PR ROI in 2024
Andrea Bolyard
Communications pro with a passion for collaboration, data and learning
A couple months ago, a teammate in our Analytics group pointed out to me that the PR discipline is all about probability. (Shoutout Jonathan Schotte)
And that really struck me. Admittedly, I’m a little bit competitive by nature – but I think a lot of people in PR are drawn to this career because it requires tenacity, skill and a hunger to promote messages more tightly than someone else to earn coverage. So my colleague’s comment really made me think about how winning at PR requires PR pros to increase their probability of earning attention.
We’ve been spending time re-thinking PR metrics. Universally, everyone seems to agree that reach or impressions don’t tell us much. And connecting PR to a final sale can be pretty challenging, if that’s the conversion you’re looking for. But there is so much more information available about our work that we can measure to add some quantitative assessment to our qualitative analysis.
For example, every company has top media they want to be featured in. Presumably those media are on top of the list because they do the best job of reaching a targeted audience, and they have established credibility among that audience. How much of your coverage is in those top tiers? What type of coverage is it – a full feature article, a series of news release pickups, interviews with your key experts? What topics are covered the most? Are those the topics you planned to get covered, or are the stories that you planned to tell not resonating with editors?
PR is unique because it’s an art and a science. It’s time to move past the idea that PR can’t be analyzed like paid media or websites, and start finding ways to learn from results in new ways to keep increasing your probability of success.
What do you think? What other ways would you measure PR better?
Brand Manager at Lallemand Animal Nutrition
11moI love this!!
Marketing Analytics & Insights Leader with a passion for storytelling & project management
11moI can't believe how much we have learned already just by pivoting the data in a new way and looking at it differently! The visualizations we have created are allowing us to gain new insights, which will help inform the go-forward strategy. It's been great partnering together on this!
Associate Director of Marketing Effectiveness at Bader Rutter
11moUnderstanding the probability is key. By studying the current content feature patterns, times, and frequency along with total media coverage at a given point, we can develop an understanding of increasing the probability of a feature.