Blog courtesy of Bridge Global Strategies

This blog post is the last in a three-part series, describing the steps to execute a successful small business PR strategy.

In our first two posts in this series, we walked you through the core components of an effective small business PR strategy—research and planning and media outreach—providing recommendations on how to craft compelling story ideas and how to pitch those ideas to reporters and bloggers to increase your chances of getting media coverage. After you’ve completed your media outreach, hopefully you will have some valuable publicity to show for your efforts, which brings us to the final step of the PR process: measuring your results.

In today’s marketing environment, where success is often gauged based on website visits, advertising click-throughs and email opens, many business executives struggle to calibrate their PR metrics with these other marketing metrics. Part of the challenge is that unlike direct marketing, PR tends to have a much longer impact, extending beyond a single promotion or touchpoint. An online news article about your company will be searchable until the day it is eventually wiped from the publication’s server (how do you determine the impact of online publicity on your website traffic and SEO?). Moreover, PR allows you to convey messages about your business, its reputation and products in a way that isn’t possible through direct marketing—your messages appear in the news, not in the pop-up box that interrupts the news (how do you determine the value of getting exposure in a credible news story?).

These kinds of questions have plagued PR professionals for years and will likely continue for some time, but fortunately, there are some specific things that you can measure to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. Here are a few indicators to consider:

Correlation of Business Outcomes with Media Coverage – Before the digital revolution, PR performance was often measured by output, such as the number of news clips, rather than business outcomes, such as lead generation and sales. Thanks to web analytics, you can now examine correlations between your news coverage and actual outcomes (e.g. website visits, inquiries, orders, attendance at corporate events, etc.). While this type of analysis can help you make some general inferences about the effectiveness of your strategy, however, it’s important to remember that these kinds of changes don’t occur in a vacuum; your business outcomes will likely be affected by other marketing activities you are executing, as well as other variables, such as seasonal trends and the overall size of your addressable market.

Social Media Engagement – Many small business leaders acknowledge—sometimes after a little coaching—that social media is an important channel for building visibility and supporting their overall PR strategy. But there is still a lot of confusion about how to measure social media effectiveness. It may be tempting to just look at the low hanging fruit, such as the number of Facebook likes and Twitter followers, but there is much more to the story than that. You should also be assessing the quality of your followers and likes (e.g. do they represent your actual target audience, or do they represent your friends, co-workers and people who want to sell to you?) and whether your social media interactions are leading to desired behaviors, such as clicking a link to your website, signing up for a campaign, downloading a whitepaper or donating to a cause.

Media Conversion Rate – One way marketers measure sales success is by looking at how well they convert leads into sales. You can apply the same concept to your PR strategy, by measuring the conversion of your media pitches and interviews to news coverage. The key here is to aim for a reasonable target: most emerging companies are probably doing well even if they convert 5% of their pitches into actual stories.

Media Mix – Not all media is created equal. Depending on your company’s business objectives and its target market, certain types of media will be more valuable than others. For example, if you are an agricultural equipment company marketing to farmers, you will probably be aiming to secure media exposure particularly in agriculture media. In some cases, you may find that your total news clips and media impressions are far from impressive, but because you have earned exposure in key media outlets, you’re PR efforts are paying off.

Tone & Key Message Penetration – Just because you got your business featured in a high profile news article, it doesn’t mean that the article is saying the things that you want it to say. It’s a good idea to review all news coverage to assess its tone (i.e. positive, negative, neutral) and determine how well it reflects your key messaging (e.g. product attributes, market segmentation, company positioning, etc.).

In summary, if you have the internal capabilities, you can carry out your entire PR strategy in-house, following the steps we described in this blog series. It’s important to note, however, that keeping everything in-house is not a viable option for all businesses. There are some clear advantages to enlisting the support of a PR agency, which you should be aware of. The biggest benefit of working with an agency is that it frees your business of the exorbitant time commitment required to manage these activities, so that you can focus on your core business objectives. Also, many PR agencies have sophisticated media monitoring and analytic tools (that go beyond the metrics listed here) to continuously monitor their results and make improvements to the strategy—these tools can be costly for a small business to deploy internally and may require additional time in user training. So it’s important to carefully consider all factors, not just direct costs, when determining whether to manage your PR strategy internally or to bring in outside support.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

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