It’s 2019. If you can’t present your ROI, you’ll be the first one to go when budgets shrink, and the last one in line when that budget cake is growing. How can PR people show their real contribution?
During one of my recent meetings with a manager of a London PR agency, I mentioned to her that I think our biggest challenge as public relations professionals in the years to come is not the “dying” of journalism (I personally believe the pendulum is turning back towards professional in-depth journalism), but the fact that unlike our ‘frenemies’ who create content for social, SEO or advertising – we still haven’t found a compelling and accurate way to measure PR success.
The sheer frustration sent across her face as I mentioned the word “measure” was a clear sign that I’m far from being alone here…
We all face it: while colleagues from other branches of the marketing tree - especially social, SEO, sales and advertising, walks into a board room carrying graphics and numbers about evolvement and PPC comparisons, us PR people are left behind with a PowerPoint presentation and a printed book of every news piece we were able to get. Sometimes it seems like when printers will finally go the way of the Dodo, PR offices will become the “zoos” where you’ll still be able to watch those rare machines at work.
Even when it comes to measuring a particular campaign, we struggle to show how our hard work made an impact, not to mention how hard it is to get properly evaluated for your day-to-day efforts. And when you’re not properly valued by your clients or co-workers, you lose them. So, what can we do to meet that challenge in the near future?
First and foremost, us PR people need to understand that evaluating our work is our responsibility. Sure, it’s fun when there’s no one watching over your shoulder, measuring every little thing you do. It’s also a risk – everyone would be afraid to find out that their work carries no real impact. But for the long run – it’s the only way to keep a client. It’s 2019, if you can’t get evaluated, you’ll be the first one to go when budgets shrink, and the last one in line when that budget cake is growing.
First and foremost, us PR people need to understand that evaluating our work is our responsibility. If you can’t get evaluated, you’ll be the first one to go when budgets shrink, and the last one in line when that budget cake is growing.
The best way for us to present our work to clients would be to source all news stories – including newspapers, TV and radio – we generated for a certain client and calculate how much money we would have spent if those were paid ads. Since both ads and news stories have their own ups and downs – news stories do not carry 100% of your message while ads are often easily ignored by readers – we should argue that this would be a fair way to compare PR to other content revenues and work together to make such research tools more available and affordable.
The key word here is “together”. If only one PR firm would start arguing it generates millions of pounds worth of publicity to its clients each month, they might look ridiculous – though in my opinion they would be absolutely right to claim so. It would also cost that firm a lot of money to create such research, and without an agreed upon scale you wouldn’t be able to use it as a comparative measure. If we want it to work – and we do – this needs to be a joint venture. If we’re able to build and adopt such a scale, it won’t just be a lifeline for PR professionals in this data-driven world – it might actually enable us to present our real financial impact and be paid accordingly.
If we want it to work – and we do – this needs to be a joint venture. If we’re able to build and adopt such a scale, it won’t just be a lifeline for PR professionals in this data-driven world – it might actually enable us to present our real financial impact and be paid accordingly.
Comentários