How do you measure ROI in PR?

A while ago I read this article by Sara Ware and thought to share it here as it is a brilliant explanation of measuring PR ROI.

(Sarah Ware is the co-founder and chief executive of Markerly, an influencer marketing platform that advertises branded content to over300 million people a month. Sarah is also a guest contributor to Forbes.)

In the old PR days it wasn't impossible, but quite difficult to calculate the ROI of your PR activities. However, in today's digital age of social media everything is measurable. In order to calculate the ROI from any media efforts, you need to know what value you received from those efforts.

TMV (Total Media Value) allows you to place a price tag on what you received and to see if it’s been a good use of your spend. For example, what is a tweet worth to you? A write-up? Or a Facebook share? Once you know the value that you place for each of these social metrics you can begin to calculate the TMV.

However, there are multiple ways to measure TMV just as there are multiple ways to evaluate whether or not a campaign worked for you. Our advertising and public relations efforts are done for many reasons and those goals are always different, therefore, listed below are several ways to calculate TMV based on what you are expecting out of the campaign.

Social Reach Based

What: Social reach refers to the amount of people who saw your brand socially. This number is not necessarily dependent on the sheer volume of social shares, but more-so on how socially influential the person that's sharing is.

How: Determining who shared the post, and how many social followers/friends they have. For instance, if person who shares on twitter has1,000 followers, than that's worth $1,000 if each tweet is valued at $1. If that tweet gets retweeted by10 people, then you must determine who retweeted it, and the sum of their followers. The total media value would then equate to the total number of aggregated friends/followers multiplied by the cost per social view.

Impression Based

What: Impression based tracking has been around since the early days of online advertising. Simply put, it's anytime your brand is displayed to a user. In the content world, an impression can mean anytime someone sees your brand's name written or expressed via an image or video.

How: Impression based includes the method described above to calculate reach, except each instance your brand is mentioned counts separately. For example, if your brand is mentioned3 times in a Facebook post, then it's impression value would be3 multiplied by the total number of friends/followers. Also included would be the number of brand mentions like a blog post, advertisement, or any other mentions multiplied by the total number of views.

Conversion Based

What: This is the simplest method, yet hardest to optimize for. How much of that media spend does it take to convert a user? A conversion can mean anything from a newsletter sign-up to a purchase of a product or subscription.

How: You take the cost of your total media spend and you divide it by the number of converted users. Tracking converted users can be challenging, especially if you don't use proper link tracking. In any media purchase, if you're trying to optimize for this, it would be wise to have special URL parameters for this particular campaign, as well as tracking pixel on your conversion page so you can track users throughout the funnel.

Engagement Based

What: Tracking any engagement of a user on a content piece and rating has value. An engagement can be anything from mouse movements, scrolling intensity, mobile pinch-ins, and encompasses aspects like social shares and comments.

How: The actual calculation can vary depending on how you rate the value of each engagement. An easy way would be to assume constant values for each engagement, and then multiply that engagement constant times the total of that engagement. It may make more sense to do this on a per-user basis so that you can keep better track of outliers.

ROI is certainly the most important factor of any marketing campaign, especially from client's perspective. There are many ways to measure it than the usual currency-to-currency immediate return. It is certainly not the end of course to receive PR value from the PR team. Be very clear that, it is the PR team that carves the brand identity, keeps the competition out of the way, and forms the key relationships for the company, be it with media, investors, stakeholders, public etc. In the real world out there it is more important than the numbers-game, and is essential for the company’s future progress and success.

Public relations is a function or activity within a key marketing communications that can be used both inside and outside the organization for being an important tool in achieving contact with the various parties dealing with the organization of workers or customers. This does not mean to say that public relations is linked exclusively to activities or marketing communications and therefore with-profit organizations, but that it extends far beyond than that. As it is an effective communication tool used in all organizations, whether for-profit or non-purposeful Therefore, as long as they seek to draw a positive picture of her in the ocean in which they operate and the community. As well as its efforts to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of administrative communication of the Organization for the completion of public and private objectives and achieve long-term impact of the parties that deal with it.

