Use These Tips to Track and Measure Public Relations Efforts

Measuring PR success is a critical component of evaluating your public relations efforts. At Think Big we work with clients to align their PR strategies with overall business objectives to help deliver impactful results. There are plenty of PR tracking and measurement methods that range from simple to in-depth and depending on what your organization is looking to achieve, we recommend defining clear objectives to your PR campaigns and measure what matters most. Here are five tips to best track and analyze results:

1. Media Mentions and Reach: Media mentions and reach are the most common metrics to track. This includes the number of media mentions and reach your brand receives across various platforms such as print, online publications, TV, and radio. Additionally, you can move beyond these basic numbers to further analyze the sentiment and tone of coverage as well as if certain key messages were included in the story.

2. Business Outcomes: PR efforts can also be connected to tangible business outcomes that raise brand awareness such as website traffic and referrals, lift in organic searches, lead generation, customer inquiries, social media shares and audience increases, etc.

3. Share of Voice: Compare your organization’s PR performance with your competitors. This is often helpful for insights into overall media coverage of a product segment, topic, or industry and it also provides you with insights into overall market position and new journalists who might be interested in covering your brand.

4. Qualitative Analysis: Combining the above quantitative analysis with qualitative research and information is also important. Perhaps breaking news affected coverage of an event or launch or something else outside your brand’s control impacted coverage.

Or perhaps coverage achieved in media outlets that cater to your brand’s audience or target market helped increase credibility or drove a better business outcome than publications with a larger reach. By developing and analyzing the full picture of all factors beyond just pure metrics will increase the likelihood of driving overall PR success.

5. Adapt and Optimize: Using the insights gained from PR measurements can help your brand adapt and optimize strategies and efforts for future campaigns.

PR success is often not always immediate or easily quantifiable, but tracking various metrics over time helps continually elevate your brand and refine your overall PR strategy.