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Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 1 Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PRMeasuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 1 Introduction All communications professionals know that they work in a dynamic field; what was true, and what worked even a year ago is subject to change. Its also true that many of those same professionals continue to work within outdated, and technologically lack- ing frameworks, often due to budget constraints or a lack of buy-in from higher-ups on more sophisticated measurement solutions. In an increasingly data-driven world, PR professionals need to prove the value of their work but without value to show, it is challenging to gain the buy-in from key company decision makers especially if youre not aligned to company KPIs. The question, then, becomes how to take PR measurement to the next level by using the essential metrics that show ROI using the tools and techniques to get you there. What percentage of your decision-making is driven by data? This eBook discusses exactly which metrics can help you prove the value of your work in the age of Digital PR (more on that in a minute). Well dive into the concept of the Communicators Funnel to help make things more concrete, in addition to real, action- able metrics, and the data behind them that you can use to justify your PR budget, spend, and decision-making. And well be honest: Much of this can be made easier by using Cision, especially as we implement new capabilities across social media, and influencer marketing. But whether youre a customer of ours or not, the metrics we recommend are available to you if youre willing to do a little work. Lets get started. 80% 80% of marketers said they were using data to drive deci- sion-making, but as that number is continuously increasing, so are the questions around which metrics are key. Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 2 First: What Is Digital Pr? Digital PR is everything you are already doing as a com- munications professional in an increasingly intercon- nected world. At the intersection of traditional PR, and digital marketing, Digital PR incorporates digital func- tions of marketing including SEO, Social Media, Influ- encer Marketing, and Paid Media with traditional PR disciplines like pitching, and relationship building. Increasingly, PR Professionals do not typically believe PR is just the “public relations” tasks the title implies, but a job that incorporates much more across the communica- tions spectrum. For example, a recent study by USC Annenberg School for Commu- nications and Journalism shared that “87% of PR executives believe the term public relations wont accurately describe the work they will be doing in five years” and that “60% of PR executives believe that content creation and working with social media influencers will be vital parts of public relation efforts in the future”. PR professionals today need a deeper understanding of how social, and influencer marketing fit into the earned, owned, and paid media landscapes, and the value that can be found at their intersection. Lets discuss how to prove the ROI of your PR efforts, along with some tools you can try if you have limited resources or are just starting out. 87% 87% Of PR Executives Dont Believe “Public Relations” Will Describe The Work They Do In 5 Years 2017 USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 3 BRAND IMPACT DIGITAL IMPACT BOTTOM-LINE IMPACT As the PR industry and the technology surrounding it evolves, its a good idea to start visualizing your process in a new way. The old ways of organizing, thinking about, and reporting on PR are just that: old. Just because something is old doesnt make it wise; stop pointing to lists of articles as success. Dive deeper. Lets look at the PR terms you may already know, and use consistently in a different way, this time based on analytics, and data because there is actionable data behind every article, journalist, and publication out there. The biggest struggle in a more data- driven PR strategy is organizing all this new information, second only to making sure youre tracking the right metrics in the first place. To effectively track, and measure impact, you need a detailed framework. Marketers use a marketing funnel or Buyers Journey model to understand what their objectives, and key metrics are at each stage. We can apply a similar model - the Communicators Funnel - to PR, and communications. The Communicators Funnel introduces three main concepts: it breaks ideas down in terms of your communication goals, asks the right questions, and matches metrics to those goals. Communicators FunnelMeasuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 4 Brand Impact Defined, The Communicators Funnel is the impact on how your brand is perceived in the marketplace, in the minds of your potential customers, and the general public. Once people become aware of, and favorably disposed to your brand, theyre more likely to engage with you. But measuring a campaigns impact on your brand has been elusive. Even if you are Disneyland, it can be hard to say that a new campaign had positive impact. You are already the “happiest place on earth”, so how do you get campaign specific, ensuring that your efforts can be tied to real results? Weve broken down Brand Impact into 3 categories: Awareness, Mindshare, and Reputation. Now, lets break each of those down into real, actionable metrics.Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 5 Awareness In theory, awareness is simple. Are people aware of your brand? Has your target mar- ket heard of you? Are they mentioning your product at conferences or in market specific articles? Focus groups, and surveys may measure awareness through aided, and unaided recall of your brand, but in the PR world there are more effective ways to mea- sure whether youre getting in front of your audience. Before you can do anything with a brand, you need to know how aware the market is. If you arent already quantifying awareness, you need to start in order to create a baseline. But how? How do you measure awareness? In its most simplistic form, the number of mentions serves as a proxy for awareness, because it captures the voice your PR work is creating in the market. As you record, and graph this number, you can capture the volume of your signal. This is where a strong baseline has to be established. Even if this is a new metric, start building the numbers now. In three to six months, youll be able to show a chart of concrete numbers to which you can tie suc- cess by showing an up-and-to-the-right trend. Or not. As we discuss each of these metrics, there is the possibility things are not going the direction you want (but thats why youre reading this book, to better your strat- egy), so dont be intimidated by less-than-stellar numbers. You have to understand strengths, and weaknesses and its often the latter than can teach us more about the work we need to do to succeed, even when its a painful lesson. Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 6 You may already be beyond the first steps with awareness. Even the green- est PR pros start their day with a strong Google Alert review. But not all mentions are created equal, so you cant stop with Google Alerts. Next, youll look at the publications. What is their readership? Do they hit your target demographic, geography, or industry audience? Youll look at the articles, too whats the sentiment, is your audience engaging with them, and other measures of article impact. This gives you a data-driven take on awareness. However, if you just stop at mentions, you arent getting the full picture. Prior to using Cision, one of our Fortune 500 customers tallied success by mentions alone. They had no idea which articles were impactful, positive or negative, or even being read by their target market. That laundry list of articles they had stockpiled became something their bosses just glazed over, keeping their PR team from getting any real recognition of success. As they saw other areas of the marketing department reporting on tangible numbers tied to real business results, they realized they needed stronger analytics or they would continue to see their budget- and team- shrink. So they reorganized their metrics, started pulling in incredible amounts of data, and began reporting brand awareness in a way that garnered more attention, and respect. Thats the pur- pose of a data-driven framework. TOOL Google Alerts is always a good start. Its free, its relatively easy to use, and you can customize it from so many angles. Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 7 MindshareMindshare includes finding trends in your men- tions and featured mentions. (A featured men- tion, in plain English, is a mention in an article that is specifically about your company or prod- uct, rather than a passing mention in an article that may be about another topic.) You can also evaluate share of voice (SoV) versus competi- tors by counting their total or featured mentions versus yours, and benchmark against the companies in your industry or other industries that you might want to emulate. Its worth looking at this over time, rather than just in a snapshot, because the trendline can show if youre gaining, losing, or plateauing, and the impact of specific programs that you run. In practice, mindshare as measured by standard media mention reporting includes: article publish date, publication name, author, link to publication, arti- cle title, topic/trend, and publisher domain. For a clear picture of mindshare, you need to record every mention during your given reporting time period. Trend/Topic - To take mindshare a level deeper, assign a topic or theme to each media mention. Common examples include: Product launch, funding announcement, charity, industry topic, etc. Why is this important to your strategy? Researching, and recording data based on trends will help you spot patterns in coverage so you can adjust your strategy to fit any upwards trends. Also, use this in your competitive analysis to ask why your competitor got a huge bump last week. If you know, you can then adjust your week to combat (or drown) their share of voice. TOOL You can use Google News to find relevant media mentions. You will have to do some manual filtering as Goo- gle News is less effective than a purpose-built tool at separat- ing quality mentions from the noise, but the information will be there. Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 8 Reputation As a successful PR professional, we consistently track if our coverage is resonating with our tar- get audience. This is a great use case for social amplification, since social sharing is a good proxy for audience engagement, looking at sentiment, and key message pull-through, as well. After all, if youre getting a strong signal with a lot of coverage, but the sentiment is poor or your audience isnt talking about the messages youre trying to deliver, youre not achieving your goals. Those three ele- ments- illustrated by the right metrics- give you a data-driven read on reputation. Comparisons of specific event coverage like product launches or crises against your total brand coverage can give you a quantitative metric for the impact to your reputation. Benchmarking those events against historical brand events, and those of other companies gives you a way of talking about the “seriousness” or suc- cess of an event and can give you hints into where in the life cycle of a crisis you are. Sentiment measured by social amplification: When most PR profes- sionals think of shared media, they think of social. Its easy to look at the number of times something has been shared across a social platform, and much more difficult to gauge the sentiment behind each of those shares put into an aggregate. After all, robots arent very good at sarcasm or the nuanced ways we use hashtags, and emojis. (Theres more; We will dive deeper into social amplification on page 15.) TOOL TIP Try the free Twitter Snapshot Report. While it isnt a deep dive into sentiment, it It gives you a basic overview of your sentiment. Plus you can search any hashtag, keyword, handle, or more.Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 9 Digital Impact Measuring digital impact answers the question, “Is my PR coverage driving traffic to my website or other digital properties, and if so, what action are those visitors taking?” PR professionals are becoming more familiar with digital measurement, but its safe to say that theyre not as comfortable with it yet, for example, as demand gen profes- sionals are. It requires a different set of tools, and a different mindset. This mindset shift is worth pursuing, as digital marketing has set the standard for modern marketing everything becomes measurable, quantified, and therefore optimized. In order to thrive in todays digital environment, PR has to make a similar shift. To make digital measurement meaningful, break it down into the right components. Youll want to understand how many visitors youre driving, if the links youre creating are of value, and if your content is resonating with your site visitors. Website traffic, SEO impact, and social amplification are a way to break those objectives down for digital impact metrics.Measuring PRs Impact: The Framework for Digital PR 10 Traffic In order to measure digital impact, start with track- ing how many visits PR drives to the website. Its not enough to just watch spikes in traffic, however. To understand PRs impact, you must map against your overall site traffic, and understand what percentage of total web traffic youre driving over time. Getting a visitor to your website is the first step, but you also need to understand whether they engage or “bounce” (exit the site within seconds). Engagement is best measured by understanding your visitors behavior. How long do they spend on the site? How many pages do they visit? What is their bounce rate? What content draws and keeps their attention? By understanding that, you better understand the value of the traffic, because you can differentiate between articles that drive one-hit wonders, and articles that drive visitors who engage in a positive way with your site, and there- fore your brand. Ask someone with access to your companys Google Analytics (GA) account to export the data or for the credentials to log in, and generate the reports you need. GA isnt the most intuitive tool, but it will give you a strong picture of web traffic, and you can build reports based on your PR metrics, and goals. Almost every CMO understands the high value of a new site visitor, a
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