PR Measurement and ROI Framework

Chris Norton 0:00

Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that helps you smash your revenue targets by learning from the unfortunate mistakes of the world's top marketers.

Chris Norton 0:08

I'm your host, chris Norton, and today we're tackling a challenge every PR and marketing professional faces measuring ROI and proving the impact of your efforts. In this episode, we'll be drawing from insights shared during our recent PR ROI webinar, where we broke down the tools and strategies that help PR campaigns succeed, from setting measurable objectives to leveraging UTM tracking links, social media listening and tools like Google Data Studio. This episode is packed with actionable advice that I've spent more than 20 years learning myself. We'll also showcase a case study of one of our clients, black Sheep Brewery, and their efforts to reposition cask beer through engaging content and clever activations. Whether you're new to PR measurement or looking to refine your strategies, this episode will equip you with the knowledge to demonstrate your value and enhance your campaigns. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's hear how you can prove and improve the impact of your PR activity, and let's hear how you can prove and improve the impact of your PR activity.

Will Ockenden 1:08

This ROI topic is fascinating. It feels like it's been an issue that's been endlessly debated in the PR industry, but we're now at a point where we are able to demonstrate ROI from PR, and Chris is going to talk about this. But you know, the wealth of data we now get from, you know, from a piece of PR, particularly if it's online, if it's shared on social technology has meant that we're now in a position where we can measure really effectively. But it's it's it's important. I mean, it's a it's a massive issue, isn't it, chris?

Will Ockenden 1:41

And if you're not careful, you can really get caught up in the technicalities and just drown in data, so hopefully we'll bring some clarity to that in this session.

Chris Norton 1:50

Yeah, and, as Will said, he's Will Ockendon, he's one of the co-owners and I'm Chris Norton. I'm the founder of Prohibition. So Will and I have worked together for years and years and we've been doing ROI in terms of public relations for years. I used to lecture at the universities in Leeds on the PR degree and the journalist degree on, and I used to cover integrated PR, so that's digital and traditional, and I used to teach areas of measurement and that's really what we're about today. It's, let's say, not the most sexiest of subjects because I you'll know, if you follow me on LinkedIn which here is the links for both me and will that I like to share good, cool stunts that we worked on or other people have worked on cool pr stunts or crises and things like that I like to talk about. But measurement is not the sexiest, funnest subject to talk about and it gets a little bit more technical, but actually is the most important because, um, you guys all there and I know there's over 50 odd of you already in the chat and there's over 150 people signed up today and yeah, so you guys will know that PR has this battle with other people in the C-suite as to justifying its own sort of reputation, which is ironic because PR is about reputation management and justifying the ROI. Often when Will and I run a podcast called Embracing Marketing Mistakes, I've put a link actually down there and every week we speak to a world leader in marketing on a particular issue. And yeah, stuart Bruce often who we've had on the show twice, believes that he always used to say to me why does everyone want to measure the ROI of things? Today it's like we're obsessed with it, whereas back in the day it used to be oh, let's do some out-of-home advertising and you can't really say what the out of you know, you do a few billboards for your big campaign, get some nice pictures. These days it does well on social media. Then you measure everything, can't you? But back in the day you couldn't measure it, you'd just do it because you'd get a feel for it. You couldn't say what the ROI of it was, you just got a feel for it. So today we're going to try and help you pull a bit of a better argument on what you can do with that, because Will and I run measurement workshops with clients. They measurement workshops with clients with they've got their own agencies and we've done it with our clients. We've got a certain system that will's going to go through a framework of how we operate. We're one of only um that's the last time we spoke to amec we're one of only three agencies outside of london in the uk to do what we do in this, this style of measurement. So it'll be interesting to see what you think so.

Chris Norton 4:24

So what is this session about, then? We've kind of touched on this, but it's about understanding the challenges and opportunities presented by effective PR measurement. As I said, we've got a best practice framework for effective PR and comms measurement and we're going to touch on that. We're a bit worried. Will and I were a bit worried because normally what we do is we give you a nice taster with these sessions and measurement. Obviously, it's much more of an in-depth, involved thing. So we're going to try and give you a feel for the framework so you can get a feel for what you can do. Obviously, you guys are in your own businesses. You all know what makes an impact and how you measure that impact. We'll sort of talk around that. But, yeah, we can help with explaining the framework we use. Yeah, we can help with, uh, explaining the framework we use and hopefully it'll be really really beneficial to you guys on what you do tomorrow, today, whatever in your plans moving ahead uh, just to stop you there, chris.

Will Ockenden 5:11

Um, somebody has asked uh, will amanda, will we receive a copy of the presentation? So, yes, everybody um who's attending this webinar will receive a copy of the slides.

Chris Norton 5:20

Um, so don't worry about that yeah, that's the one thing I always say at the beginning and I forgot to say today, so sorry about that. I normally put it in the chat as well Whoops, yeah, so we're going to look at a deep dive into the most innovative ways to measure your activity and to demonstrate ROI from your PR efforts. So what value will you get? You're going to get context around measurement and PR and comms. Why aren't we all doing it? Basically, because we're not. I'm going to be honest with you. Um, when we talk to the prca, we're a prca agency and not every agency is doing, and this is just the agency sphere. I know we were in a bubble but, um, a lot of pr people out there are measuring in different ways. They're not measuring effectively. Some people have got their own spreadsheets and things like that, but not everyone is doing it. They're just getting the coverage, showing it to their board or whatever. So, yeah, we're going to help with that. Where to start? So, as I said, will's going to explain the framework about best practice measurement and I'm going to touch on the principles that guides that. We're going to look at metrics deep dive. So how to get creative with your measurement, so how you can be a bit more creative when you're thinking about measurement. We're going to what can go wrong and the challenges you might face, and then finally how we can support, because obviously this is a there's not a heavy sell here. If you've been to these webinars before, you'll know. But we do do workshops with clients on this to help them measure effectively. That's it.

