Companies nowadays find difficulty in measuring the ROI invested when trying to grow their business, especially when it comes to working with PR agencies. How can they tell whether their partnership is a successful one, and how do they measure the results being provided by the agency?
Below are five metrics to help measure results and base their decision accordingly when working with PR agencies.
Media coverage:
Before starting any project, the agency should know who your target audience is and share their suggested media list. To get the required results, the media outlet should have a credible name with a strong viewership to positively impact your list of potential customers. For example, a developer would benefit from being featured in a publication that is either a reputable newspaper or magazine that covers business and construction; a lifestyle or design title would also be beneficial if there was an interiors angle to focus on.
Examine the right budget required for your campaign on a quarterly basis and pay your agency according to the coverage secured per article, not for their pitching efforts. Your coverage should always be within top-quality titles to both maximise on overall exposure and solidify the credibility for your company amongst many competing brands. The campaign should be a minimum of three months, as you require this time frame to help build the company name from one month to the next, especially if you are a new brand to the market.
Momentum and growth:
Once you start working with a PR agency and results are being achieved consistently, your business should start growing automatically as millions of potential customers are being reached out to daily. As the proactive approach by the agency to reach out to new potential business continues to increase, this should also result in a strong residual effect in the market where journalists become more familiar with your brand and start mentioning you spontaneously whenever they are working on any of their features using previously shared content.
Once a company reaches that stage, then their focus with the partner agency can focus a bit more on other ongoing services such as crisis management, brand reputation consultancy, and overall strategy with less of a budget being spent on driving overall coverage. These services can be charged collectively at the specific time on when they are required to remain cost-effective and avoid wasting any money without utilizing this service effectively.
Channeling creativity with PR agencies:
When it comes to delivering results, this should not only come in the form of securing coverage within a traditional approach, such as distributing press releases to the same set of media. Agencies should be able to come up with ideas and a good overall strategy of how to secure different types of articles, all within one retainer fee to keep readers interested and wanting to know more about your brand.
An agency should always be able to implement a diverse approach and craft new compelling stories for your brand every month, whether it is through exclusive features, partnership opportunities, thought leadership articles, speakership opportunities, or anything that they feel like will help the brand. This should all be within an integrated campaign where you can maximise on your efforts by reaching out to your audience through all traditional and social media platforms as each medium provides a different benefit to the company and its future objectives.
Setting goals with PR agencies:
It is always essential to have a realistic goal set between the client and the agency where this becomes a transparent partnership, which both parties are working towards growing positively. The results should keep improving throughout the year based on the agency delivering the appropriate content and gradually engaging more with the media as they get to know the brand more.
If the end-goal is not achieved, which in some cases is not the agency’s fault, they should atleast be able to provide some constructive feedback on the reason and the best way to find a solution for this. If the agency was able to communicate the appropriate key messaging and followed the right approach, they did their part as you can’t always guarantee what a journalist decides. However, in this case it means that the KPIs were not met so the client should not bare any financial cost for this.
Flexibility:
This is probably the most important metric when hiring a PR agency is their willingness to be flexible to whenever the client needs their support. Some of the months are considered relatively quiet, especially when it comes to driving coverage and results so this could potentially be a break period for both companies, just as long as clients do not do it too frequently which would affect the agency’s momentum in achieving the required results.
Being flexible with clients as opposed to tying them down with contracts that have long notice periods if they wish to terminate one day always builds a long trustworthy partnership between the two companies. Agencies should always try their best under any circumstance and just be honest with clients when they are no longer able to deliver on the required tasks as not every campaign can be managed successfully and there is nothing wrong with that, you just need to charge on what you are able to deliver.
By Karim Geadah, Head of Corporate PR at Cameo Communications.
