This week, we’re wrapping up our blog series about building a perfect pitch with an overview of how to measure your success, optimize your strategy and nurture your media relationships for the long-term.
You’ve done the research, crafted your powerful pitch, and sent your media campaign out into the world. What happens next is the real fun part – at least in the eyes of our analytics-focused team here at Onclusive – you get to measure how your initiative is performing.
In addition to being able to make real-time changes to your current campaign and informing your strategy going forward, you can also use your success metrics in your stakeholder reporting and, ultimately, prove your value to your 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. With just a simple dashboard that includes real-time metrics such as email opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes, such as the one below from Onclusive, you can quickly gauge the overall level of interest in your pitch – as well as the quality of your media list.
Given that most journalists will react to your pitch within a few hours of it being sent, this high-level data on its own is very 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 also use this information to evaluate the effectiveness of your lists and determine whether list hygiene is in order.
The next step is to dig into who is getting back to you, how they’ve engaged with you, and what you need to do next in each of these relationships. 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.
Stay organized with everything in one place
As we mentioned in last week’s blog (and we’re clearly really excited about this!), 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.”
~ Sara Eberle, 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. Based on this data, you can optimize who you target next, how you do it, what your next pitch should look like, what to include in your outreach, and how you can adjust your next campaign in the moment.
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.
- 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. Consistency with your engagement, follow-up and providing value to the person on the other end greatly contributes to developing 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.
- Keep up with what the 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.
- 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.
Join us for Building The Perfect Pitch and Nurturing Your Media Relationships webinar on February 17th. Our panelists will be sharing how they achieved success building relationships with the most impactful journalists for their brands, their “secret sauce” for crafting and packaging a compelling pitch, and how they measure their effectiveness and optimize their storytelling and media relations strategies—all powered by data and automation through easy-to-use technology.