Chris Norton 6:49

So first let's define what ROI is. So this is a little graphic that I had done by our design team. So you basically put your marketing investment in, it goes into the machine and the expectation of return or result is more than what you put in, so a return on investment. So ROI is a ratio between net profit over a period and the cost of the marketing investment. So you can see in the graphic, you've put, like, say, a pound in and you've got one, two, three, four, five pound out, a five to one ROI. That's how people basically do ROI. If you've not done it before, that's just sort of gives you a feel at the very basic level. So you've not done it before. That just sort of gives you a feel at the very basic level. So you've got measurement, clever, careful measurement, and obviously we don't want to do paralysis by analysis, because that's measuring everything.

Chris Norton 7:34

Measurement, roi. So measurement allows you to improve performance of your inputs and the work that you're doing, and sometimes the panacea of measurement, linking it marketing to an input, to a commercial output. So an ROI will then show you you've done this and the commercial outcome of that is this. So with the best will in the world, you won't always be able to do an ROI. I mean, when we do our workshops, we explain loads of different scenarios where you can, and there's all sorts of different ways you can. If demonstrating a return on investment was that easy, we'd all be doing it right Wrong.

Chris Norton 8:13

No Less than one in three marketers can effectively evaluate the ROI of each of their channels, and that's from the state of marketing measurement report last year, the latest report that they produced. So less than one in three can effectively evaluate the ROI of each of their channels and 75% of comms professionals admitted they need to do a better job of measuring the impact of PR. Hopefully, that's why we're all here today. That's from Cision this year, so Cision's report on measurement. Yet less than half of marketers are using web analytics tools to measure effective marketing campaign effectiveness. That's from the State of Marketing Measurement Report. Now I get it. Ga in the last two or three years has been an absolute, in the words of a developer that I work with, a shit show, because they've changed the way that it is. It's getting improved again. There's a new version coming out, so it should be a little bit better than it's been. But the user-friendliness of GA has made Web Analytics much harder than it was before. You have to have bespoke reports and events and everything created.

Chris Norton 9:13

But it's not just a PR problem, because of what I've just talked about there, this graphic here, if you can see the different shades of gray 50 shades of gray you've got the lighter gray. So this is how effective your organization able to measure these activities today. So this is from Gartner. So if it's the lighter gray, it's not well at all. That's one to three, I believe, and then the middle color, gray, is four to five, and then six to seven is the darker and, as you can see, you've got corporate website activity is the easiest thing to measure, but at the bottom you've got corporate website activity is the easiest thing to measure, but at the bottom you've got some of the things that are difficult, hardest to measure. So social marketing and mobile marketing, which is quite surprising because you think mobile marketing would be really easy to measure. So it's not just a PR problem. Measurement is a thing that we're all obsessed with in all of our different silos, but it's just a way of bringing everyone together and looking at how we can get a clear picture for the business impact. So effective measurement basically from what we're saying can bring huge benefits to everyone here.

Chris Norton 10:17

Why measure in PR? Well, you can demonstrate often a direct ROI Not always, and that's when we put before an ROI. You can sometimes demonstrate an indirect ROI or a direct ROI. It's like the billboard situation I was just giving you there. Obviously, if you put a billboard outside King's Cross Station and you've got it there for three months and you see an uplift in people on their mobiles looking for a web address, you know there's been some impact.

Chris Norton 10:54

That can be a direct and indirect, a changed perception of PR with the C-suite. So if you can measure PR effectively and justify your existence, the C-suite will often look at you in a different way. I found that when PR people get the most respect from marketers is actually when the proverbial hits the fan, because when a crisis breaks out, it's like who do you call? You call the crisis team. The crisis team is usually dealt with by the head of comms or the PR agency or whoever it is to help control the message during the crisis. But this, if you measure effectively, can really help your case for getting more budget and justifying what you're doing. Did you have something to add then? Will? I thought you.

Will Ockenden 12:20

No, no, that's just interference in my mic.

Chris Norton 12:25

Okay. It could demonstrate where your effort and budget are most effective. So if you've measured it, you can see what's working and what's not working, and then you can constantly tweak things and improve different areas of where you're getting coverage or what you're doing public relations in with. But don't get confused. So PR is not performance marketing. So PR is brand marketing. It's part of more of a brand, it's a brand-led marketing initiative and it's more long-term and it's reputation management. That is what PR is. That's what we were taught at university and that is what we teach the power of brand marketing.

Chris Norton 13:02

You're building the brand, but reputation management is the most important thing in business. Ask someone like Richard Branson All you have in business is your reputation. So it's very important that you keep your word, which is true. Your reputation is everything. Or you can ask Warren Buffett it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

Chris Norton 13:25

I always just think of Gerald Ratner with this comment, when he made that one throwaway comment at a conference and he said what we sell is shit. And the media were there, they quoted him and his business nearly went bust and became it's not Ratner's anymore, it's the other, h Samuels, I think, bought it out and yeah, because the business just tanked off the back of one throwaway. It was a joke, actually he was joking, but there you go. The reputation of the business was ruined by one comment. But let's not just listen to business owners, let's also listen to one of the UK's top marketing

Measuring PR Effectiveness in Marketing

Chris Norton 14:03

professionals. So, mark Ritson, he's done the mini for those of you that don't know, he does the mini marketing MBA and, yeah, widely respected key writer at marketing week. And he says brand marketing drives sales but performance doesn't build brand. Most marketers should separate the two or they'll risk investing in the risk under investing in long-term growth. So brand marketing does drive sales, but performance marketing doesn't build the brand. There's two quite different things there. He also recommends a budget split of 60% for long-term brand building and 40% for short-term sales promotion, in other words, performance marketing, which is interesting when you think about. Everybody wants an ROI instantly now on the work that you've just done or this project that you just executed.

