Measurement
A standardized measurement approach for public relations has yet to be determined, despite the industry’s best efforts through tactics such as the Barcelona Principles and countless measurement vendors all seeking to crack the code. If it had been cracked, the industry would have created a standardized strategy years ago, even before the emergence of social media as part of core public relations plans.
As the industry continues to evolve beyond traditional measurement of impressions, CPM, audience reach, circulation, site visits, etc., there’s a need to find the holy grail of measurement, especially as brands find themselves increasingly engaging with consumers outside of traditional channels—moving beyond the pages of print and the views of television.
@havaspr offers a customized approach for leveraging analytics to support and drive strategy for brands across the spectrum—health and wellness, consumer business, CSR, financial/B2B, corporate, fashion, youth, social, public affairs and crisis management. Our agency works with clients to set measurable objectives in order to successfully monitor results.
In establishing objectives, @havaspr acts to decipher and align the PR/communications goals with the larger leadership/corporate objectives to ensure executive buy-in. In other words, we determine very early and before jumping out of the gate: What keeps your C-suite up at night? How do the PR objectives help reach the company’s goals—and how will a program be evaluated as a success … or #fail? The objectives must be meaningful and not as vague as something such as “increase awareness.” There must be a clear output.
Effective PR measurement requires following these five steps:
- Design a measurement framework
- Outline the PR influence funnel
- Align metrics to influence the journey
- Identify techniques, tools and data to track metrics
- Define your scorecard
Business values are also determined at the beginning of each program by implementing an exercise to identify a variety of issues and/or desired outcomes the brand is looking to achieve, such as an increase in sales or WOM, an increase in efficiency, a need to inspire innovation, an increase in donations, greater employee retention and more.
To measure any given program, @havaspr establishes a baseline that addresses the following simple measurement mandates:
- Program traction: Overall exposure, impressions, clicks
- Program engagement: Customer interaction within the channel ecosystem
- Business impact: Correlation between interactions and resulting desired behavior
This provides an uncomplicated way to monitor and measure basic awareness, and it provides a way for brands to understand the environment and public opinion as it stands at that moment. @havaspr goes beyond just capturing statistics of the core program efforts to include the movement around other areas that encourage and elicit consumer behavior. Some examples include monitoring crisis communication responses, watching organic social engagement, and leveraging and learning from competitor activity and any shift in the industry based on late-breaking issues and news.
We believe that every brand has its own respective holy grail of measurement tied to predetermined business objectives and their impact on individual target audiences. We work with brands to tailor their measurement and leverage insights that allow for continuous feedback and improvement on public relations and social media programs.
Our process allows for continuous evaluation of the data to ensure a lasting success of programs across all channels, allowing us to meet a brand’s objectives—all while ensuring that the C-suite can sleep at night.
