This week, our focus on Demystifying PR Measurement shifts to the benefits of viewing and implementing measurement as a foundational process in PR and communications.
First things first: what is PR measurement?
Here is Onclusive’s definition of PR measurement: it is a set of standards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that allows communicators to accurately and consistently evaluate the performance and demonstrate the business value of PR, and use insight from ongoing evaluation for strategy optimization and future planning.
The benefits of measurement standards across your organization are three-fold:
- You can compare results across programs, geographies, business units and agency partners in order to understand your program performance in context.
- Instead of guessing, you can use concrete and consistent data over time to improve your performance.
- Your stakeholders can see the continuity in the data and results year over year, which builds their confidence in the impact of communications on your brand.
“Yext’s press efforts span regions from North America to Asia, and it can be extremely difficult to measure our coverage metrics globally in a reliable way. It’s critical for my team to have access to advanced metrics to inform our communications strategy, and Onclusive makes this much easier.” ~ Michael Dolmatch, Director of Communications, Yext
Optimize your campaigns
Measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns reveals what’s working and what isn’t, which can help you adjust your tactics in the moment and get better results. In addition, evaluating past campaign performance is essential for building future PR strategies and asking for the right budget and resources to be able to successfully implement them.
Power innovation and business agility
Without measurement, there is no experimentation or innovation. Even something as simple as A/B testing of new messaging requires careful measurement for you to know which one worked better so that you can scale from there. And as every organization’s ability to keep up with the market dynamics is now more critical than ever, real-time tracking and measurement is needed to allow PR pros to pivot quickly under any conditions.
Support long-term vision
Strategic communication is a marathon, not a sprint, and ongoing measurement plays a key role in your long-term strategy. A robust measurement framework that tracks your KPIs over time can provide a big-picture view into the success of your long-term initiatives, such as increasing brand awareness or improving brand reputation year over year. Being able to track and demonstrate results on a continuous basis will also help secure consistent investment in PR.
To learn more, join us for the Demystifying PR Measurement webinar on March 30th. Greg D’Andrea, Head of Customer Success at Onclusive, and Romain Vezirian, Director of Global Brand PR Content & Multimedia at IHG Hotels & Resorts, will discuss how implementing PR measurement best practices contributes to the IHG communications success, and why measuring PR performance can help you become a strategic advisor to the C-suite.