The effectiveness of marketing communications:

You may organization in general management and marketing management in particular to assess and measure the effectiveness of integrated marketing communications in the organization realized by reference to the following aspects or areas:

1. auditing the financial budget earmarked by the organization to marketing communications and has already been spent on this activity is calculated that spending and accurately to specific paragraphs are: - Contact used tools and means adopted to promote it. -Products Which were the focus of communication and promotion. - The amount of realized spending on the product - what financial allocations might be identified in advance for the development of means of communication approved catalog.

2. Adoption of appropriate quantitative methods to measure the effectiveness of marketing communication system in influencing consumer purchasing behavior can be adopted index return on investment is important as a basis to measure the results achieved in the effort to connect.

3. The construction and development of a database to manage and understand the relationship between the organization and its customers who are consumers, workers, investors, buyers, etc ...

4. determine the points of convergence that are the organization with others.

5. analysis of general trends in the environment surrounding the organization to establish the strengths and weaknesses and the use of all available promotional mix to get to achieve marketing objectives planned.

6-find some kind of integration in the approved marketing communications plans in the current market and is likely to enter him in the future to other markets.

7. The adoption of the standards should be quantitative and qualitative evaluation of all the means adopted in marketing communications and activities of the various promotion.

8. Measuring the extent of integration between the various marketing communications activities and administrative activities and the level of their contribution to the overall strategy of the organization.

Measure the effectiveness of direct marketing:

 direct marketing evaluation process as an activity promotion related to the number of variables that will be depending on the specificity and the nature of the region and the products they handle are different, as well as the time period covered by the activity and submit it, but in general there are a number of normative standards that can be adopted in assessment of promotional direct marketing campaigns notably are:

 - the cost of the process every inquiry carried out by the organization.

 - The amount of earned value response.

- Realized the value of remittances.

 - The cost of each order executed.

 - The average value of orders.

 - The value of the returned orders.

 - Returns achieved.

On the other hand there are services offered through direct marketing, which is also an important basis for evaluation and is as follows:

 - Contact facilities provided to customers.

- Requests that do not result in financial payments.

 - Visit the store and the company's sites on the web.

 - To answer the queries.

 - Allow experimenting with the good or service.

- Request more information on the marketing activity of the company

1. Setting goals before embarking on a measurement process.

2. Measuring deployments in the media should be based on quantitative and qualitative criteria regarding the nature of the medium itself.

3. determine the extent of the change in the public areas of the business as a direct result of the public relations activities.

4. The social media is similar to any other media outlet.

5. should all standards and measurement tools be equally transparent.

There are various ways to justify ROI in PR - Ad Value Equivalent (AVE) being the most traditional followed by Coverage, Index and Visibility scores crunched out of various tools available with the agencies. However the best option would be identifying a clear communication objective and monitor the parameters set for PR while reaching close to that objective. Your ROI will be impact made on reaching those parameters and can be in any form - your communication reaching out to right audiences, your key messages being reiterated in every communication, you are able to create and change the perception of your audiences in favour of your brand and finally your target audience delivering your key messages while speaking about your brand.

While AVEs or advertisement value equivalent is the most commonly used method of ROi calculation for PR activity , it is by far the most misleading method as well. Since PR efforts include a lot of communication channels and the PR activities are tailored for varied audience and purposes, there is a need to have different metrics pre-defined before starting any PR campaign or activity. Good way to define these metrices is to consider the following3 dimensions- 

1. Output - This includes content, channel, messaging...

2. Outcome - Reach, impressions, engagement, share of voice  (here the quality and quality both are equally important)

3. Business impact - Sales conversions, subscriptions, leads, new business opportunities, increase in share prices...

With the growth of digital PR the analysis and quantification of PR activity has now become much easier. But in order to avoid getting lost in the maze of measurement yardsticks, it is important to know what needs to measured and how does it really help to reach the set PR goals.

Return on investment can be measure in many ways but in PR, ROI can be seen when the communications tools that we use to in deal with this eventually bring more profit to the company.

ROI in PR can only be measured through the visibility of the brand in all forms of media. PR value is the right way to measure ROI. The more number of stories the more ROI you get. But that totally depends on the publication, size of the article and other interesting elements in the article.

For me, PR helps a lot,using social media and even personal approach. I used old and new tricks. It Works!

good questions my dear , But in relations are always longterms or lifelong , as long as your relations alive your ROI always show profits.