When you spend time and money on business efforts, such as buying new equipment, expanding your team, or investing in branding, you want to ensure that your investment will produce results that move the needle toward your broader business goals.
Public relations is no different. When you invest in a PR campaign, monitoring the results is crucial in understanding your return on investment (ROI). This will enable you to make a business case for your investments and determine how to optimize your campaigns going forward.
In this article, we will talk about improving the results of your PR efforts by using various ROI metrics to inform your strategies. We will cover the importance of understanding analytics in PR before breaking down how to get strategic in boosting the ROI of your PR campaigns.
Why is ROI Important in PR?
As we mentioned, every action you take in your business must push you toward your company’s overarching objectives. As you design your PR campaigns, you should set them up in a way that makes your results measurable. This will help you determine the return on investment (ROI) so you can decide which efforts you should repeat and which you should pivot away from.
For example, getting a press mention is excellent. However, suppose it’s from an outlet with minimal viewership or an irrelevant audience. In that case, it won’t be as valuable to you as coverage on an outlet with a relevant, engaged viewership.
How to Measure ROI for PR Campaigns
Understanding which metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are important for measuring PR ROI will help you set more effective objectives for your PR campaigns. Here are a few ways to measure your PR initiatives’ performance.
Active Media Coverage
The most basic PR metric you should track is active media coverage. This metric considers any mention of your brand in the media, such as blog posts, op-eds, podcasts, videos, and more.
Understanding this KPI helps you ensure you hit your quotas on how many press mentions or media placements your brand gets. You can break your active coverage count down into specific categories if you’re aiming to land diverse media coverage.
Not all media coverage is created equally, so it’s difficult to measure the ROI of your PR efforts using this metric alone. However, this number is a good starting point for your broader PR analytics.
Potential Reach
Potential reach is a vital PR metric that is calculated based on active media coverage. Since different media outlets have different-sized audiences, this metric measures the sum of potential viewers, readers, and so forth for each piece of active media coverage.
Although active media coverage gives you a good idea of how many publications you’re getting, potential reach helps you better understand the potential impact of these publications.
Website Traffic from Referrals
Website traffic, which is also known as “earned traffic,” is another way to assess the effectiveness of a PR campaign.
You can track website traffic from different campaigns by setting up UTM parameters on the links you include in various publications. This allows you to differentiate traffic from one media placement versus another. UTM parameters can be specified by source, medium, campaign, term, and content so that you can get very granular in your tracking.
Sentiment
Another essential thing to pay attention to when assessing your media coverage is sentiment. While your PR efforts are geared toward shining your brand in a positive light, bad press happens. Outlets can catch wind of negative things that involve your brand, leading to bad press.
Of course, quantifying sentiment is a little bit difficult, but you can separate them into general buckets, like “positive” or “negative.” You can also use this qualifier to tag and sort other data based on more quantitative metrics. This is where a media monitoring tool comes in handy.
For example, if you’re calculating the potential reach of press coverage about your brand, you can divide it into positive and negative reach. The same goes for social engagement and other metrics.
Link-Building Metrics
Link-building is an integral part of performance PR, a newer type of public relations geared explicitly toward improving a website’s performance. It is meant to boost your site rankings and increase your organic traffic.
One of the most critical link-building metrics is domain authority. This measures a domain’s strength based on various factors search engines use to rank content on a scale of 0 to 100. All of your link-building efforts should focus on gaining links from sites with a domain authority of 50 or higher. Plus, you can look at your site’s domain authority over time to track the progress of your efforts.
Beyond the quality of websites you get backlinks from, you should also pay attention to the quantity. While there’s no magic number of backlinks you need to secure to boost your rankings, keep track of the number of backlinks you get so you can monitor the results of your outreach.
Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement is an umbrella term for a metric that measures how social media users interact with your brand’s content or content about your brand. This can include likes, shares, reposts, clicks, and other platform-specific engagement metrics.
This public relations KPI is very important when assessing the success of influencer marketing campaigns or choosing influencers to work with. In fact, assessing the engagement rates of influencers’ past campaigns can be even more telling than their following account.
5 Ways to Increase ROI in PR
Now that you understand key metrics for measuring ROI for PR campaigns, let’s review some tips for increasing your ROI and maximizing the success of your campaigns.
1. Lean into the Analytics
Keeping tabs on the metrics we reviewed above allows you to understand what worked and didn’t work with past campaigns. Using this data allows you to craft your future campaigns more strategically so you can tap into what made you successful and rethink things you struggled with.
Of course, which analytics you monitor depends on the type of PR campaigns you’re conducting and your objectives.
For example, if your primary PR campaigns revolve around influencer marketing, focusing on metrics relating to link building doesn’t make much sense. In this case, you’re better off focusing on social engagement and potential reach.
2. Understand Your Expenses
ROI measures your profit compared to your expenses, so one easy way to boost your ROI is to reduce costs. You can start this process by mapping out your costs with expense reports.
Think about the last time you read a company’s financial news that caught your attention – it probably wasn’t just about numbers. When organizations discover how to turn seemingly routine processes like expense reporting into compelling stories, they unlock a powerful PR opportunity that many overlook.
Plus, by sharing how they’re innovating even basic business processes, these organizations aren’t just managing expenses. They’re crafting narratives that resonate with stakeholders and demonstrate real business value, often leading to unexpected growth opportunities and more substantial market positions.
3. Create More Engaging Campaigns
Many people automatically think of features in magazines and similar publications when they think of PR. However, as many industries become more competitive, brands are forced to get creative to stand out.
Social media has opened many doors to creative PR campaigns. For example, PR box giveaways have become very popular in retail. Brands create Instagrammable kits to send to their loyal followers to show appreciation and spread the word on a micro-level.
This practice was inspired by the PR boxes that brands started sending to influencers and content creators for larger-scale promotion. However, creating a contest or giveaway creates a multi-dimensional campaign that produces authentic engagement.
4. Optimize Your Operations
To improve your PR ROI, you should optimize your strategic communication operations. When your team runs efficiently, you can use your time and resources better and boost your earnings from your efforts.
The first thing to do when optimizing your PR operations is to take a look at your current operations. Think about how you brainstorm, plan, and execute your campaigns and who is involved at every step of the way. Identify any weak links in the process and consider how you can improve them.
Another vital part of optimizing your operations is choosing the right internal communications tools. The support of the right tech can make it easier to share updates, coordinate responses, and keep everyone on the same page. With a clear flow of information, your PR efforts become more impactful, helping you build a stronger, more credible brand.
5. Hire Internationally
Another way to improve your ROI is to hire international contractors to expand your PR department’s operational capabilities. This is helpful in a few ways, especially if you’re looking to expand your target audience on a global scale.
For starters, hiring international contractors can save you money if you recruit from a lower cost of living, making livable wages lower, as well. Spending less on creative, outreach, PR management, and so forth will increase your ROI.
Plus, incorporating an international perspective into your PR content can help you create an enhanced global presence. This creates a positive cycle of media coverage and market penetration enables you to improve your reach and, ultimately, raise your bottom line.
What Does this Mean for PR?
Data and reporting technology continues to improve as technology improves, and AI makes it into more business processes. With access to advanced analytics and more thorough reporting, PR professionals can study past campaigns to better shape future initiatives.
Pairing informed decision-making with creative strategies for engaging your target audience will set you on track to boost the ROI of your PR initiatives.