Chris Norton 14:54

So why aren't we all measuring our PR properly? Challenges are understanding what to measure. That's the difficult thing. As I said before paralysis by analysis, drowning in data. Prs aren't always the most technical people and they don't like numbers. Having worked with PR people my whole career, numbers are not their strong point.

Chris Norton 15:13

Prevailing assumption that PR is intangible. Everybody thinks, oh, I can't measure that, we can't report on that, it's so hard, it's just intangible. Some bits are a bit intangible and you have to go with your gut and linking commercial outputs with marketing interventions and demonstrating that Excuses. 70% of PR professionals say they lack the data necessary to measure the impact of their PR and comms campaigns. From recording decision. 70% of PR pros say they lack the data. I'd say that they're just not looking in the right places for me.

Chris Norton 15:48

So, really, traditional PR AVE and I'd love to know how many people still use AVE. I'm not going to lie, you're not supposed to use AVE. So for those who don't know what that is, that's advertising value equivalent, which basically is if a piece of coverage appears in a title, what would that piece of coverage cost? So, obviously, if you had a piece of coverage in, I don't know, the Daily Mail, we had a piece of coverage yesterday in the Daily Mail for a client. They measure that and a lot of the cuttings agencies will give you an AVE of what that's worth it used to be. You could have an AVE, so it would cost that size. A piece that big would cost I don't know £5,000 or £500 or whatever. And then sometimes people would say the PR value is three times more than that because it's written in editorial, which is more believable. There's a lot of science behind this. It's independent, it's written by a journalist, so it's more believable than an advert. So that's AVE, but it's discredited massively.

Chris Norton 16:45

So the PRCA and the CIPR discredit AVEs, but clients love it. They have a number, they can go back to their and I understand that we do that for some of our clients because they ask for it. But we have to say that the PRCA and when we enter our awards, we've won awards for the campaigns we've done. We have to take AVEs out. The clients love it, but in the industry it's not widely respected. Whether you like it or don't like it, it is still a thing and I don't think it's ever going away.

Chris Norton 17:13

But that said, I've got a quote in a minute which shows you the opinion on it. You've got reach and there's other things that you can do in traditional PR as well. So this is a friend of mine and Will's. He's been on the podcast. Stephen Waddington is the number one PR blogger in the UK and he's also the former CIPR president and he says AVE is bullshit. It's a lazy, meaningless metric. It has no relationship whatsoever to the value of corporate communications or management. Don't pull any punches, stephen. So yeah, that's the view. However, I'm from the other. He isn't running agencies anymore and I understand that clients have got to justify what they're spending money on and what they're getting as a result of that. So I'm just showing you the sort of context Integrated PR. You can track website referrals, conversions from PR, for instance.

Chris Norton 18:04

Right, we had a client who sold Christmas hampers and every year for four or five years they sold them in Harrods and they're really good quality and we used to send them out to journalists. We'd pitch the hampers, picture what was in it, all the products. We'd get them out. You'd have to send them out pretty much roundabout now to get into the Christmas lists and stuff, maybe a little bit earlier. And when we got a piece of coverage, we got pieces in the Metro and we got a recommended top 10 hampers on the Daily Mail Product. Sold out, sold out Two and a half thousand sales in 24 hours and so the client was absolutely buzzed. That covered the fees 10 times over Happy days. So you can get things like that where they put a link in it's to a product Great.

Chris Norton 18:53

The problem is not everything that you do will be product PR. Clients love product PR, but not everything is so. It's thinking about that. Then you've got sentiment. So the sentiment. You might do a campaign to change the attitude towards what you're doing. Maybe you've done something and you want to make a positive impact on something or behavior and you want to measure sentiment. You can measure that online. You can also measure and we've done that. They do this for all of our clients share a voice, the client versus maybe three of their competitors, and you can see when the client, when the other competitors have got something going on. You can see when we're doing our campaigns. You can compare share a voice during campaigns. Then you've got again a return investment and the halo effect of that share of search. So campaigns, and you've got again a return on investment and the halo effect of that share of search.

Chris Norton 19:36

So you know, when we were working with Hallmark Cards, they had a competitor, moon Pig. You know bespoke cards made online and share of search. When we were doing a Christmas campaign or a Valentine's campaign, we'd do a load of activity, pr and yeah, you'd get direct clicks to the site and stuff like that from the bits of online coverage. But then you'd get the stuff that was in the nationals and you know, we'd get I don't know. Say, you get 30 pieces of coverage in the nationals over three months and the search volumes of Hallmark would go up and we could directly correlate that to the campaigns that we'd executed. So, share of search more people are basically seeing it and just thinking, oh, I'll get a card from whoever, oh, sorry. And then you've got social shares of articles and much, much more. There's so much you can measure. So, okay, we've got the case for it, you're bought in.

