Whether you work in a PR agency, or as an in-house communications professional, one of the biggest challenges in our field of work is demonstrating an accurate ROI for PR services.
As a long-time PR pro, I am sometimes too close to what I do to easily boil the results of a campaign down to a series of numbers on a spreadsheet. Perhaps it is partly my ego, but the reality is, I am not convinced that listing out the sheer quantity of articles placed is a good, or accurate, measure of the value we PR pros, bring to our clients.
Granted, while using traditional reporting methods such as article tracking, number of pickups, and number of briefings held for a particular campaign are important, I think that these should serve only as initial data points when looking at the true value of a PR program. With each successive campaign executed upon, these data points should not only serve to track short-term responses, but more importantly, they should create a bigger picture that illustrates long-term benefit received from the PR function by examining the quality of coverage, and how journalist perception and article messages align with the goals of the business.
In addition, by monitoring not only the amount of coverage, but also quality and message saturation, PR professionals are able to approach future campaigns more strategically. We can accomplish this by using past results to effectively modify and align future campaign objectives more closely with business objectives. So, while tracking clips remains the primary measure of success for PR agencies and professionals, providing only that information to executives can create a disconnect, and does not truly illustrate how PR correlates directly to those business objectives.
In short, rather than measuring success solely by how many articles we are able to secure for our clients, perhaps it would be more effective to demonstrate the value of a given campaign by focusing on how the client is perceived — and more importantly, by illustrating how those perceptions change after each successive campaign.
In a climate where the first function to be cut during the hard times is often PR, I believe that the closer we, as PR professionals, can tie ourselves to the long-term health of our client’s brand, the greater our value, and the greater our chances become of remaining viable in an increasingly competitive field.