Five ways to track the effectiveness of your PR

Don’t be fooled into thinking that PR and marketing is a dark art, argues Nathan Bushell, Director at Lasco.

We all know marketing is a vital business function. But like every business function, it carries a cost, which has to be justified.

As a full-service agency, Lasco provides all the tools you need to promote your brand and market your products and services. One of our greatest strengths is that we are content led.

Every day, Lasco produces content that features in blogs, social media posts, newsletters, press releases, articles, award entries, etc. Without decent content, all those routes to customers (existing and potential) are less effective.

Ineffective content, in turn, weakens the argument for investing in your marketing channels when finances are squeezed.

So, once you have decent content, how do you measure its reach and effectiveness?

Here, I have picked out five ways to ensure – and measure – that your marketing PR is reaching its intended audience.

Include online publishing

LinkedIn is a growing community for business leaders, and I don’t believe its influence should be underestimated. It provides many opportunities to both directly publish articles, and to link through to your own website.

Significantly, LinkedIn tracks the number of people that your messages have reached, and how many have directly interacted with them. If you properly manage your connections, and ensure that the right people are following your company, this data can be extremely valuable.

You can also monitor which messages resonate with your followers, so you can adjust future posts accordingly, both online and in print.

Do you know what people read?

There is an assumption that just because something is printed, its reach and influence can’t be tracked. But this isn’t entirely true.

If you are sending press releases to Glass Times instead of Joggers’ Monthly, you know you are on the right path to your intended audience. But even among the window trade press you can make educated choices about which ones will have better reach over the others.

Here are some thoughts: what is the magazine’s published circulation figure, and how is it measured?; does the magazine have an ABC certificate, which is an independent official circulation count?; can the publisher provide a proof of postage certificate (it’s expensive to post 10,000+ magazines each month)?; and do you see that magazine in the offices of the customers you visit?

Talk to your customers

This is not very scientific, but if you make a point of asking people where they heard about a particular product or service, you will begin to build a picture of which channels are effective.

This should come with a small caveat: good marketing will use more than one channel, and it is usually the accumulative effect that will help some messages stick.

Don’t ignore self publishing

A key call to action is to drive people back to your website, where you can demonstrate your wider offering, and help close the sale. You can also count the number of visitors.

Use this space effectively and publish articles and press releases here. Include some web-only content like blogs. These are a great way for companies to show their ‘human’ side. For example, you can tell stories over time, and you can take your customers on a journey. Write a weekly blog detailing your new showroom: choosing the site; overcoming challenges; and the grand opening.

You will never reach the same audience levels as publishing in a magazine, but you can create content that wouldn’t work anywhere else, and it can be really engaging. Also, be proud of it – make it easy to navigate to, and don’t bury it among the small print at the bottom of your homepage.

Demand more of your agency

Don’t be fobbed off with a simple cuttings book from your agency, if you use one. While return on investment is difficult to calculate with PR, it is not impossible.

At Lasco, we invest in a comprehensive method of measuring marketing reach, which uses a mixture of quantitative data and qualitative data using independent third-party-approved metrics.

Not only does this help our clients understand which marketing channels work, but also how influences change over time, which then informs our own approach to the market.

Talk to me or John Warren to find out more. You can find our details at www.lascoprandmarketing.co.uk