Chris Norton 20:29

Where do we start with measurement? Well, we start with the seven Barcelona principles yes, principles, right. Well, this is what best practice, the best measurement, is based on. So, if you haven't done this, just listen to how this is built. And then this is the structure that creates the framework for what we use for all of our clients. So Barcelona principle one framework for what we use for all of our clients. So basketball owner principle one goal setting and measurement are fundamental to communication and PR.

Chris Norton 20:57

So setting a clear goals and how you're going to measure them, measuring communication outcomes is recommended versus only measuring outputs, outcomes and outputs. So an output would be a press release or a feature, or or an editorial opportunity, or, I don't know, a thought leadership article or a podcast. Their outputs, outcomes is what, what happens due to that. So bear with me, and as Will's going to explain this in a bit more detail the effect of organizational performance should be measured where possible. So what you know, maybe that's sales, maybe that's an uplift in recruitment, I don't know. Whatever that is the effect on the organization's performance.

Chris Norton 21:41

Measurement and evaluation require both qualitative and quantitative methods, because some things are quantitative and some things are more qualitative, which is where you might want to need to do a few focus groups to find out whether people have heard about it, etc. Etc. So they're the first four Barcelona principles. Principle five AVEs are not a value of communication. So, yeah, the Barcelona principles completely discredit them. Social media can and should be measured consistently with other media channels. And then, finally, measurement and evaluation should be transparent. So how you're measuring it? What you're measuring, consistent and valid.

Will Ockenden 22:21

Okay, so excuse me. So Chris has done a good job of kind of talking about the context of measurement, the kind of the evolution of measurement in PR, and I think you know the challenge is PR has traditionally been seen as a relevant, relatively intangible discipline and we can't measure it. But that's, that's not true and I'm going to sort of talk to you about how we can measure it and really a starting point is a um, a measurement framework. You know we need to be, we need to be using frameworks in order to properly plan and measure our campaigns. Now you may have heard of amec, which chris alluded to at the start. So amec is the association for the measurement and evaluation of communication. Essentially, amec is um, is a, is a not-for-profit industry standard for effective measurement in PR, and you can go on the website Ameccom, and essentially it encourages us to kind of properly define our objectives, which is really really important.

Will Ockenden 23:18

I'm going to talk about that and link our tactics to those objectives. So your idea is we only do the tactics that will help us achieve our objectives, and it really kind of focuses our efforts and then strips out any activity that isn't necessary and then the final thing it does is. It measures the things, helps us measure the things that demonstrate business impact. So it helps us focus in on measuring the right things, and it's a really useful planning tool at the beginning of a strategy, at the beginning of a campaign and so on. And this is actually an interactive tool that you can use online. We've actually got our own version of it that we use at Prohibition,

PR Measurement Framework Simplified

Will Ockenden 23:55

which I'll take you through now, which is, in our view, a little bit easier, so well, just log out of Teams because your Teams messages are popping up on the screen.

Chris Norton 24:04

You need to change your Teams settings.

Will Ockenden 24:07

Do not disturb, let me quickly change that yeah, sorry, yeah so yeah.

Chris Norton 24:12

So basically, what will was just showing you then is the amec. This is like amec free tool that basically you can use to help you, but it can be a little bit clunky, um, so what we've done is we we've used it. We had like a few workshops with a few clients and then we were like this doesn't work for us on how we do our campaigns with our clients and the terminology and also based on some of your questions as well, a lot of it doesn't really make sense in the UK in how we speak. So we changed a lot of the terminology and we've created our own framework, but based on the Barcelona principles and the Amex sort of tools.

Will Ockenden 24:49

Well, you need to present your screen again. My message is does that work? Has that come up?

Chris Norton 24:55

Yeah, that's back up, yeah.

Will Ockenden 24:57

So our version of it. I'm going to talk through each of these boxes. I appreciate there's an awful lot of information here. We actually do a whole separate workshop. I mean this is like a day workshop session really. I'm filling this in, so this is going to be a bit of a whistle stop tour, but essentially we need to start with our objectives.

Will Ockenden 25:13

So we define organizational objectives. So, commercially, what do we want to achieve? Let's say it's sales, share of market footfall. We then define our communication objectives. So which communication objectives are we trying to achieve, which will naturally link with organizational objectives? We then define our target audience and we look at inputs and considerations. So these might be existing campaigns that are happening, market insight, audience insight, any kind of consideration that may influence the campaign, and this is where it gets really good. We then map out our peso tactics so paid, earned, shared and owned and essentially our tactics. Whether it's a press release, it's a social media post, it's an event, these tactics will will map specifically against our objectives. So the idea is it keeps you super focused in terms of only doing the activities that are going to influence achieving our objectives.

Will Ockenden 26:05

We then have outputs and outtakes, which everybody gets confused by. So I'm going to try and explain these. And outputs are what people see as a result of our comms. So if our tactic is a press release, the output would be a news article or a website article. The outtake is what action do people do, or what do they think, as a result of the comms? So if people see an article, their attitude or sentiment towards the brand may change, and these two bits are really handy to understand what we need to measure. And then it's only the final box to where we actually measure. So outcomes is what do people do as a result of the comms? And this links with our comms objectives. All this will make more sense in a moment moment, and the impact, ultimately, is the panacea. So what commercial impact did our comms intervention have? And this is where we, where we can demonstrate roi.

Will Ockenden 26:57

So ideally you'd say sales have increased by 50, and that links with your organizational objective, which is increase sales by 50. And and this forces you to really plan out what you want to achieve and what tactics you've got and how you're going to measure them. And what often happens. If you don't plan like this, you realize, oh God, we should have been measuring that. And it's too late because you can't measure that. So as a framework, this is really really handy. Now where do we? We start?

