What is the benefit of effective PR?

 Your reputation can be your company’s greatest asset giving you competitive edge and making you stand out from the crowd.  And managing your reputation and building trust is an ongoing activity not just for the short haul.

Effective PR involves communicating with your stakeholders (all your audiences: customers, employees, community, shareholders) about what you do, how you make a difference and what you stand for.  This is usually through story-telling in earned media coverage of all kinds, award recognition, positioning yourself as the experts in your sector, your CSR and the good that you do. There’s a whole raft of PR tools. Story-telling raises your profile, builds understanding, increasing your reach to audiences that may not have heard of you before; in turn influencing public perception and the credibility of your company. Digital PR can also help to improve your SEO over time especially if you are featured on high Domain Authority news sites which Google loves. But it’s also about the small things.  How you interact with customers over the phone, how you manage conversations when things are not going well.  Standing strong and aligned with your values at all times. Being authentic, walking your talk.

How long does it take for PR to get results?

It’s a difficult question to answer. There are a lot of variables which influence how long it might take to see results from PR efforts. Alongside what your specific goals are and what you plan to implement, the amount of time you invest in PR work is also going to have an impact on what can be achieved and how quickly.  There are always quick wins to be had with short lead time and smaller, niche publications, and online.  I recently met with a company who were only interested in the big wins, the large national media, all achievable but over what time frame?  If you are completely honest as a PR practitioner you cannot hand on heart predict exactly.  Momentum takes time.

While you may land a piece of earned media coverage quite quickly, it’s often the work of ongoing PR campaigns or multiple pieces of earned media which begin to generate buzz around your company. All of that could happen rapidly or could take a while, again depending on multiple factors.

Managing expectations is a whole blog in itself, and it’s important that you have these conversations before getting started to set realistic goals that are unique for you.

How can you measure ROI in PR?

We all want to know if our money is being spent effectively. Though measuring the effectiveness of a PR campaign is not always straightforward, there are a number of things you can track or measure depending on your goals. For instance:

• You can track the number of media placements you’ve achieved.
• You can calculate the value of that media coverage by monitoring how many views or shares the placement gets.
• You may have goals which entail getting coverage with very specific media sources (based on your target audience) and if you succeed in earning coverage in these places you can rank the value of these placements highly.
• You can track the click through rate to your website from online media placements you’ve achieved by using unique URLs.
• You can track your domain authority. If you’re getting coverage with links back to your website, your authority on search engines will improve, giving you an SEO advantage.
• You can track social media mentions to see if your PR efforts are creating a buzz.
• You can track the sentiment of your media coverage, both in your earned media and across social media.

In terms of straightforward metrics around estimated reads, Domain Authority and Engagement I like to use CoverageBook as part of my reporting. How you choose to calculate your return on investment will come back to the goals you have for your PR activity.

Simply hoping to get from A to B quickly with a few scattered pieces of PR coverage is likely to leave you disappointed. In fact it shows that you don’t fully understand the PR process. It is those who set clear goals for their PR journey and commit to the road ahead who feel the most impact from PR activity, and that my friend will take a little patience and commitment, but I promise you it will be so worth it.

If you’d like to join me on the PR journey, or talk to me about how PR could make an impact for your business, drop me a message: diane@fibrepr.co.uk