PR is often considered a nice-to-have as opposed to a vital service by business owners and marketers, and a common reason for this is because many question whether or not it has measurable business impact. But, it does, you just have to know how to measure success!
At Agent99 benchmarking and reporting on business impact is in our DNA, and in fact, data helps guide our direction and strategies. It is also a fact now that SEO practitioners can no longer ‘game the system’ and rely heavily on PR to do the heavy lifting. Using PR tools, we secure brand mentions and backlinks to the brand’s website from authoritative sites such as top tier news outlets, which then help brands to rank for critical keywords. This ultimately drives direct, indirect and organic traffic. This will not only help with brand awareness and sales, but it will also leave your competition far behind.
So, while many PR agencies shy away from metrics, we embrace them, and here are just a few ways we measure success:
- Brand awareness. There’s no doubt that brand awareness is a key reason many companies do PR, but how can this be measured? Hearing that people are talking about your campaign is great for anecdotal information, however there is also more metric driven ways to measure this. For example, at Agent99 we regularly execute market research projects for content purposes, but this is also a solid way to track how many people are aware of your brand. We can benchmark this awareness to see if it’s increased at the conclusion of a campaign. Another method is to study growth in direct traffic – if more people are becoming aware of your brand, the more likely they are to directly type your business into the search bar.
- Share of Voice (SOV). Again, anecdotal comments can be regularly used in reporting, however at Agent99 we track exactly what your key competitors are doing, both from an earned and paid media perspective, and can reflect how each brand compares percentage wise in terms of their share of voice in the market. We can collate this information for several time periods, so again we can benchmark your SOV at the commencement and conclusion of the campaign to see how this has increased.
- Increase in website traffic. For brands that have numerous touch points and strategies e.g. social media, ads, referrals, it can be difficult to determine which website traffic spikes can be attributed to which sources. At Agent99 we plug our clients’ Google Analytics (as a read only version!) into our media monitoring service, where we are able to track exactly how many people click through from our earned media articles to our client’s website. We also benchmark your site authority, total backlinks and top referrals to see how our efforts have contributed to your digital footprint and business success.
- An uplift in sales or enquiries. Depending on whether you are product or service based, PR can have a considerable impact on your sales and client enquiries. Although it can sometimes be difficult to pinpoint which earned media pieces triggered this, you can simply ask new customers how they heard about your business and its offerings. Another way is to observe their purchase path – did they click onto a link from a news site and then purchase a product or submit a contact form as a result of this?
- An increase in social media following or subscriber base. If you’re executing an influencer campaign or driving traffic to your social media, you can monitor growth and see if the level of engagement has increased. Another way is to examine social media mentions – are more people talking about your business since launching a PR campaign, or tagging their friends in your posts? Conversely, if you’re driving customers to subscribe to your database from your website, again, ask them how they found out about your business when they sign up.
If you’re interested in hearing more about how we can help you elevate your brand, and track successes in a measurable way, get in touch with us today at info@agent99pr.com.
Agent Amelia
