Even seasoned marketing experts can find measuring campaign effectiveness a challenge. And for companies considering PR for the first time, understanding and demonstrating its value can be daunting. But measuring impact is vitally important.
In this blog, we’ll guide you through the most effective strategies to ensure your PR and marketing efforts are delivering the results you need.
1. Social media is an incredibly powerful tool in the marketing mix, so leveraging it to its full potential – measuring and optimising your success on whichever platform you’re using – is crucial.
Fortunately, built-in analytics tools are there to help.
On LinkedIn, for example, you can get invaluable insights into key metrics – likes, comments, shares, and clicks – to gauge audience reaction and preferences, both for content and format. And these insights become even more critical for campaigns with specific key performance indicators (KPIs).
Imagine your company is launching an exciting new product. By analysing the types of posts that most engage your audience, you can ensure your announcement resonates with your potential customers.
Using these readily available free tools and an analytical approach maximises your campaign impact while ensuring you’re strategically targeting the audience you want to reach.
After sharing your announcement, you can assess its effectiveness, using the same analytics, continually refining your strategy for ongoing, optimal campaign success.
2. Harnessing the power of your own website, measuring web traffic is a key element to help gauge the success of your PR and marketing campaigns.
Including a link to your website at the end of every press release encourages readers to explore more about your engineering expertise, your projects and technical solutions, and gain a deeper understanding of how you can help their business. And it gives potential clients and partners an easy, direct way to get in contact.
Monitoring website traffic during and after a campaign enables you to see how many people are engaging with your press release through the volume of click throughs coming via your website link.
This click through data provides a clear measure of your campaign’s effectiveness in driving interest to your company, your products, and your services.
3. Domain Authority plays a crucial role in public relations, yet it is often overlooked, and is a tool mainly used by marketing professionals.
Developed by Moz, domain authority is a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website is to rank on a search engine results page (SERP). The score ranges from 0 to 100 – BBC News’ domain authority, for example, is 95/100.
Targeting high domain authority publications- high authority for your industry- as part of your PR strategy significantly increases the visibility of your press release as compared to publication through low-authority outlets.
One feature with a respected, high domain authority publication can add significantly greater value to your campaign than multiple postings with lower-authority ranked domains.
There are numerous tools available online to help you check a domain’s authority. By targeting high-ranking sites and incorporating this measurement into your marketing strategy, you can enhance the success of your PR campaigns and better-understand where your results are coming from.
4. Understanding the reach of publications is crucial for setting accurate KPIs to measure the success of your campaign.
For example, at the start of a campaign, you might set a KPI to achieve potential visibility of 100,000 people. By analysing the potential readership of each publication where you gain coverage, you can determine whether your campaign has met its goal by comparing the projected visibility to the actual reach at the campaign’s conclusion.
5. Finally, you can take it back to basics by simply asking your customers where they found out about your company.
This can give you a really good idea of which PR and marketing campaigns have generated the most engagement and, ultimately, brought you the most customers. This can be done through an e-shot with a survey attached, a tick box when ordering a product or at the end of a conversation.
Measuring the success of your PR and marketing efforts is key to optimising your strategy and ensuring impactful results.
No two companies are the same. By utilising social media analytics, tracking website traffic, leveraging domain authority, analysing publication reach, and gathering customer feedback, you can gain valuable insights into what works best for your engineering company.
If you’d like to explore this further or just have an informal chat about how to generate opportunities to grow your business, drop us an email info@aroprandmarketing.co.uk or phone 0117 379 0008.
P.S, measuring and evaluating marketing campaigns is hard, detailed work needing some brain power. Bruno has just completed an in-depth session and needed a rest after it!
