Do Your PR Efforts Measure Up?

 I recently spoke about the benefits of measuring public relations  efforts. Many PR people are afraid to run a publicity report. Why? The PR report can help you gain better contracts, more money, and more respect within your industry. If you are afraid to run a metrics report then you know you are doing something wrong or under-serving your clients.

Here are a couple of ways to measure PR efforts for you “Do-It Yourself’ers” out there.

1.       Surveys - Ask relevant questions and tally results. Yes, survey results count as part of reporting. In fact, it is a major role if your client isn’t a B2B client.

2.       Scores - Create indices or scoring mechanisms to identify valuable outcomes and results, recognizing quantity (volume of media hits) and quality (scoring for content feature, prominence and mention).

3.       Correlations - Identify correlations between outputs, outcomes and business results. Track public relations events with lead generation (online, email, phone, events) and track public relations events with web traffic.

There are some online applications that can run your social media and clipping reports too, but you often have to pay for these. Yes, they are expensive.

Even if you have to create and keep reporting data in a spreadsheet, do it! Not sending clipping reports or reel reports- heck, any report, can shortchange both you and your client.

Until tomorrow,

Velma Trayham