Until such day when scanning all media to create a full and comparative picture of our PR efforts becomes affordable, measuring your PR efforts depends on your ability to mine golden nuggets of information.
“Our retainer is about as high as a first-year assembly technician. You’re telling me that the press attention we got you doesn’t produce you as much revenues as a first-year assembly technician?”, said my boss to the CEO of Gamatronic, a tech industry company we were working for, in a desperate attempt to somehow quantify and compare our PR efforts to figures that the 77 year old CEO might grasp better.
It worked. We got the contract extension.
In a prior post I discussed what I think should be our profession’s future goal, in terms of evaluating PR efforts and translating it into quantitative and comparable ROI. However, until such day when scanning all media – including tv and radio, on and off-line – to create a full and comparative picture of our PR efforts becomes affordable, measuring PR will remain in the domain of qualitive research. But that shouldn’t mean we can’t introduce figures and quantitative insights into our account, and not just as a token.
Without a cross-profession measuring tool, you must first agree with your clients upon shared expectations: what are their goals, what would they consider as successful PR work and how would both sides measure that success. During the process of aligning expectations, you want your client to understand that the accuracy of measuring that success depends heavily on their ability to mine information from within the company or organisation.
you must first agree with your clients upon shared expectations: what are their goals, what would they consider as successful PR work and how would both sides measure that success
Such information is crucial when it comes to presenting study cases linking our PR efforts with customer involvement – it could be a sudden growth in calls coming into the client’s sales team following a published news story, or a spike in downloads of a certain app following a national interview of one of its founders, or information regarding how a certain online story you worked hard to get generated direct entries to the client’s website.
You can turn those nuggets of information into comparative measures by alignning them against the client’s competitors (when available), other means of generating involvement for that client or past stories success. Obviously, you won’t be able to present the full picture of your efforts and impact, but the examples you will use can be cemented with numbers.
In fact, in today’s data-driven markets, those gold nuggets of information are so valuable when it comes to presenting your ROI that any firm who will choose to hire a CRM advisor to plan the evaluation of their PR work will gain an important edge over competing colleagues.
in today’s data-driven markets, those gold nuggets of information are so valuable when it comes to presenting your ROI
In Gamatronic’s case, that nugget revealed itself when the company’s Head of Sales told me he received numerous calls from main clients, following a news story on how government contracts ignores local industry he was interviewed for. “my colleague from IBM told me that they did not know we were being ignored, and that she will make sure they will order more of our products from now on” he said, sending me to compare sales before and after that point. When the time came to re-negotiate our contract, the desperation from the year before was long gone… and we kept that client for a third year.
*In 2018 Gamatronic was acquired by SolarEdge for an amount of more then 9M£.
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