Will Ockenden 27:25

So the first step with anything should always be a set of really great objectives and and the importance of good objectives is, you know, the more specific and clear your organizational or your comms objective is, the less ambiguity there is around whether you've achieved it or not. And I'm going to give you some examples so you know. If we're super clear about our objective, you've either hit it or you haven't. And it also keeps you super focused in terms of what you measure. And the danger in, obviously in PR, is that you measure everything and you spend all of your time measuring everything. This keeps you really focused in terms of what you measure.

Will Ockenden 28:00

So when we're coming up with objectives, we would always advocate that they should be smart objectives, so they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. So what do I mean by that? I'll give you some examples. An okay objective would be drive product sales through PR, but just looking at that objective, you can see it's not really very smart at all, is it? A better objective will be drive product sales for the Christmas range. So you're specifying product sales for what through PR product placement. So you're then specifying what tactic, but we can be even better than that, and the best objective in this context would be drive 25% of all online Christmas range sales through national online PR product placement by the end of Q3. So it's time bound. You've specified you know it's very, very measurable because it's 25% of Christmas range sales and you've specified the tactics. So always think in terms of as specific as you possibly can be when it comes to objectives, and this will just help you in your planning. It will help you understand what you need to measure and it will help you in your planning. It will help you understand what you need to measure and it will help you understand what you need to actually do to achieve those objectives.

Will Ockenden 29:10

What we then need to do, now we've defined our objectives and we've filled in the objective box in the AMAC framework is think about what

Strategic Planning and Next Gen Measurement

Will Ockenden 29:16

tactics do we need to do that link to those objectives. So clearly, if your objective was 25, increase webshop sales by 25't, you wouldn't necessarily have a billboard, would you? You wouldn't necessarily do a guerrilla activation. You'd probably say, okay, we need to do online pr with links linking to the the shop, so it makes it very, very um focused. And then we need to think about our outputs and outtakes. So I'm going to bring this to life just to kind of illustrate it.

Will Ockenden 29:43

Back to the amec framework. So, as discussed, our organizational objective this, remember, this is the commercial objective 25 increase in sales. We then need a comms objective. So to achieve 25 of sales, let's set a softer comms objective. So what we need to do is it's going to be brand awareness, isn't it? So we need to increase brand awareness around key christmas skews with 10 plus pieces of media coverage in regional trade and lifestyle. And that's quite a good comms objective. It's very specific and it links with our organizational objective. We'll have defined our target audience and our inputs, which I don't need to go into, and then we think about tactics. So what tactics can we do that are going to link to our comms and organizational objectives?

Will Ockenden 30:24

And, as I said, consumer PR, product placement is a good starting point. The output remember the output is what people see as a result of our comms. So they're going to see online media coverage, 70% of which has a link, a key message and an image, and what's the likely outtake of that. Remember, this is what they feel as a result of that. So it's going to be brand sentiment. They're going to feel differently about the brand, having read that, they might click a web, they might click a website link, they might share it, they might have a conversation about it. And by doing this, it keeps us super, super focused and the outputs and the outtakes really starts to focus what we need to measure. So, straight away. I'm looking at this thinking okay, brand sentiment is something we probably need to measure. We need to measure web clicks, and it keeps you again so focused on your objectives.

Will Ockenden 31:14

Now, this then moves us on to the actual measurement, which is the sharp edge of this, and this is this bit. So the challenge then becomes um, how do we measure? Um? And we would always say and we took chris and I talk about a lot. Let's think about next generation measurement here, you know, in the old school way of measuring in PR is press clippings. That's not going to help you here, you know, that's not going to tell you anything. And we need to think about the data and the insight that we can get from a piece of PR coverage. And the beauty is we live in a digital world, so there's an abundance of data and we need to think in terms of next generation measurement.

Will Ockenden 31:49

There's a few favorite areas of measurement I'll talk you through now. This is not exhaustive. We would recommend you think deeply about what works for you, but these are certainly some areas that will help. So, first of all, referrals and conversions. So if we are doing a PR program, then we would urge you to become familiar with Google Analytics, and if we do this correctly, we can actually start to track the direct impacts of PR by using GA. And essentially this comes down to UTM tracking links. So a UTM tracking link is basically and I'll show you some examples it's a unique link that we can use in a piece of PR coverage that Google Analytics then picks up on and it means everything becomes attributable. So if we're using a link for the Daily Mail, we're using a different link for the Daily Mirror, a different link for that Bible. We can see exactly what those click-throughs are doing from each of those media outlets and we can set up our utm links in line with campaigns, so we might have a christmas campaign, an easter campaign, a mother's day campaign, a father's day campaign.

Will Ockenden 32:53

We can actually do it on a content by content level. So I gave the examples of um, um. Is my team still flashing up, chris, or is that okay? No, I think it's fine, all right. Good, I wasn't sure whether it was showing through. Um. We can actually do this on a, on a kind of a content by content piece. So you know, split out which media titles we're talking to and then we can. We can actually record and I'll give you some examples of this how many link clicks we've had from each source, how long they've spent on our website and actually have they purchased, having clicked through from the daily mail or the daily mirror. Now this looks terribly complicated, but, um, google link, um, sorry, google tag, um tag builder is a really good um way of doing this. Essentially, you define your source, your medium, your content. In your campaign there's little boxes you tick, so you'd say daily mirror, the medium is pr, etc, etc. And then in google analytics, in the campaign section, shows up something like this well, your teams is coming up again.

Will Ockenden 33:52

So annoying I've turned it off, logged out and I've how weird this is uh this is.

