10 ways you can measure PR's impact on the business

One of the major hurdles in adopting new forms of PR measurement is isolating the impact of PR activity on business metrics. Many PR professionals feel paralyzed when facing this issue, not having the resources or the know-how to tackle such a complex project. As a result, PR continues to get left out of the conversation of marketing’s impact on the business, a dangerous position when budget time comes. Last year’s market decline created a game changing shift. Accountability to business metrics is no longer optional.

Fortunately, this hurdle is easily overcome simply by shifting the premise of the conversation. The underlying assumption is that PR has to show its value independent of the other marketing functions. But this assumption really emanates from the internal structure of the business which assigns teams, budgets, etc. to distinct areas like PR, advertising, etc. Customers, however, don’t react to a company’s communications in this fashion. They may see an ad (placed by the ad team) that prompts them to search the web for more info (SEO team) and find an article in a trade publication (PR team) which convinces them to visit the company’s website (web team) where they download a case study (marketing team) and then pop over to a retailer or website where point of sale communications (channel team) seal the deal.

Since the ultimate marketing goal is to get the desired business result, it doesn’t make sense to start measuring by trying to isolate the impact of one function. PR simply needs to start integrating with other disciplines to better illustrate how our activity aligns with the broader goal. While we may not have direct insight into customer attitudes and behavior, these other disciplines do.

Search metrics, web site visits, post-purchase surveys, market research, even social media all provide clues to customer behavior. By creating ways to correlate PR activity to data captured by other groups, we start getting a more complete picture of how outbound communications are impacting customer behavior. We may not be able to isolate the specific contributions of PR vs. advertising, POS, etc. but we can point to the fact that PR activity aligns with the desired business outcome and even show how it is playing a role in moving the customer through the funnel from awareness to purchase.

Once PR results are integrated into the broader marketing mix, larger organizations may want to take the additional step of optimizing the marketing spend by determining which disciplines had the greatest impact on the result but that typically is an expensive and long term project. Companies need to have very large marketing expenditures to expect any benefit from this effort.

Below are ten ways to start correlating PR’s impact on customer and target audience behavior. Some can be executed solely by the PR team but most would benefit from tight alignment with the other outward-facing functions within the company. Consider these starting points for a larger conversation with other dataholders about how you can work together to mutual benefit.

10 ways you can measure business outcomes
- Use Google Insights to correlate the impact of launches and announcements on audience search activity
- Use PR-unique URLs to gauge traffic driven to a website from PR efforts
- Use a PR-unique variation on a promotion code to track online sales related to PR efforts
- Track downloads of white papers and case studies promoted through PR activity
- Conduct message recall and retention survey and correlate with message pick-up in the media
- Capture/measure favorability of blog comments, discussion groups and tweets as a proxy for consumer perception
- Use Crimson Hexagon to measure topics of conversation in online forums (Twitter, blogs, forums, etc.) as a proxy for consumer perception; correlate with message pick-up in the media
- Work with the sales team to identify marketing influences on the customer; correlate customer mentions of PR to PR activity
- Conduct a post-purchase survey to identify sources of information utilized by customers during consideration of product
- Work with your web team to track customer’s online activity after they visit your company blog (do they visit product/service information pages on your site? do they visit an e-commerce site?)

Social Media: Liberator of PR

Kara Swisher over at AllThingsDigital posted an interesting piece on whether social media is killing PR?.

In some ways the answer is yes but I think the reason is a self-delusion that marketing and PR professionals have held for many years that social media is laying bare.

Essentially, PR folk have felt like they "controlled" the public perception of the brand because they could look at coverage of the brand and evaluate how it was being represented in the media.

What social media has revealed is the conversation that has always been held informally and privately - the word of mouth that more closely reflects how consumers, customers, etc. truly feel about a brand. This conversation was hard to measure prior to the emergence of social media. Consumer/customer surveys never did a very good job capturing the nuance inherent in people's opinions.

So, in that sense, social media has killed the perception of control that PR folks had. But, for those who can adapt to a new conversational model, social media opens a whole new opportunity, as Kara rightly points out.

And, in fact, with all the social tools PR folks now have, it is easier than ever for them and companies to go right around the gatekeepers of the media directly to customers.

I'd also add that PR is best positioned to do this among the marketing disciplines because of the longstanding dialogue we've had with the media. Unlike most other marketing disciplines that excel at creating one-way message delivery platforms, PR knows how to have a conversation about an industry, brand, etc.

If Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington are fed up with PR people, wait until they hear from folks who only know how to force feed messages to the public.