Measuring campaign success has always been a grey area for the Public Relations industry. In the old days it was simple – you put an ad out, and the newspaper data figured out the rest. But it’s 2020 and a brave new digital world, we now have access to many tools and technologies to serve your brand’s PR campaign and measure its success.
Why measure at all?
Why do you go to the gym? Why do you read and research? To learn and improve. Campaign measurement will reveal what is working, and what’s not. It gives you the ability to identify weak spots and adjust your campaign, so you get the desired results for your brand.
So, how do you measure success?
No PR campaign will have the exact same tools of measurement, there are no ‘guidelines’ to adhere by, it is all relative to your brand and your goal. The key to measuring success is to identify where you are starting and where you want to finish. So, you’ve got a product and you’ve got an audience – what’s next?
What is a conversion?
Conversion is the rate at which your audience becomes a consumer for your brand. It is often the end goal for your PR campaign. Conversion monitors how many people have visited your site and made purchases. Your PR campaign will increase brand awareness and ultimately drive sales.
Keeping an eye on your conversion rate allows you to identify a key measure of success for your campaign. Google analytics is a great platform to track your brand’s conversion rates – you can see specific publications, set specific goals, track revenue and see which avenue of the web your customers are coming from. Conversion is tracked and linked to your brand’s social platforms. But how do you monitor what people are saying about you, but not to you?
Brand mentions
Brand mention is simply a measure of who is talking about your brand. It indicates how many times your name, your hashtag, or other monitored words have been mentioned online during a specific timeframe.
Tracking your brand mentions gives you the unique opportunity to monitor unbranded content. Brand mentions provide insight to current social conversations, and helps brands connect with their most active audience.
They:
offer an authentic view on what your target audience is saying about your brand.
allow you to measure brand satisfaction and track your impact on your target audience.
give you the opportunity to tailor digital strategy and community management to improve your relationship with your customer.
give you a basis to diagnose strengths and weaknesses of your campaign.
The most effective way to gain insight from your brand mentions is to work quickly – you want to participate in current conversations and use your most active audience to your advantage. Figure out what they like and implement it in your campaign.
Social media
It goes without saying, social media plays a vital role in PR strategy and execution. It provides brands not only with valuable data on their audience but also a detailed means of measurement. Social media influence is all the rage, but how do you know if your social presence is paying off? No matter where you’re posting, each platform has its own means of data analytics. KPIs is a term that gets thrown around for measuring success on your social channels. Let us break the big ones down for you….
Social media reach
The number of people that your content has been posted to.
It provides a strong idea of the context of your posts and ads.
It poses the question, who is looking at you and is this number growing?
Social media impressions
The number of times that someone sees your content.
A measure of the frequency of your posts/ads.
Social media engagement
Actions taken by users on your posts.
Includes, likes, comments and shares.
The more engagement your post gets the more people it will reach, at a higher frequency (impressions).
Using social media engagement as a means to measure success is one of our favourite subjects, we’d be here all-day listing all of its benefits. The main takeaway is that engagement on social media gives you an opportunity to see how your audience interacts with you. It allows you to diagnose your most active customer and target your posts to engage those who aren’t as active. It allows you to modify your PR campaign so that your target audience is your actual audience and grow brand awareness and increase conversion. It’s basically magic, and at Piccolo PR we’re so here for it.
