This week, we’re finishing our blog series on creating a great pitch. We’ll talk about measuring success, improving your strategy, and maintaining good relationships with the media in the long run.
You’ve done the research, crafted your powerful pitch, and sent your media campaign out into the world. Afterwards, you can have fun measuring the performance of your initiative, which our analytics-focused team at Onclusive finds exciting.
You can use real-time changes to improve your campaign and inform your strategy. Success metrics can also be used in stakeholder reporting to show your value to executives.
Track your pitch effectiveness & journalist engagement
The goal for PR campaign measurement is to understand how well your pitch is landing and how journalists are engaging with it. Using a basic dashboard, like the one from Onclusive, you can see real-time data on email activity. This includes opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes. It helps you understand how interested people are in your pitch and the effectiveness of your media list.
Most journalists respond quickly to your pitch, so this data is valuable. You’ll know how your pitch is doing on the same day that you send it and can make timely adjustments if needed. You can use this information to check if your lists are effective and if you need to clean them up.
First, determine who is responding to you. Then, assess how they have interacted with you. Finally, decide on the appropriate actions to take in each of these connections. Once your story is picked up and published, you can also track coverage and sentiment generated by your campaign, as well as any activities, interviews and to-dos.
Measure to stay organized – everything in one place
With an all-encompassing PR CRM platform you can discover, pitch and manage all of your journalist relationships in one place. It’s easier than ever to stay organized with tools that can help you access all of the incoming and outgoing correspondence with each journalist across your entire team – including any emails and notes logged by your teammates.
“Onclusive is an invaluable tool to help you become a better PR person. It’s great for strategy setting and industry analysis, as you can quickly and easily review what’s happening beyond your own company. Onclusive gives us the ability to see what journalists are covering and track editorial patterns both regionally and globally.”
~ Senior Director of Global Public Relations, Sophos
Optimize your targeting, outreach and media relations strategies
What if you’re experiencing low engagement with your current campaign? With real-time tracking, you can tweak your approach as you go.
Look at the data and ask what it is showing you. You may need to review who has unsubscribed, update your list, or adjust your pitch. You may also decide to correspond with the journalists and follow up with them, asking what else they need that might be missing.
Once your campaign is over, you’ll also have ample data that will help you understand what worked well and what didn’t. Using this data, you can improve your targeting, approach, pitch, outreach, and adjust your campaign in real-time.
The bottom line is that you can stop guessing what to do and start using real feedback from your audience – your campaign performance data.
Nurture your media relationships to get more media placements
In PR and communications, relationship-building never stops. Here are some of the best practices we’d like to offer for nurturing your media relationships beyond a single campaign engagement.
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Cultivate respect, trust and consistency:
Building and growing relationships is essential to any business, both internally and externally. It requires cultivating mutual trust and respect, which is something that happens over time. Being consistent in engaging, following up, and providing value to others helps build strong media relationships. Modern CRM tools for PR can automate this for you by helping you keep track of all your journalist interactions in one place.
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Measure what journalists are doing:
To continue earning journalist attention, you also need to stay current on each of your key media contacts. This means keeping track of their most current articles and social media posts, which will help you gauge what projects they are pursuing and whether you are still in alignment in catering to the same reader audiences. Again, you can use a robust media database to support you by automatically keeping you up to date on every journalist’s, influencer’s and blogger’s activity.
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Be a subject matter expert & provide unique data and insights:
One way to provide value to the journalists is to make sure that your brand and your team are a trusted source of information on the particular subject matter that is within your core expertise. Start with your brand’s unique value proposition. What do you do that no one else can? If your company collects proprietary data that results in unique and valuable insights, for example, any industry primary research, you can use this information to add even more value to your media relations.
Watch Building The Perfect Pitch and Nurturing Your Media Relationships webinar on demand. Our panellists will share how they built relationships with important journalists for their brands. They will also talk about their special way of creating a persuasive pitch and how they measure their success. They use data and automation to make their storytelling and media strategies better.
