Public relations (PR) is an essential part of building a strong brand value. Businesses worldwide spend a big chunk of their time, money, and efforts on PR. The success of the PR campaigns of any business affects its share of voice. That’s why it becomes crucial to measure the success of every PR campaign to calculate the returns of investment made on PR.
Many PR professionals struggle to measure the success rate of their PR campaigns, as they don’t know which metrics they should use. To help all the PR professionals out there, here are seven effective metrics to measure the success of any PR campaign. Let’s take a look at them.
1. Engagement
Any PR pro would know that social media engagement is the most effective metric to understand the performance of online PR campaigns. Social media engagements such as the number of likes, shares, comments are the indicators that show you how well your PR material performed on social media.
Whether it is organic or gained through paid promotion, each user engagement counts. The higher number of social media engagements can help your PR material be more visible across the platform. It also helps to create a stronger community of users who interacted with your PR material and showed interest in your brand.
2. Reach
Reach indicates the number of people who came across or saw your PR material online and offline. People who interact with your campaign on online platforms, like your website, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and offline platforms, prefer surveys and community members from your PR campaign’s total reach.
The higher number of reach can lead to the success of your PR campaign. With the right tools and strategies, you can improve the reach of your PR campaign, which makes it a crucial metric to measure the success of any PR campaign. Reach also helps to get a better idea of the share of voice of your business or client.
3. Sentiment Analysis
The sentiment analysis is one of the current metrics for gauging the success of a PR campaign. A little while back, PR professionals considered only the reach and engagement of the PR campaign. The sentiment is the feeling that your prospects show toward your PR material. Various factors such as the language used for the comments or the type of emojis used in the comment can quickly help you determine how the prospects feel about your campaign. You can classify the sentiment into three groups that are – positive, negative, and neutral. A higher number of positive sentiments can indicate a successful PR campaign.
4. Brand Impact
Many PR professionals consider brand impact as one of the primary metrics to determine the success of PR. Brand impact metric determines how often prospects on online or offline platforms mention your brand name, hashtag, or a specific word relevant to your brand. It is considered a preferred metric if the goal of a PR campaign is to raise brand awareness. The previously discussed metric, sentiment, plays a vital role in brand mentions as you can see what people feel and say about your brand or product.
5. Web Traffic
Although many PR pros focus more on social media campaigns, analyzing your website traffic can give you some valuable insights about your prospects. Whenever a user visits a website, they go through various pages to find what they are looking for.
Web traffic analysis tools like Google Analytics can give you valuable insights about user behavior and other things that will help you determine the sources of traffic and whether they like the contents of your website or not. You can also use online survey forms to get valuable information about your PR material from the website visitors.
6. Earned Media Value
Earned media value is a critical metric for PR campaigns. It determines how much money the business would spend to promote the PR campaign and get the same results through traditional media. It is the direct correlation between your PR efforts and the amount of money your client or company saves.
7. Email Metrics
Emails are one of the prime mediums used by PR professionals for their PR campaigns, especially in the B2B sector. Various email metrics such as open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, and response rate determine the success of the PR campaign through emails. PR professionals use email automation tools to automate their email campaigns.
These are the seven metrics that every PR professional should know to determine the success of any PR campaign. It’s essential to have a system to determine the ROI on PR efforts because sometimes it is difficult for businesses to decide whether it is worth spending money, time, and actions on PR campaigns or not.
