PR practitioners should be very familiar with the term, “return on investment”. ROI is a straightforward business metric that asks one of the most basic yet important questions in day-to-day work activity: what are you getting in return for the money you are spending on a given activity?
Despite its simplicity, measuring return on investment has proven to be tricky for PR pros. This is for a whole host of reasons, but there are three big stumbling blocks that make PR a particularly challenging field in which to measure returns on investments made.
For each stumbling block, there are ways to get at the information you need to show ROI. It takes some planning and a little bit of work, but once you have things in place, you can show how PR efforts are proving their value.
Crisis communications
Having a PR crisis is draining, exhausting, and expensive. Even small issues can pull you off track, both in meeting your objectives and for staying on budget.
It is almost impossible to effectively plan for a crisis. Unless you are in an industry that is sufficiently high-risk that there are years of prior data to allow for predictive modelling, you probably do not build a crisis response into your ROI calculations.
And, if you do not build it into your planning, even one small crisis can upend your careful attempts to quantify total return on investment.
For example, one way to calculate return on investment in PR is to connect earned media to business goals. When you track key audience activity following earned media, you can link the value of the content to customer or audience responsiveness. You can also look at share of voice, with higher PR activity translating to a more prominent share.
Now you can see how a crisis could upset your carefully planned metrics. A crisis can drive people to your website and increase your earned media coverage. But these are not results that connect to business goals, so you will need to separate out the crisis coverage as part of your analysis work.
Measuring ‘vibes’
One of the most common critiques of PR work is that it is designed to impact something that is hard to quantify. PR defined is the building of “mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their publics”. Reputation, trust, interest, and public perception are not static factors, and measuring the changes in each can be time-consuming and can prone to bias error.
Measuring the building of relationships is similarly challenging. Put it all together and it can feel like you are attempting to “measure vibes”.
Bolstering and increasing trust is another key aspect of public relations work that can be difficult to grasp. Measuring trust, determining whether trust is increasing or decreasing, and exploring how durable trust is, are all important aspects to consider and challenging to assess.
One way to address this challenge is to identify publications that your audience trusts and responds to, and treat those as top-tier outlets, weighting them in your analysis work.
The logic behind this approach is that your key audiences likely prioritise certain outlets, so they will value earned media mentions in those publications more highly. For example, a beauty brand that sells product primarily to the 20-30 age range may see a greater audience purchase response from an online influencer mention than a small article in The Independent—even though the news outlet is a high-reach publication.
The purchase response is the business goal, so the online influencer’s mention should be weighted equal to, or even higher than, the high-reach publication. This can feel counterintuitive. After all, a placement in a high-reach publication is a hard-earned win. But if we are truly focussed on business goals, we must pay closest attention to that which moves the sales needle.
Separating PR from other factors
No matter how siloed an organisation is, once things are out in the public it is inevitable that many factors are in play. For example, a major new product launch will have advertising, marketing, and PR components.
While some aspects of a campaign can be easy to track and attribute, such as a click on an online advert, other aspects are more elusive. A news article about the product, placed by PR and read by the consumer, may have created the favourable conditions under which that click happened. Put another way, if the consumer had not read about the product first, the advertisement may have been ignored.
In this situation, PR efforts laid the groundwork by which the advertising was successful. Viewing the advertising spend as the sole factor in the sale is incorrect but teasing that distinction out is challenging.
Here, in addition to the direct attribution that can come from a click, there need to be information provided about communications activities. An activity timeline is helpful, particularly when layered on top of purchase data. Showcasing the timing of earned media alongside website traffic and purchasing data provides a more comprehensive picture of how multiple streams of campaign activity affect outcomes.
Because public relations work is focussed on developing and reinforcing relationships and trust, it can feel hard to make the connections between those efforts and business goals. This is particularly true when we are taken off daily tasks by a crisis.
Having the tools and processes in place to overcome these obstacles is an important part of any organisation’s monitoring and measurement program.
Ultimately, it is essential that PR practitioners become adept at proving return on investment in communications.