How to get the best out of your PR Measurement service?

The measurement and data analytics landscape play a crucial role in determining the health and maturity of any business. Yet, many companies fail to leverage the full potential of their PR measurement service provider. This article aims to provide some preliminary guidelines on how to get the best out of your PR measurement service provider.

1. Clarify Measurement vs. Monitoring:

It is essential to establish a clear distinction between measurement and monitoring. Monitoring focuses on tracking and observing ongoing activities, while measurement involves assessing the impact and effectiveness of your brand’s content on both brand perception and financial outcomes. Monitoring provides news alerts, share of voice, tonality split, and other data, while measurement delves deeper.

2. Encompass the Communication Chakra:

A comprehensive measurement approach should cover the entire communication chakra, encompassing exposure, engagement, and conversion. Neglecting any of these aspects renders your efforts incomplete. Measurement should progress through listening, planning, benchmarking, target setting, execution, and conclude with evaluating return on objectives (ROO) and return on investment (ROI).

3. Define the Scope of Work:

Align the scope of work provided to your PR measurement service provider with your broader business and communication objectives. Ensure that mediums, media titles, markets, keywords, required data cuts, data delivery frequency, and insights all fit into the larger scheme of things.

4. Go Beyond Share of Voice and Rankings:

While it’s common for clients to focus solely on the share of voice rankings, the real potential for success lies beyond that. By analysing the factors contributing to your success or failure, you can identify actionable insights regarding your organisation’s efforts, resources, and processes.

5. Adopt a Healthy Unit of Measurement:

Avoid outdated metrics like Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) or Earned Advertising Value (EAV), which have been widely criticised. Instead, strive for a balanced approach that combines qualitative and quantitative parameters as the unit of measurement.

6. Foster Strong Working Relationships:

PR measurement is not just about data; it can be a powerful tool for strengthening relationships between service providers and clients. It can help corporate communication heads achieve fruitful performance appraisals with top management and assist PR firms in successful performance meetings with clients.

7. Utilise Data beyond Pleasing Your Boss:

While using data to impress superiors and secure job stability is important, it should not detract from the core intelligence that measurement should provide. Strike a balance that caters to both objectives when designing your measurement strategy.

8. Embrace Account Planning:

Account planning, a relatively new concept in public relations, forms the foundation for a stronger business. By answering crucial questions related to communication objectives, the rationale behind PR, and execution strategies, account planning provides purpose to measurement. Without it, measurement remains superficial and merely a formality.

9. Link Measurement to Performance Evaluation:

Develop a measurement framework that enables the evaluation of efforts, resources, and processes deployed by each desk within the communication assembly line. This allows you to correlate the health of the report card with the performance of specific desks, both in corporate communications and PR firm teams.

10. Explore Cross-Media Trends:

While it’s valuable to analyse individual media reports (print, TV, digital, social media), significant insights and actionable observations emerge when examining cross-media analytics. Don’t overlook the broader picture that emerges from combining or cross-fusing data across different media channels.

The effective utilisation of a PR measurement service provider requires clarity, comprehensive planning, a balanced approach to measurement, strong relationships, and an understanding of the broader communication landscape. By following these guidelines, you can maximise the value derived from your PR measurement efforts and enhance the overall effectiveness of your corporate communications machinery.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha is the founder of Brand Balance that helps the C-suite & CCO collective optimize its Brand Reputation Management ERPs (efforts, resources & processes) across stakeholders. His professional mission is to establish the Corporate Communications function as the only engine towards brand reputation and valuation success.

Before setting up Brand Balance, a neutral organization, his past 23 years of holistic learning curve includes leadership roles across all the three sides of the industry – corporate communications, communications firms and as a business head of a brand data analytics, audit, research & measurement global behemoth. During spare time, he bikes across the Indian highways, writes articles, consults students & professionals and teaches at media and business schools.