Running a PR campaign is a multi-step process. First, you need to define your goals. Next, you identify your target audience. This is followed by developing your key messages, creating a campaign timeline, building the media list, engaging with them, and finally launching the campaign.
But what often gets missed is something that comes after—the need to monitor and measure results. Without tracking the results of your campaign, you won’t really be able to tell how successful your campaign was. More importantly, you may not identify the gaps that exist, and how to improve your future campaigns.
Let’s take a look at the different strategies you can deploy to improve the ROI of your PR campaigns.
Picking the right campaign metrics
The success of your PR campaigns is typically measured with the help of metrics like the number of media placements, media impressions, share of voice, and media quality score. While these metrics are indeed good ways to benchmark each campaign against the rest, it may not necessarily align with the rest of your marketing objectives.
Across the marketing function, success is measured with the help of actual deliverables—qualified leads generated, meetings booked, and conversions. Unless your PR campaigns can be translated into these measurable metrics, it may be difficult to justify your budgets.
But this is also true that the objective of a PR campaign is to build brand awareness and such campaigns play out over the long-term. So, the right way to go about this would be to make use of your traditional metrics to benchmark each of your PR campaigns internally, while using metrics used across the board for assessing your success to stakeholders outside the PR team.
Differentiate Between Vanity vs. Actionable
PR campaigns need a lot of operating resources, and as such, a placement on top media sites (think Forbes and The New York Times) can cost way higher than a smaller publication. David Miller, the founder of Great Lake Tiny Homes, a company that offers tiny houses for sale in Michigan, says that from the perspective of meeting business objectives, you need to look at what really is necessary to grow your business.
Sure, a featured placement on The New York Times can help you establish credibility that can further help with securing new customers. However, a similar placement on a much more niche industrial publication could bring in the right eyeballs to your brand – it could generate several inbound leads right off the bat.
So while chasing vanity placements is cool, it may make more sense to invest the same resources in highly targeted industry-focused publications in order to improve your ROI.
Adhere to the PESO Model
A PR campaign that is done in silo can be quite expensive and may also fail to deliver the necessary results. This is because a mere brand mention or a quote is insufficient to move the needle.
For effective ROI, your PR campaign needs to mesh with the other elements of a marketing campaign. This includes Paid Media (P), Earned Media (E), Shared Media (S), and Owned Media (O).
Paid Media includes Adwords, Meta ads, and other ad campaigns that build demand. PR campaigns are part of the Earned Media segment which also includes SEO, guest posts, product reviews, and influencer mentions (without compensation). Shared Media is typically social media posts, comments, and engagements while Owned media includes assets your brand owns – the website, blog, email newsletter, podcasts, and YouTube channel.
To build a high ROI PR campaign, your press release should align with your other marketing campaigns.
Word-of-Mouth marketing tools like ReferralCandy make it easy to encourage your existing customers to share your new launch with their networks by rewarding referrals. This not only complements your PR efforts but also turns earned media attention into measurable conversions. This helps align paid media campaigns like a press release with shared media like your referral network.
Let’s take the example of a product launch. To ensure high ROI in your PR investment, you could run native ads on related blogs to publicize the launch, distribute your press release across social media channels, share the news in your email newsletter, and also add this in the signature of all tickets that go via your customer service software.
To make this process faster and more efficient, you can use AI ad generators like Predis.ai to create ready-to-publish social media creatives, captions, and short video ads.
This way, the news about your product launch reaches your target groups across multiple channels; ensuring high amplification for your press announcement.
Build better press relationships
Many PR agencies treat press outreach as a number game – reach X outlets with your story,and hope to get at least Y mentions out of this. This is honestly an inefficient way to go about a PR campaign.
Journalists are regular people like you and I. Building a more personal relationship with journalists covering your beat could be a better way to ensure a higher success rate for your press campaigns.
There are several ways to build such personal relationships – at scale. One way to do this is by serving them insightful scoops and roundups on a regular basis. This adds value to their cluttered inboxes – and when journalists trust and respect the value you bring, they tend to open your emails more often; and this naturally delivers a higher conversion rate for your PR pitches.
Build a success workflow just like you do with customers. Just like you would have a customer service software to cater to your customers, chase metrics like NPS to deliver great satisfaction, obsessively track the needs and satisfaction of your journalist cohort – by delivering them what they need, you can be sure that they are here for you when you need them.
The other way to do this is through establishing a personal rapport. Make use of your network to help them secure exclusive interviews or scoops that enable them to excel in their line of work. Such gestures need significant investment in time and resources but help your business stand out from competition in appealing to.
Repurpose and Amplify Content
The cost of producing content has come down significantly in the last few years. This also means that the barrier to entry is quite low with respect to content marketing.
However, in order to stand out from competition and attract eyeballs, you need to produce unique and extraordinary content that does not exist.
Let’s take the example of a company making ball point pens. This is an industry that does not see a lot of innovation and as such, there is not a lot of new information to cover. However, there are new ways to present old content that can serve to interest the audience.
For instance, a video of someone drawing a straight mile-long line with a pen without running out of ink could be engaging – something that the media will write about as well.
Now, producing such content can take a lot of planning, time, and money; not something that can be done regularly.
To maximize PR ROI, you could consider repurposing this content in many different ways. A video is certainly engaging. You could also repurpose this into a whitepaper comparing the line lengths of different ball point competitors. Or, you could launch a ‘Draw a mile’ contest inviting your customers to draw their own lines.
This way, the same content can be reused and repurposed many different ways to derive PR mileage.
Automate Your PR Relationships Smartly
We have said this earlier in the article that PR outreach should not be treated as a numbers game. However, in some ways, it still is – regardless of how well you build relationships, you need to automate certain parts of the outreach for the sake of better resource management.
However, it is important to maintain a smart use of automation tools. While a PR blast can certainly do things much more quickly than crafting each outreach message personally, it may not yield the best outcome.
To do this well, you need to look at smart segmentation. Understand the ‘beat’ that each of your target journalists cover. Understand their motives behind the stories they write, the content angles that work.
Based on this smartly segment these journalists based on the beat, the content angles, and the motives. This way, you can craft a message that appeals to this specific cohort of journalists.
This strategy can dramatically improve the ROI of your PR outreach campaigns.
Timing Your Campaigns Correctly
Journalists have an editorial calendar to adhere to. While some publications do share their calendar online (and this makes it easy for you to build content angles that align), it is not something that all publications do.
However, you may look into the previous years to arrive at some conclusion on what their calendar is going to look like. You may notice that the topic ideas align heavily with specific events, holidays, and other industry-specific days.
For instance, if you are a manufacturing organization, then you may notice that labor rights could be a popular topic around May when the May Day is observed. Perhaps, your PR angle during this time of the month could be about the unique benefits that you offer your workers in return for the service they offer.
The same strategy could be tied to industry events, popular news announcements, or even political developments.
Timing your campaign wisely can improve the conversion from your outreach which impacts your ROI.
Wrapping up
As a PR consultant, your objective should not simply be to generate buzz. Your campaign must deliver outcomes of measurable value. By setting clear objectives, targeting the right audiences, leveraging data, and amplifying your content strategically, you can significantly improve the ROI of your PR campaigns.
Remember, the key lies in quality over quantity, consistent tracking, and continuous refinement. When your PR campaign is integrated with broader business goals that are fueled by actionable insights, it becomes a powerful driver of awareness, trust, and growth.
Start treating your PR not just as a communication tool, but as a business investment. The returns will follow.
