6 Effective Ways to Measure ROI of PR

Public relations is often considered a job that must be done but actually, cannot see conversions in real time. This is an old school pattern of considering how PR works. With PR integrating very closely with marketing and advertising a brand, these days, PR is considered more relevant and is measurable in terms of how much return on investment (ROI) it brings to the organisation. There are many tools used by top PR Firms – the most common of them, Google Analytics - that bring the vital information on the amount spent and the leads that spend has procured. However, PR can be separately measured for its effectiveness. I’m not talking about ways to measure the PR value which is not relevant anymore. PR Value = Ad value (for print/online coverage) x 3? You get the cost of ad & then multiply it by 3 (PR value Factor) is a way old way to measure the ROI. Here are some of the concepts to keep an eye out for while measuring your ROI, specifically on PR spends.

1. Brand perception building Building your credibility and authority within the industry and the world at large is certainly very important for any brand. If your competitors notice you and your consumers want you, there is hardly a better indicator of the ROI from your PR initiative. Your conversation must help your consumers make the decision to go with you. Engaging with your audiences, appearing in the news, podcasts, webinars, radios are all important ways to show your visibility.Example: In a recent press unveiling during CES for a wearable startup (boltt) we secured a 3 min prime-time live broadcast coverage in CNN International. As a result, the brand perception for a startup has been built in a league of global competitors like under armour and Fitbit
2. Sentiments It is necessary to monitor the sentiments of the brand, PR can make & break the brand in a day. There always is a huge impact on brand mentions before & after PR announcements done right. For measuring the ROI, you can track the +ve & -ve cloud within the time span using tools like Meltwater, brandwatch, simply measured & others.
3. Referral Traffic Visitors arriving at your website from other website are considered as referral traffic. Here by gaining insights from referral traffic to a client’s website, the public relation team is capable of drilling down deeper into who the target market is, how they were driven to your website, what they are interested in, and what are activities performed by them. For instance, if you know the exact demographic of your audience based on the referral traffic, apart from measuring your current reach, you can additionally tweak future PR efforts to target it to your right audiences.
4. The Share of Voice (SOV) SOV can be defined as the % of share for your brand while considering the total number of competitor/category mentions ie it is the percentage of all online content and conversations about your company, compared against those of your competitors.Since the new share of public relations is Digital PR, most of the online mentions are inspired from the media coverages, their posts on social channels & hence making anything go viral with visitors/followers comments. Example #1: SOV can influence the purchase decision of buyers. See how e-book buyers discover books vs the role of blogs/reviews.
5. Social media mentions & new followers from PR coverages
6. Increase in inquiries and sales inspired from awareness created from PR Example: The recent tea for trump viral marketing campaign that we executed results in 1100% increase in international business enquiries, 9900% increase in website organic traffic.