Mentions—any time your brand is referenced in the media or online—are a vital, data-driven metric for measuring your communications campaign's success. This approach offers a clear picture of your brand's visibility. It's an effective way to confirm that your PR efforts are being noticed, reaching not just potential customers but also journalists and bloggers. Tracking mentions can start simply with tools like Google Alerts, but for deeper insights, exploring a range of media monitoring tools can provide a more comprehensive view of your campaign's impact.
To measure the success of a communications campaign, you need to: • Set a clear and attainable goal that aligns with your campaign objectives. • Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you track and evaluate your progress towards your goal. • Collect and analyze the data from your KPIs using both quantitative and qualitative methods. • Compare your results with your baseline and your benchmarks to assess your performance and return on investment (ROI). One example of a metric that I found particularly insightful is the sentiment analysis of the media coverage and the audience feedback. This metric shows how your campaign is perceived and received by the public, and whether it generates positive, negative, or neutral emotions. It can help you understand the impact of your campaign on your brand reputation and customer loyalty.
To measure the success of a communications campaign, one particularly insightful metric is the number of earned media mentions. This metric quantifies how often an organization is mentioned across various media platforms, such as broadcast, print, social media, or podcasts, based on specific keywords. Earned media mentions are valuable because they reflect the effectiveness of the PR team in securing message positioning across media channels. This metric is both measurable and comparable over time, allowing for the assessment of different campaigns' performance and highlighting the PR team's success in enhancing the organization's visibility and reputation.
Reach is going to be important in any communications campaign, but there can be other goals as well, such as improving sentiment scores, echo markers, etc. Marketing metrics are not the same as they once were. Campaigns about data privacy, consumer choice, etc. have encouraged every to 'say no to the cookie,' use non-tracker browsers, or install VPNs. Where marketing analytics was once a relatively straightforward opportunity to show wins and losses, managers and marketers today need to be able to recognize and work with these new shadow metrics. When 25,000 people get an email and you get a 20-25% open rate, but fewer than 10 people clicked, it's disappointing. Then, you look at website traffic analytics a few days later and see within 24 hours of that email going out, organic and direct traffic to that page jumped up about 1,500. Your email was far more effective than the numbers would imply. As a marketer, you have to be able to analyze and work with this strange series of seemingly unrelated data, make a story out of it, and use it to make informed decisions for ongoing and future campaigns.
In the marketing landscape, there are predefined sets of lead and lag KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that are available depending on whether it is an 'Awareness' campaign or a 'Conversion' campaign, and depending on the platform of communication. The success thresholds for these KPIs can be determined by taking industry benchmarks or by looking at historical campaign performance. For example: CPM (Cost per thousand impressions), landing page views, ad clicks, and interaction rate help evaluate the success of awareness campaigns. ROAS (Return on Ad spend), and successful CTA submissions determine the success of a conversion campaign.
Founder at PRHive
Answered 2 years ago
One particular metric I've found is the earned media value (EMV), which quantifies the monetary value of publicity gained through channels like social media, press coverage, and influencer mentions. By calculating the EMV, businesses can calculate the organic reach and impact of their campaign beyond paid advertising. This provides a more in-depth understanding of its overall performance. EMV in combination with other metrics can help businesses optimize their communication strategies to maximize ROI and engage their target audience.
Assessing the effectiveness of a communications campaign involves monitoring various metrics, such as engagement rates, audience reach, and conversion rates. One insightful measure I've found in my experience is analyzing audience feedback sentiment. For example, examining social media comments or survey responses to gauge the overall sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) towards the campaign provides valuable insights into its effectiveness in resonating with the target audience. This qualitative analysis complements quantitative metrics and offers a deeper understanding of audience perceptions and attitudes, guiding the refinement of future communication strategies accordingly.
Qualitative measures are often looked over in this area. Numbers are hard facts; people's subjective experiences are difficult to track and make sense of. But it's worth it to let audiences explain in their own words what worked and what didn't when it comes to communications especially. This is a medium that requires articulation, not cold data. At Redfish Technology, when we test a campaign, I always want to speak directly to the recipients. It's the best way to discover how they truly feel about the message. Often, they use words that would have been difficult to capture via another ROI measure -- and while the emotions they experience while viewing or listening to the campaign might feel superfluous and fleeting, they're actually a great predictor of action. Rob Reeves CEO & President, Redfish Technology https://www.redfishtech.com/fintech-recruiting/
For Digital PR campaigns, the most important metric is backlinks. And not just did you receive backlinks, but how authoritative were the sites that they came from? A big metric you can use to check the strength of a backlink is to find the Website Traffic of the domain the backlink is from using the AHREFS Website Traffic Checker, a free tool. Using that you can see how strong the domain is when it comes to existing search traffic, which in turn will help determine if it will have any sway on your website traffic.
Measuring the success of a communications campaign involves a mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics to evaluate its impact and effectiveness. One particularly insightful metric I've found is the engagement rate. Unlike basic metrics such as impressions or reach, which tell you how many people could have seen your message, the engagement rate goes deeper by measuring how many people interacted with your content. This can include actions like likes, shares, comments, and clicks, depending on the platform. For example, in a social media campaign we ran to increase awareness about a new product launch, we closely monitored the engagement rate on each post. This metric was invaluable because it not only showed us how many people found our content compelling enough to interact with it but also which types of content (e.g., videos vs. images, educational vs. entertaining) resonated most with our audience. High engagement rates on specific posts guided us to adjust our content strategy in real-time, focusing more on the content types that drove the most interaction. This approach allowed us to refine our messaging and content strategy effectively, increasing overall campaign performance. The engagement rate served as a direct indicator of our audience's interest and involvement with our campaign, providing insights that helped us optimize our efforts for better results. It exemplifies how a well-chosen metric can offer deep insights into campaign effectiveness, beyond just surface-level analytics.