If you’ve ever evaluated PR agencies or communications technology providers, you have likely considered how their solutions compare to each other and how they fit your needs. But have you also looked at their potential Return on Investment, or ROI?
G2 Crowd, the leading independent business software review company, has compiled a report that compares top media monitoring and PR analytics software solutions, including Onclusive, Meltwater, Cision and Muck Rack. One of the rankings they provide is ROI, and Onclusive has consistently rated #1 for this and many other categories over the past few years.
In our final blog series of the year, we take a closer look at 2021 G2 Crowd ratings and spotlight the key criteria for choosing the unified earned, owned and social media monitoring, media relations and PR analytics platform that best suits your needs as a modern communicator.
Why technology ROI matters
Return on Investment (ROI), not Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), is the most important metric in the cost-benefit analysis for any technology platform. The purpose of the ROI calculation is to prove to yourself, as well as your executive team and other stakeholders, that an investment results in a larger benefit to the business than the cost associated with it.
In the past, evaluating ROI for media monitoring was much more challenging than, say, for demand generation or even SEO. Today, it is no longer a “black box”—thanks to innovations such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
In addition to the ROI itself, time to ROI is an equally important metric. In other words, how long does it take you to get the return on your investment—is it several months or a few years?
Onclusive is leading the industry with an average time to ROI within 12 months, and 78% of our customers see ROI in 12 months or less:
How do Onclusive’s customers achieve such a fast ROI? They use the data provided by our integrated media measurement software to develop more effective communications strategies, focus on the right stories, authors and media outlets, and optimize their messaging across earned, owned and social media.
Getting to ROI through business impact measurement
Going one step further, the Onclusive platform also enables PR professionals to measure which content directly impacts the customer journey and key business outcomes.
Onclusive’s proprietary PR Attribution™ is the most reliable and scalable impact measurement tool for communications. It allows you to accurately measure how many times people, after having read a piece of content about your brand, eventually visit your website and which actions they take – including pages visited, content downloaded, sign-ups, and sales – even if there is no backlink in the article.
As a result, 87% of Onclusive customers say that they are able to link their PR strategies with business impact, and therefore, ROI:
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Monster demonstrated the impact of their 2020 public relations and content strategies by measuring a significant increase of 135.3k quarterly website visitors driven by their media coverage.
Extending the ROI to other teams
Can other teams benefit from PR analytics data and shared ROI? The answer is yes! In fact, 90% of our users agree that Onclusive’s platform promotes team collaboration with their colleagues in marketing, product and other functional areas:
As we continue our blog series next week, you’ll learn more about evaluating comprehensive media monitoring and social listening capabilities.
Read the full 2021 Media Monitoring Comparison Report to learn how the top PR technology providers stack up against each other, who provides the most accurate and complete coverage, which solutions you can use across your PR workflow, and what level of customer support you can expect.
