Q: How do I measure and evaluate my PR and marketing to see what return on investment I’m getting?
A: Gauging a return on investment for your marketing and PR spend used to rely on a lot of guesswork; it does not anymore. Although the process is a lot easier and much more insightful, though, it is still possible to go wrong.
The tactics (and many of the tools) used in modern PR and marketing are similar but the disciplines differ enough to make evaluation for the two different. Very simply put, PR protects and enhances your organisation’s reputation, allowing your marketing team to continue selling to customers.
Before getting into specifics, let’s think about what you are trying to achieve. We need to start at the end. Every communication has a purpose: it may be to increase sales, change behaviour, achieve a policy goal or something else linked to your overall business strategy. So, your evaluation approach is aimed at seeing a meaningful difference in those priorities.
But, and here’s the rub, it can take a long time to achieve those and they are influenced by many factors, so how on earth do you know what is working and what is not?
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That puts people off so they revert to measuring tactics and intermediate measures, which might show changes in the short to medium term but this approach could end up being misguided because it is not necessarily aligned with a bigger objective.
Not surprisingly, the answer is to cover all the bases: have a performance framework that is structured for the long term but with intermediate stages when you can refine your campaign as you proceed.
To take one example: the National Blood Transfusion Service wanted to increase the number of registered donors. It specifically wanted to increase registrations among black, Asian and ethnic minority audiences and also 14 to 18-year-olds. Those were the goals that guided the campaign.
It used tools to delve deeper and look at:
•Demographics from registrations.
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•Completed registrations online.
•Correlation between communications promotion and website activity.
•Engagement with campaign promotion, eg on social media.
•Inclusion of their key messages and calls to action in media coverage.
This is all hugely valuable information but the plethora of metrics we have now, from search engine optimisation to social media “likes”, can be a blessing and a curse. The granular detail is great but sifting and collating it is often challenging and there are other ways to go wrong too without a proper framework.
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The Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication has nearly 200 members, representing organisations based in more than eighty countries and more than a thousand professionals dedicated to measurement and evaluation of best practice across the globe. Its golden rules are called the Barcelona Principles. They emphasise the essentials of goal setting, measurement and evaluation while also ensuring that modern communication measurement includes all relevant online and offline channels.
The best PR teams will deliver consistency and credibility in terms of metrics, measuring the success (or otherwise) of a campaign and offer you a clear view of how your business is perceived among target audiences.
Speak to your team today to ask whether they are measuring the right thing, quantifying the commercial/business impact and whether they are acting on the data.
Ultimately, what you really want, and need, to know is how your communications have achieved, and can continue to drive, the objectives that matter to your organisation.
Zoe Ogilvie is director of the marketing agency Big Partnership
