Quantifying Public Relations For Your Business

Reach a Wider Audience with Targeted Public Relations

Setting quantifiable PR goals makes it easy to measure your PR initiatives’ progress and track your campaigns’ effectiveness.

Improvements in analytic tools and innovative tracking methods, helps make quantifying your business’ PR initiatives easier and more precise. That said, the availability of analytical tools doesn’t mean that business managers are measuring the right KPI’s or analyzing them correctly.

Evaluating outcomes requires more than just checking earned media metrics, such as how many people saw or read a piece of content. To truly measure the success of your PR campaigns, you need to look beyond impressions and clicks. You need to focus on measurable results that clearly connects a campaign to your business goals and ROI.

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5 Methods For Quantifying PR Results

Using a combination of these methods, your business will be better positioned to measure the impact of your PR efforts. As a result, you’ll be able to make informed decisions regarding the direction of future campaigns.

Social Media Engagement

Social media metrics are a powerful way of measuring your PR efforts. From social media metrics, your business can get real-time data on the total engagement of your campaigns. You can track social media engagement from the number of followers, impressions, likes, comments, and shares of your content across different platforms.

High social media impressions indicate brand awareness. Increasing followers, likes, comments, and shares indicate growth and interest in your content.

Ensure you calculate your social media engagement rate when measuring PR efforts. This will tell you how your content performs independent of your number of followers.

To calculate your engagement rate, divide the total engagement by the number of followers, then multiply by 100.

Press Mentions

Press clippings are a traditional but effective way to measure PR success. A press clipping refers to a published piece of content that mentions or features your business in some form. To effectively measure press clips, it’s essential to look beyond the number of articles and focus on the quality of coverage instead.

For instance, consider the reach and credibility of the publication where your press clip appeared and its relevance to your target audiences.

To track how many clips you’ve secured, it’s important to maintain a central repository where all the articles are stored and easily accessible.

Some of the indicators of success from press coverage include:

Further coverage by other media outlets
Increased brand recognition
Increased shares of the article on social media
Improved website traffic and leads

Media Impressions

Media impressions refer to the total number of times your business is seen and heard through different media channels. Impressions differ from reach in that they account for the number of people exposed to your content as opposed to the number of people who clicked it.

To get the number of impressions on your campaign, multiply your number of press clips by the circulation of each outlet. This will help you determine the impact of your strategy. That said, don’t rely on impressions alone to quantify PR. They don’t necessarily translate to clicks or conversions.

Traffic And Backlinks

How many unique visitors and page views did your website or blog receive every month of your PR campaign? Evaluating website traffic helps measure PR ROI, particularly if you can link the traffic to a particular campaign or content.

With tracking tools, such as Google Analytics, that track both organic and referral traffic, you can measure the number of visitors that come from a specific source, such as a press release or article.

One important metric you shouldn’t forget to check when analyzing traffic is bounce rates. These are the number of visitors who land on a page and leave without engaging with the content.

A high bounce rate may indicate that you’re targeting the wrong audience or that the audience feels that your content is not useful. Cushion your site against high bounce rates by sharing useful content and linking to relevant pages.

You can also track backlinks to your website or blog. This will help you determine how many websites link to your site and share its content on their platforms. A high number of backlinks indicates increased visibility and potential leads for your business.

Market Surveys

Another effective way of quantifying PR is conducting market surveys. Before beginning your campaign, research how many people have heard about your product or service. After your campaign, do the same kind of research. Then you can compare the results to measure how successful the campaign was in increasing brand awareness and recognition.

Surveys are also great for measuring customer sentiment, engagement, and satisfaction. All these metrics can give you an accurate snapshot of the success of your PR efforts.

Final Thoughts

Quantifying public relations helps you gauge the ROI and success of your PR campaigns. Hire a professional PR agency to help you set measurable goals and develop effective strategies to ensure your PR campaigns are successful.

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Leeza Hoyt

Founder and President at The Hoyt Organization

With over 25 years of experience, Leeza’s campaigns have garnered over 150 awards from top public relations organizations nationwide. Additionally, THO serves as the Los Angeles area partner of the Public Relations Global Network, granting clients access to over 50 global markets. The agency was also named to one of the top 200 firms in the country by Forbes magazine in 2021, and she has been named by Globest.com as a Woman of Influence and a Woman to Watch, among other designations.