While PR doesn’t come cheap, when done the right way, it can really help promote your company, no matter whether you sell physical products or offer retargeting and remarketing services . Consequently, it may lead to increased brand awareness and improved sales. However, tracking the impact of your PR campaign might be a challenging task.
In contrast to other forms of promoting your brands, such as online advertising, there’s really no particular analytic metric that you can quickly use to measure its effectiveness. So, how do you check whether your PR initiatives are successful and your efforts are headed in the right direction? Fortunately, despite the fact that public relations’ impact is not directly quantifiable, there are still plenty of ways to measure it.
Whether you choose to focus on the number of press articles about your brand, check social media engagement, or decide to track conversions , the methods listed in this article should give you a good idea of what direction you should be heading in. Check it out!
Set Measurable Goals
If you aim to get the most accurate evaluation of your PR campaign’s success, one of the first things you should do is set some goals that you can later measure. Hence, before you launch the campaign, take time to set some realistic targets to meet and continue to pay close attention to your progress against these original goals.
Regardless if you choose to use PR analytics software or decide to do everything your own way, you can expect some excellent results. By tracking your progress, you can not only keep your campaign on the right track but also get real-time updates on the impact it’s having on your target audience.
Pay Attention To Press Articles
Looking at the number of press articles about your brand or product is a highly effective way to measure the impact of your PR campaign. The idea behind this is quite simple: wide coverage in various well-known media publications can give your brand a significant boost and help it reach a much broader audience. The wider the reach of a publication, the more brand awareness it can help you create among its readers.
Still, keep in mind that while it might be really tempting to publish as many articles as possible on every website that accepts new content, it’s better to focus on websites that have a high interest in your particular brand. Thanks to it, you’ll be able to stay relevant and avoid people viewing you as “spammy.”
Monitor Social Media Reach and Engagement
Today, social media is more prominent than ever, making it an ideal medium to transfer your campaign idea from the drawing board straight to your target audience. But, it is also an excellent way to monitor how your content is reaching the public and what is its general impact on your audience.
You can monitor factors such as comments, shares, the number of likes and reactions, and who they come from. For instance, the range of reactions on Facebook includes emotions such as Like, Love, Care, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry, allowing people to express their emotions in an accurate way. It could give you a better idea of what they think about your PR efforts.
Overall, social media monitoring is a method for PR professionals to get updates on honest public responses in real-time and watch the immediate impact of their campaign. As a result, keeping up with your company’s social media accounts — while being straightforward to do — can yield astonishingly accurate results.
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Track Conversions
Keeping an eye on the conversions is yet another excellent way to look at the impact of your public relations campaign. Experienced digital marketers know that “conversion rate ” is one of the critical online success metrics. It represents the percentage of visitors to a website who accomplish a particular objective.
Let’s say that 100 people visit your website. If seven of them fill out the lead form you prepared, it means that your conversion rate is 7%. Conversions are also things such as sales, downloads, or clicks. All of these variables are easily measurable.
Tracking conversions is crucial because each conversion has the advantage of measuring outcome, not volume. It allows you to see whether your PR campaign is driving traffic to your website and whether people are actually engaging with your business, e.g., buying your products, downloading files, and filling out forms.
Analyze Blog or Web Traffic
Return on investment (ROI) is an effective way to prove whether your campaign is successful or not. One way to measure it without focusing on sales numbers is to monitor blog and web traffic on your company’s website. If you notice metrics like dwell time went up since the campaign went live, it indicates your PR efforts are working as intended.
Make sure to measure the results as thoroughly as possible. Otherwise, you might find it challenging to estimate whether you’re actually hitting the targets.
In Conclusion
When companies decide to run a public relations campaign, they usually invest a considerable amount of funds and plenty of effort in it. For this reason, it becomes absolutely necessary to measure the success of these campaigns and see how effective they are. Besides, checking their success rate is also an excellent way to identify the mistakes and learn from them to see improved results in the future.
When running a PR campaign, remember to set goals and measure whether your campaign managed to achieve them , pay attention to the number of press articles, and monitor social media engagement. Other than that, track conversions, and don’t forget to check how much traffic your campaigns have brought to your website. Good luck!
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