The first step is to plan.
You must first know what you want from PR. If you don’t know that, how will you know what success looks like?
To plan, you must know what your business goals are and then to apply them to PR. Before you know what you need to do with your PR, you need to know why you are doing it. Business goals will differ from business to business, but they could range from increasing sales to moving into new geographies to increasing the value of the business for an exit. Whatever your goals are, they need to be directly applied to your PR activities so that you can measure the effectiveness of those activities. As I often say to clients – it’s easy to get media coverage, it’s getting the right kind of media coverage that is hard.
Once you have planned what it is you want to achieve, you must then define how you want to measure success.
Too many PR agencies still try to measure success on the old- fashioned metric of column inches (or their equivalents, e.g. number of Tweets etc.). Yet the only true measure is whether the PR is helping you to achieve your goals. Is it bringing in leads; making recruitment easier; or
helping
you break into that new territory? Those are the true measurements, yet they are not always easy to quantify, which is why many agencies fall back on the far easier column inches. But if you want to make PR work well, then you need to define the true measurement.
If your main business goal is to
To plan, you must know what your business goals are and then to apply them to PR. Before you know what you need to do with your PR, you need to know why you are doing it.
increase sales, then the PR activity must be tasked with generating leads. However, again you need to be careful as for many businesses direct in-bound leads can be hard to achieve, maybe the true measurement would be website visits. If you can work out the ratio of hits on the site to in-bound leads then you know how many extra hits you need to create.
The final thing you need to do in the set-up phase is to agree to give it time. As we’ve seen, to get it right it will take some initial thinking and planning and the measurements you will use will not be about quick fixes. Just creating a press release or two will not have a major impact,
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