Chris Norton 33:59

It's quite funny really, because you're explaining, like, how to do technical. You've not signed out, you can see there. There you go. You are now um, technical measurement, um, but how to look out of teams.

Will Ockenden 34:10

There's a, there's a lesson yeah, I could do with a training session on that, couldn't I if?

Chris Norton 34:14

anyone's available.

Will Ockenden 34:15

If anyone's an expert, yeah so this is something like how it will show up. So if you had, you know, christmas campaign daily mail, it would. It would show up here in google analytics and just gives you so much data because you know you. Typically you get a piece of product placement in one of these titles and and you don't really know what the results are. I'll give you an example of of how powerful this can be. Um, a prior client, a previous client we worked with for a few christmases cartwright and butler. You'll have seen them. You'll have seen them in Selfridges in Harvey Nichols, harrods airports. They basically do amazing sort of cakes and biscuits and things like that. Now we worked with them for several Christmases. We did a campaign called Christmas Wrapped Up. Now, essentially we did a kind of a program of themed product placement around their Christmas collection. Every product release, every piece of activity had a bespoke UTM link linking to the online store and we got a huge

Social Media Measurement in PR

Will Ockenden 35:13

amount of media coverage from it. We measured this all via GA. So we got 78 pieces of coverage in key media, most of which was kind of nationals. Now, 49 of those pieces had a URL linking to the web shop, which is great. Traditional measurement would probably end there. But because we use UTM tracking, we could see that a piece in the Telegraph, for example, generated 4,000 link clicks and actually that directly led to a new corporate account for Cartwright and Butler and we could attribute 8% uplift in sales that was attributable to our integrated PR activity. So straight away, and as Chris said, pr isn't always a direct response mechanism. You can't always demonstrate an ROI from PR, but sometimes you can, or at least a quantified part of your activity. And in this case, 8% of sales attributable to integrated PR. And it's just brilliant to be able to report that% of sales attributed to water integrated PR and it's just brilliant to be able to report that level of detail in terms of commercial benefit. A few other areas a few people on the chat actually asked about this. So word of mouth and key message penetration.

Will Ockenden 36:17

So we know if we land a successful campaign, a PR campaign, we create those water cooler moments, don't we? When people up and down the country discuss it in the pub, in the office, in the queue at the supermarket. But how do we actually measure that? We do that through social media listening and there's a lot of. You know we have various tools in prohibition, best in class tools where we track online conversations happening around a category or a brand. So a category might be craft beer, the brand might be, you know, madri or, or black sheep, or whatever it might be, and and we look at how people are talking about a topic and how that changes after our campaign, and ideally we track pre campaign and then we track during and post campaign and, if we've done our job properly, we start to see people organically discussing our campaign, um, independent of the brand, and that's a success because we're influencing public opinion, in effect, and social media listening can be a really great way of demonstrating that. And then, yeah, like we say, we compare narratives. Um, I won't play this video because it's quite long, but when we send this you'll, you'll get a link to this.

Will Ockenden 37:28

But essentially, um, we ran a campaign for black sheep in 2022 called drink cask beer. Now, for anybody that understands the the cask beer market, it's a, it's a category in decline and it's um unfairly seen as a drink that old men in dark corners in pubs drink, whereas black sheep actually realized it. You know, has got a kind of an emerging diverse customer base and it should be a drink that is enjoyed by all and they essentially rather than rather than pushing black sheep, black sheep wanted to launch a campaign that champions the whole category and basically repositioned it as an interesting, fresh, um flavor, some drink that actually is every bit as good as so-called you know, trendy uh, cask, cask, um, you know, craft beer. And we did lots of activations. We did lots of kind of quite edgy you know this is a mean tweets video on the right where Maisie Adam read out kind of mean tweets about cask. We did a piece of kind of urban poetry loads of activations and content, pushing the fact that cask beer is a fantastic product, is absolutely relevant to all age groups and so on and so forth. And Black Sheep was behind the campaign but wasn't the main focus. Now we wanted to understand to what degree Black Sheep was associated with cask beer and post campaign was associated with the cask beer. So this was a word cloud pre campaign about cask beer.

Will Ockenden 39:04

So if people talked about cask beer, if people talked about cask beer, they would talk about um seba, which is a society of independent brewers. They would talk about boris johnson and rishi sunak, because they've made some kind of a concession to pubs um british beer and pub association. You'll notice, no brands are part of this conversation. Really, you know, there's no brands being discussed about cask beer. So if someone's having a conversation about cask beer they'll talk about this sort of stuff. We then launched this kind of year-long campaign pushing cask beer, championing cask beer, lots of kind of edgy activations. That got lots of cut through and we repeated this process. And guess what? If people talk about cask beer, suddenly they talk about massum, which is where black sheep are based. They talk about johnny, who was the sales director at the time. They talk about blackk beer. Suddenly they talk about Massim, which is where Black Sheep are based. They talk about Johnny, who was the sales director at the time. They talk about Black Sheep Brewery as a brand.

Will Ockenden 39:52

So this shows the power of social listening in terms of really kind of demonstrating the impact of a campaign, and in the old days you used to have to do really expensive kind of qual and quant research. It would probably cost you 20 grand to demonstrate this. Now you can do it from a dashboard using social media listening, so a fantastically sophisticated tool when it comes to measuring the impact of pr campaigns. A few other things sentiment. So pr social listening allows us to measure sentiment. And again, you can measure sentiment to your brand before the campaign and post campaign and and you know we talk about net brand sentiment. So that's positive minus negative sentiment and that's a really good way, you know. Do people think better of your brand or worse of your brand pre or post campaign? Funnily enough,

Measuring PR Outcomes and Impact

Will Ockenden 40:39

I did a bit of a bit of number crunching last night. This is sentiment of Keir Starmer pre, pre, pre-election.

