Measuring PR Performance

When it comes to public relations efforts and campaigns, companies have to keep track of a lot of different metrics to better understand the performance of their efforts. Fortunately, there are a few public relations tools and platforms that allow companies to streamline their tasks and operations, while generating insights that will end up helping keep track of metrics and measurements. Nevertheless, companies still have to keep track of various different metrics to understand the performance, and to even figure out whether their campaigns have managed to achieve the desired goals.

Brand impact

First of all, companies have to begin by evaluating the effectiveness of their current public relations efforts because PR campaigns tend to have a direct impact on brand reputation as well as brand awareness, which means it’s important for companies to keep track of their performance. Through great public relations campaigns, companies can promote themselves and their solutions effectively. If the public, or the target audience of a company has a poor or negative perception of a business, it can be detrimental to business operations, because it’s going to be a lot more difficult for the business to persuade potential customers to make a purchase, and impact is bottom line. On the other hand, if a company has a positive public reception, then the company can improve its reputation, bottom line, sales, website, traffic, and more.

Media reach

One of the core elements of all public relations campaigns is the fact that companies have to consistently reach out to journalists, reporters, and media outlets in general, to generate positive media coverage. After all, a public relations campaign that has no audience is a waste of time, money, and efforts for a business. That’s why it’s important for companies to not just keep track of the media coverage that they are able to generate through their public relations campaign, but also the potential impact each piece of coverage has that the company has generated through its public relations efforts. To be able to measure it, companies have to monitor their reach, while they are being discussed or highlighted in media outlets, and articles. That means calculating the potential followers or readers of an outlet, and figuring out whether that outlet should be targeted in the future.

Share of voice

The share of voice public relations metric is simply a comparison of the media mentions of one company against its competitors. Companies that have a detailed understanding of the percentage of media mentions that they’ve generated can also grasp the authority that they have in their market and their industry, especially if a company operates in a very competitive industry or market. To keep track of share of voice, companies have to divide the total number of mentions they’ve generated in industry outlets by the total number of mentions of all industry brands in those outlets. After that, by multiplying by 100, companies can understand the percentage of voice that they have in their industry.