most powerful storytelling elements available to you in 2017 is data. Don’t shy away from it.

IBM Digital Experience Manager Brandi Boatner put it another way during the Miami conference: “Congrats, you’re all data scientists.”

Boatner pointed out the many data streams at our disposal today. There are internal sources that are coming from your advertising, website and internal processes. Analyze them as well as external streams you can study such as news trends, social media trends and competitive intelligence.

Google’s Louis Gray pointed conference attendees to Google Trends, a site where you can see in real-time what the world or the U.S.A. is searching, what news stories are trending and find interesting reports on search behaviors.

If you’d like to dig deeper into your audience’s awareness, beliefs or behaviors, check out Google Survey. Use this tool to cost-effectively add your questions to consumer surveys pushed out to targeted demographic groups via a network of publishers.Image result for PR measurement memes

Or if you have data of your own that you’d like to put into an impressive visualization, Gray pointed to Google Public, a data visualization tool. And don’t forget plain old Microsoft Excel. It will recommend the optimal charts and graphs for you based on your spreadsheet data.

It’s a data-rich world. Your company and clients are collecting data all the time. Extract that data to find amazing trends or to dispute conventional wisdom. Maybe there’s a surprising correlation between weather patterns and shopping behaviors, or day of the week and donations. The point is, you won’t know if you don’t look. And you won’t look if you think it’s outside of your skillset.

So, call a meeting with your company’s data guru and start spit balling with your new best friends in I.T.

LIE #4: More data is the answer.

It’s not about metrics. It’s about insights. And it’s not about the quantity of data points. It’s about their relevance to your goal.

Over a third of social marketers reported recently that they struggle to “distill data into insights and actions.” And it’s no wonder. Facebook and Google Analytics are just two sources that can generate a massive amount of data on your target audiences’ behavior.

Going back to your informational and behavioral objectives, it’s important to pinpoint a handful of key performance indicators to show that your message is reaching your target audience and that they are taking the behaviors that your client or boss really cares about.

You don’t need to track them all. You just need to focus on the metrics that matter and then go beyond tracking to analysis.

LIE #5: Setting measurable PR objectives sets you up to fail.

The old saying applies here: you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

It is not a failure to set measurable objectives and then fall short of them.

The failure is in not understanding why you didn’t meet your objectives. Were they not SMART enough–specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time dimensioned? Was your strategy missing an element? Was your target getting the information but not motivated sufficiently or too inconvenienced to take action?

If you’ve set measurable goals, you are forced to ask yourself these questions and better understand your successes and challenges, which will make you better.

The only real failure that should scare you is the failure to even try. Or as another old saying goes, no one plans to fail, they just fail to plan.

Let us know what you think. How has your experience with PR measurement been? What tips or tools have you discovered? What obstacles have you encountered with your team, boss, budgets or clients? We’re all in this together and I’d love to hear what you think. Tweet me at @juliewright or @wrightoncomm.

Four Keys to Getting the Most Out of PR

 

By Chance Shay, Senior Communications Strategist

Over a decade ago, Entrepreneur Magazine explained why every brand needs PR (back then brands were called “companies”) and while explaining that “good PR is the telling of a good story,” referenced The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR to illustrate their point. Long gone are the days where CEOs asked if public relations is important to their company. Instead, they’re asking how to make PR the most effective it can possibly be. Every brand in every vertical in every geographic market is different, but these four keys to getting the most out of PR are universally found at the foundation of all great public relations strategies.




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Focus on Efficiency

Whether you’re Justin Timberlake, Oprah or an exhausted PR director of a brand producing widgets, you have 24 hours in a day. Making the most out of that time is critical to beating competitors to the story angle punch and seeing your brand’s name in lights instead of on the outside looking in. Be smart about where your time goes.

This could come from instituting efficient work behaviors. Commit to starting the day off right. Schedule time for checking emails instead of responding to them as they hit your inbox. Make a point to prioritize your to-do list.

Another part is making sure you’re using technology to amplify the results while minimizing the time invested. Use tools like Hootsuite, Buffer or Soci to manage social media accounts, optimize content development and publishing, and streamline reporting (see below for why reporting is important). Use Basecamp to alleviate budget-eating project management time.

Remember, don’t bang your head against the wall. If there’s something your team lacks expertise in, outsource it.

Emphasize PR Measurement

To optimize your team’s efficiency, focus on results that provide the biggest bang for your buck. To understand which results are actually moving the needle, you have to measure them.

Without measurement, you won’t know where your resources are best spent. ROI was the buzzword (acronym?) of 2013, but it’s just as relevant today. Think of it this way: is an hour of your time best spent pitching a story or developing an eblast? If the time spent pitching media results in 10 sets of target audience eyeballs seeing your story, but that same time spent on the eblast results in 20 sets of target audience eyeballs seeing and engaging with your story, it’s easy to see where your focus should be.

But not all PR measurement is the same. Make sure you’re gauging outcomes over outputs. For good, strong and valid PR measurement, your team should follow the guidelines set by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications, or AMEC.

PR and Marketing Go Hand in Hand

Do you still think of marketing as driving sales to customers and PR as building a brand’s reputation or trust? You shouldn’t. More so than ever, a brand’s reputation can make or break sales.

But the importance of traditional media is coming back down to earth, too. In fact, scholars and experts were writing about the declining influence of traditional media way back in 2010. With fragmented audiences and the socialization of the Web and its information, a brand doesn’t have to rely solely on traditional media to reach a large, targeted audience.

In 2016, marketing and PR are most effective when they’re done in tandem. Making sure what’s being said about your brand (media) and what you’re saying about your brand (marketing) are consistent is important because future or prospective customers are more informed than ever when they make a purchase decision. If there’s something out of sync with the information they’ve turned up in their research, they’ll see it as a big red flag.

Most importantly, PR and marketing working in tandem amplifies the result. If your PR results are driving the audience to additional brand-created content, then it’s easier to move them down the sales funnel.

Proactivity Over Reactivity

Finally, like a prize fighter, PR is most effective when it’s out in front of opportunities rather than back pedaling and swinging from its heels. Make sure a solid amount of lead time is given to prepare and launch campaigns. This allows you to tee up media wins in advance of the press release or advisory hitting the wire and ensure key influencers are already in the know before a single piece is published.

Being proactive is also important for fostering the strong media relationships. The quickest way to burn a media bridge is to cause a reporter to miss a deadline because you couldn’t provide the information they need fast enough. Anticipate the questions they might have and identify what information your brand is not comfortable releasing. If you’re announcing a development project, anticipate the detailed financial-related questions and have responses pre-approved. Be proactive in providing whatever is necessary to make it easy for a journalist to cover your story.

There is no magic bullet in PR. However, brands can set themselves up to maximize the return on their public relations investment by following these four keys. If you enjoyed this read, make sure you poke around the (W)right On Target Blog for some other pearls of wisdom from the world of PR and marketing. Some of my favorite recent posts include 12 Signs PR Agency Life Isn’t For You, 10 Feelings Anyone Who Works in PR Will Relate To and Reflections to Begin 2016, written by (W)right On’s CEO, Grant Wright.