Chris Norton 40:48

I was just gonna say Will, before you go on to that, I love the way that we we knocked Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson was mentioned twice in that tag and also the balance yeah, now you're doing.

Will Ockenden 40:59

Now you're doing Keir Starmer, so we're going like the BBC, measuring all three yeah, so you'll see that Keir Starmer had a 20% there or thereabouts, sentiment positive sentiment score. This was two months before the election. I repeated this for the last month, so basically September, and it's 4.5% Keir Starmer's positive sentiment. So I'm not making a comment on that, I'm presenting the facts as they are. But you can do this for a brand and, ideally, post campaign, your sentiment will increase tenfold and that's a really powerful thing. People think we're a better brand after our campaign.

Will Ockenden 41:34

Talkability is another one, and the beauty now with online media coverage is that everything's shareable.

Will Ockenden 41:40

So, um, you know, we we were lucky enough to be involved with the relaunch of the classic alcapot reef earlier in the year and it absolutely became a viral story. Um, we kind of tapped into the 90s nostalgia and everybody talked about it. Um, but what we were able to do was actually find out how, how much talkability it generated. So this is a piece we generated in the daily mail. We then did some analysis in the top right, which is, um, a tool we use called a buzz sumo, and we can see 490 this is in the first week, or something like that so 491 facebook shares of that article, which, to us, says people are interested in it and this morning ran it as well, and we can see 5,600 comments and 784 shares. So this gives us an indicator into. You know, just reading a piece of coverage is fine, but if somebody reads a piece of coverage and then is compelled to share it or talk about it, that shows more interest and more engagement. And it's just another metric which can become incredibly powerful.

Chris Norton 42:41

It was in Every National basically as well.

Will Ockenden 42:43

They're just two examples, aren't they?

Will Ockenden 42:44

Yeah, it is a genuine kind of word-of-mouth, viral story.

Will Ockenden 42:50

I'll come on to the ROI bit in a moment, but what we would recommend is all of this data needs to be kind of brought together in one place. And something we advocate at Prohibition is a PR performance dashboard, and we we create these bespoke, but this is a really good way to kind of keep a handle on what's happening in a real-time basis, and we use AI to basically pull this information through. So this is just an example of a dashboard. You break down the media by tier, by sentiment, the of coverage, the share of voice you've got versus key competitors, and I think in the digital worlds we're really used to these kind of dashboards, aren't we? But PR hasn't always been very good at this and, outside of the whole measurement discussion, this is a really handy tool to basically make great decisions, and the more data we can have about how our PR is performing, the better decisions we can make, and would recommend any. You know anybody that that does a lot of pr has some kind of dashboard like this.

Chris Norton 43:45

it just it just allows you to be really kind of reactive and responsive and that's that's a, that's an in-house bespoke tool that we use for our clients, that we can have like a, an online dashboard, an online dashboard. But basically it's not difficult for us because basically, as a piece of coverage comes in, one of our execs on the account will just go daily mail, this amount of circulation, this size positive, negative they put it into a spreadsheet and it repopulates the dashboard and it all visualizes for the client. So yeah, really simple.

Will Ockenden 44:15

So, oh, that's fine, but let's remember, not every metric we measure will demonstrate direct ROI. We're almost missing the point if we want to demonstrate ROI through everything we do. But some will, and it's really that combination of the hard metrics and the softer metrics. So back to this AMEC framework that we're used to. What we're looking at now is outcomes and impact. So outcomes remember outcomes needs to link with our comms objectives. So if our comms objectives are increased brand awareness, then we would measure that by an increase in brand awareness as measured by 10 pieces of coverage, blah, blah, blah. And then sentiment, so 5% increase in sentiment on a like for like comparison, um, in terms of dates. So both of those become quite useful metrics to demonstrate yes, we have achieved our comms objectives. But we need to look beyond that and ultimately we need some sort of business impact. So ideally and this is easy because we've looked at sales, you know that's that's fairly easy to measure. And this is where the challenge comes in. We, you know, x percent increase in online Christmas sales versus the last 12 months. So to us, this is a really effective framework. You know, we've demonstrated yes, we fit our comms objectives, we fit our organizational objectives. That's as a result of us hitting our comms objectives and we've been super focused throughout the process because we're measuring the right things, we've got the right processes in place to measure those things and we've not bothered with any tactics that aren't in tune with our objectives. So this is a perfect world what it might look like, but you know we understand the reality of it and often kind of this, this end bit, linking impact with your organizational objectives, can be a challenge and we need to make those connections between what we've done versus what we're seeing from a commercial perspective. And sometimes we have to be a little bit creative here. Something we find really handy at Prohibition is activity timelines. So what's really good is to kind of map out, to try and force these connections and make a case that, yes, my comms intervention has achieved those commercial um, those commercial results.

Will Ockenden 46:26

You know it's good to map out activity. So we might you know somebody, some we do we do a podcast, um, you know, in on week 33 we get a comment with our spokesperson on this morning. In week 35 we do another podcast in week 36. They kind of map out those key tentpole moments of of activity and then look at your sales or whatever. Whatever it is you're measuring, you know. You, indeed, you might be measuring footfall, you might be measuring share of voice, whatever it is, for the sake of argument. We're looking at sales, you know. Look at your sales and how they're changing over time, and then what we need to do is try and find patterns. So you know there's no impact in the bottom line, but actually we're seeing a. You know we're seeing an increase in sales from these two tactics. That's before activity, that's after.

