One of the more time-consuming challenges for communications practitioners to tackle is measuring PR effectiveness across varying channels.
Integrating online and offline data is both essential and a fair amount of effort.
Why does one need to integrate online and offline data?
Integrating your data is desirable because it provides a more complete picture to analyse. When data from both online and offline sources are combined, a PR professional can see both what is working and not working overall, and identify differences in how online and offline audiences are absorbing and responding to key messages.
For example, if an analysis of a particular PR campaign shows that online audiences are more likely to respond to a specific message, that is a key learning for either the next phase of the campaign or other campaigns moving forward.
The next question to examine in the above scenario is “why?” With integrated data, you should be able to examine differences in sentiment or audience composition that might provide clues as to why a particular message might resonate differently.
Determining relevance
Integrating online and offline data can take many different forms. The first step in designing an integrated assessment plan is to take stock of all the data points relevant to what you hope to measure.
Undertake this step during the campaign planning process. Once you have a campaign goal in mind, make a list of all the different inputs used to determine success. Is the plan to sell more units of a product? Then sales must be included, with online and in-store measured separately. Is it to increase awareness? Then offline components such as physical adverts—posters, billboards, decals—must be considered.
Traditional media is likely to be your most relevant PR communications offline data point. Securing earned media coverage and then tracking the results is an important part of your process.
For other offline aspects, such as in-store sales, you will probably need to engage with team members in other departments such as advertising and marketing.
Measuring communications effectiveness
Once you have listed the data points you will be tracking, establish a baseline before your new campaign begins.
Develop a calendar that includes any upcoming marketing or advertising initiatives, so those efforts can be either layered on top of, or teased out of, the PR communications results.
Once PR efforts are launched, track engagement wherever possible. For instance, you may wish to track engagement by platform, rather than grouping it under “social” so that you can determine if there are differences.
Separating engagement by platform can help to surface important learnings, such as whether your target audiences are being reached and how audiences are responding to messages.
Engagement data should include sentiment, and your media monitoring should also be tracking the sentiment of traditional media articles. It is important to separate article sentiment from audience sentiment. These are two different things, each of which carries important information.
Article sentiment shows how an earned media article was positioned by a journalist or media outlet. Audience sentiment shows how the public is reacting.
If a journalist writes a positive piece that is posted on the website of a media outlet, sentiment analysis of the article shows positive. However, if that piece is shared extensively on social platforms along with angry comments, the audience response would be coded as negative.
Cross-channel analysis in this situation is an important part of determining why the audience response differed from article sentiment. Sometimes there may be a cultural zeitgeist that can quickly explain such differences—a positive human interest piece about a CEO’s recent mansion remodel may be ill-received in the face of corporate layoffs, for example.
Other times the disconnect might not be so apparent, and will require deeper analysis—which could uncover a logical explanation. An example of this type of “layered” explanation is a product that proves so popular it is difficult to get a hold of, which leads to complaints. In this instance, analysis of audience sentiment should be viewed through the lens of access. Negative responses have less to do with the product itself—which remains popular—and points to a need to ramp up production and fine-tune communications strategies to adjust audience expectations.
Referral and response traffic
Referral traffic, new signups, and sales (online or brick-and-mortar) are common goals for a PR campaign. Improved reputation, awareness-building for new products or offerings, and increased thought leadership are also goals.
Tracking changes in these numbers will help to provide a detailed picture of any PR or communications campaign. Using integrated measurement tools allows for both drilling down into details and then zooming out to see the full campaign, giving you both the micro-details and the macro-big picture.
This means that not only will you garner a better understanding of what was most effective, but also the why behind it, for more successful PR campaigns in the future.
