PR can help drive exponential business growth, but to quantify that progress, marcomms pros must infuse the same creativity into measuring ROI as they put into the strategies that support and bolster a brand's reputation. Below, Crowe PR founder Anna Crowe shares the different factors to consider when evaluating your PR ROI.
Organizations are continuously seeking ways to lead their respective industries and drive revenue. As such, marketers around the globe regularly evaluate the success of their integrated strategies and tactics to better understand what’s driving the intended results.
Whether it’s brand awareness, credibility, sales, in-store or web traffic, a strategic public relations program can exponentially grow a business. The challenge, often, is understanding which levers to pull and the different ways to measure ROI.
Like many industries, the public relations profession and tactics have evolved over time. The past five years have been especially dynamic, given technological advancements, social media prevalence, rise of AI, the economic climate and more. With these changes comes a natural shift in the way customers engage with brands, including buying behavior, which makes it even more critical to review all marketing tactics on an ongoing basis and ensure you’re making the most of your investment.
We take a holistic marketing approach at Crowe PR, which starts with gaining clarity on an organization’s business goals and success metrics. Based on those quantifiable and qualifiable goals and metrics, our team evaluates a variety of integrated marketing tactics to develop the appropriate strategy. This may include traditional and non-traditional media channels, digital outlets, social media, influencer activations, content creation and more. And once a strategy is set in motion, we evaluate the ROI to ensure our brands are thriving.
Here are a few elements to consider when evaluating a return on your investment.
Measure What Matters
At the start of any marketing or ROI conversation, it’s important to understand what success looks like – how you define success for the current year, three years out and a decade from now. Gaining clarity on your goals – short and long-term – can ensure you’re measuring the right things to begin with. Similarly, understanding an organization’s success metrics helps ensure you are properly measuring progress.
If you’re in the hotel or resort space, for instance, one of your success metrics could be “heads in beds” or average daily rate. For a medical device company, it may be weekly sales volume or industry recognition. And if you’re a consumer brand, you may be looking at daily sales, traffic or social media engagement. Knowing goals and metrics will help ensure impactful work and continued progress.
Brand Awareness
A common goal of public relations is growing brand awareness. Given its role in building trust and customer equity, brand awareness is key for both newer and established brands. Securing media real estate via positive earned placements and stories is a great way to generate awareness, buzz and share of voice – in print media, digital outlets, broadcast and more. Additionally, with Google’s trust in media platforms over brand websites, it’s even more critical today to tell your story across various channels and to do so continuously. And with the recent rise of influencers also comes an increase in influential voices and social conversations, which means consumer-facing brands must also consider incorporating appropriate partnerships into the marketing mix.
PR-friendly tools like Cision, MuckRack or Tagger are helpful in measuring brand amplification by quantifying gross impressions, share of voice, domain authority, engagements, etc. And it’s important to also evaluate the qualitative ROI – is the intended messaging getting through? Is the brand properly positioned in the market? Are you connecting with the right audience?
Additionally, consider this – what is the cost of not having your brand visible?
Earning Trust and Credibility
As discussed above, positive brand awareness plays a major role in gaining customer trust. In addition to brand stories, a company can dominate the headlines due to an innovative PR stunt, product launch or press conference, building creditability in the process.
And there are considerations for ‘earned’ vs. ‘paid’ strategies and placements. Yes, trust is generally earned, not paid for; that said, strategic partnerships – a piece of the PR mix – are another great way to foster trust. While there is generally some sort of financial exchange between partners, the right collaboration with a publication, an influencer, an event, or another brand can build credibility. The caveat is that partnerships must be authentic to everyone involved, transparent, non-promotional in nature and generate value for the end user.
Sales, Traffic and All the Rest
Public relations is arguably the best way to build and maintain a brand’s reputation, which is essential for the success of any company. A question that comes up is how PR contributes to sales, conversations, traffic or other results-driven metrics. How does one measure that type of ROI from a PR campaign?
PR is not the lead actor in a performance marketing campaign – although it plays a key role. Digital marketing tactics such as Google or social media ads – when executed flawlessly – can drive same-day results. For instance, a $1M investment in such ads can return $1.5M or more. The minute you turn off those ads, however, the activity also shuts down. Plus, companies sometimes need to invest money and time in brand awareness and traffic campaigns before seeing any results.
Public relations can set the brand up for ongoing (and increasing) value exchanges such as sales, traffic or more. While it’s not the main driver in performance marketing, it can be a key element in a successful metrics-driven campaign. In fact, we’ve had clients sell out of products within hours after a greatly earned editorial feature and continue the momentum by continuously connecting with their customers through PR. And let’s not forget about affiliate marketing, which has also seen a major uptick over the past five years as publishers and influencers find new ways to monetize their content.
The Right Mix and ROI
Marketers have a tough but exciting role of delineating their marketing budgets into tactics to drive intended results and figuring out what to spend on PR, SEO, organic and paid social, digital advertising, content creation, outdoor advertising and more. With the landscape continuously evolving, algorithms changing and customers behaving differently year after year, experienced marketers know their tactics may need to shift at any time. The great news for PR professionals is that, regardless of these changes, a company’s reputation remains essential for the success of the business, and practitioners have a variety of integrated PR tools to keep the momentum going.
Public relations is a multi-faceted and impactful aspect of any organization's success and it’s important to know why it matters and what to measure. Embracing a comprehensive quantifiable and qualifiable approach to PR allows businesses to unlock their full potential and capitalize on the various opportunities it offers to thrive in today's competitive landscape. As businesses continue to invest in strategic PR initiatives, they pave the way for increased credibility and sustained growth.
