It’s time to stop counting clips and impressions.
It makes sense.
You spend weeks – months – maybe even years nailing down an incredible media hit. When it comes out, you feel that incredible rush of accomplishment as your principles nailed the messaging, the headline was complimentary, the angle advanced your strategic goals.
So when it’s time to do your reporting, you proudly count all those media hits you achieved. You total up the impressions. You convert it to AVE. You feel good sharing all those big, juicy numbers with your clients or internal stakeholders.
And they shrug and ask what you’ve done for them lately.
The mistake is that none of these numbers can be directly tied to the kinds of numbers executives, investors and other stakeholders truly care about: revenue and profit.
Maybe you’re saying, “that’s not fair! It’s very difficult to draw a direct line between changing hearts and minds and revenue!”
You’re right. It is hard. That’s why it’s so very important.
There is no magic bullet
I won’t sit here and tell you that measuring quality and quantity of media hits or campaigns is a bad thing (though I do doubt the efficacy of impressions and AVE as a measurement). They’re important signs of success — but they’re far more useful for your PR team than for executives. It’s a great measure of how effective your pitches are, how interesting your activations are. But they’re telling executives about what you did, not what you contributed to the organization. And in a time of tight budgets and high competition, that’s just not enough.
But similarly, I can’t sit here and give you one simple metric you can use to solve this problem. If I could, I’d retire to my own private island. The connections and metrics between PR and revenue are going to be different for every organization depending on your goals and challenges.
The best way to figure out what to measure is to ask. Talk. Form relationships. Pay attention. Listen to earnings calls. Read annual reports.
You’re looking for what your organization values. Obviously, they value revenue — let’s push a little beyond that and figure out what challenges the organization is facing and how PR can help.
For example:
- Your organization just faced a crisis. Counting stories won’t give you insight into whether trust is recovering. For that, you need to look at things like social media sentiment, focus groups and trust surveys, and internal employee data. Ask specifically if respondents saw certain coverage or engaged with certain items on social media to draw a cleaner line.
- You need more name recognition. Measure increases in branded search, direct website traffic, qualified leads from referral links, sales inquiries and changes in awareness among the target audience.
- Your nonprofit needs to increase donations. Media coverage is useful only if it helps people understand need and act. Measure traffic to the donation page, completed donations, average gift size and recurring donors in the wake of a media hit.
- Your company wants to become an authority. Measure speaking invitations, inbound partnership requests, sales conversations mentioning the coverage, backlinks, citations and share of voice on the specific issue.
These aren’t easy to measure. It’s harder than totaling up placements. It requires building relationships with other departments and digging deeper.
But the result is worth the payoff.Leaders see not just what you did, but why it matters and how you can help them solve problems.
That pays off through the trust leaders place in you and being called in earlier to help solve problems.
It may take time. You may fail a few times trying to get the right mix of metrics.That’s OK. Try anyway.
Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
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