Will Ockenden 47:10

You know, was this group touched by a tactic? Was this group touched by social media? Was this group touched by PR? And by doing this, this, you can start to focus in on what it was that was likely to have had that favorable commercial outcome, and then you can start to dig into the metrics and start to understand okay, let's, let's dig deeper, let's let's measure that, let's make a case. You can spend all of your time doing this. So there's clearly, there's a balance, um, and then we need to kind of understand, you know what.

Will Ockenden 47:37

You know, if we really want to get serious about ROI. You know what. What is each conversion worth? You know, and we can look at literally what they've spent, or could we look at customer lifetime value, you know, and that's that's. That's even an even more powerful metric. So one customer might spend 50 pounds, but over a lifetime I might spend 5000 pounds. And of course, measuring ROI by revenue comes down to, you know, revenue over investment. And when we look at investment we need to look at everything people, hours, any ad budget we've spent, etc. Etc. And that can give us our PR ROI. But that's assuming that the sole objective of the PR was to drive sales, and the chances are you're going to be tuned into the fact that actually it's partly you know it's about reputation drive sales, and the chances are you're going to be tuned into the fact that actually it's partly. You know it's about reputation as well. And there's always going to be other objectives as well, and this is something Chris and I are big advocates of.

Will Ockenden 48:27

You know, don't think of PR in terms of, or rather don't always think of, pr in terms of pure revenue. There's lots of other benefits of PR that will demonstrate some sort of cost saving or financial benefit. So you know, improved customer satisfaction or less customer service queries, you know. You think, does positive PR and educational PR reduce the calls you get to your call center by 10%. You know there's a cost saving associated with that. You know that you have to pay salaries for a call center. Are you getting less returns as a result of pr? Is there more opportunities to see the brand or brand exposure, you know?

Will Ockenden 49:05

Are you getting a huge amount of web traffic? Does you know how does that compare with what you're spending from a ppc basis? Is it cheaper web traffic that you're getting from pr and better quality web traffic? You know, are you looking to grow your database versus buying that data? There's a load of different ways you can think about it and this, really you know this this is a kind of a softer financial benefit to what you're doing from from a PR perspective, because I think a lot of us do just kind of default to. Has the PR driven sales, or rather, board members or chief execs often, often default to. Um, you know, comms, people get it and they get that. It's not always a direct response mechanism you can keep on, yeah yeah, I'll stay.

Chris Norton 49:44

You keep controlling it, yeah so, um, just, we've had a few questions in the chat which is great about um, like paid and non-paid. Obviously we've been talking about earned media here. So if I, but we have got a little tool that we thought we could share with you, because obviously we've been talking about earned media here, so if I, but we have got a little tool that we thought we could share with you, cause obviously we talked about our dashboards that we built in house, that we've plugged into various bits and pieces that we build for all of our clients, but we've also got like a free tool here that you can use so well if you just want to change screen, so yeah, google data studio. So, if you don't know, google Data Studio, it turns data into easy-to-see graphs that you can see there on the right and basically

Google Data Studio for PR Measurement

Chris Norton 50:20

you can include multiple data sources into one dashboard, so you can. Basically what it acts is like a portal. It's free, it's a little bit techie, so you might want to pay someone a couple of days to put one together to pull from various data sources, but it can be done. So the things that you can include, if you can just put the dropdown Will, that'd be great Google products, anything Google-wise, obviously, because it's Google Data Studios or Google Ads, google Analytics, search ads. You can put YouTube stuff in there, you can add social platform data such as Facebook, reddit, twitter, linkedin all your social platforms and then you can even have databases, um, including so mysql and all the more technical things that you might need a developer for. But basically what we're saying is the google data studio is a free tool and if you, you can have it nicely branded and built. I know we've shown hours that we've done that we do free for our clients. But if you want to do something free and you haven't got loads of budget, you might want to play around with that for a couple of days. Well worth it. And just to bring that to an example of what, how that can look, I've got an example on the next slide um, yeah, you can also upload files, but this is from a friend of mine and he's also been on the embracing marketing mistakes pod andrew bruce smith.

Chris Norton 51:34

Um, he used to do the seo, npr, um and PR training which we've helped him with a few times, and he's used Google Data Studio for return investment here, which is why I've included it. Remember it's free. So what he's done here which I thought was interesting to share with you guys is you can combine media coverage data with other sources, such as search volume and social media engagement. So if you look on the right hand side, you can see the map and it shows where he secured all regional coverage for a brand. And what he's done is he's got Google Data Studio to publish his coverage on a map, so then you've got a proper visualization. Quite clever that.

Chris Norton 52:15

So he's also got a dashboard, a Google Data Studio dashboard, but then he's created a Google map with all the coverage of where it's around, so then you could show your C-suite oh look, we've had coverage all around the UK, because often regional coverage is like oh yeah, we've had a bit of regional coverage here. But if it's mapped out, you can see where there's opportunities, where you've not had coverage and where you might want to focus your efforts. And it's free, little bit of tweaking around, but you can plug all kinds of different data sources in there, totally free and maybe worth the play if you've got time to do that. That's the thing about these things, isn't it? They make it free.

Will Ockenden 52:48

Yeah, that's. The thing is that time is an issue here. There's so much you can measure, but the point is we do need as as an industry we do need to be better at measurement and certainly, um, the amec framework is a really good place to start because it is just such a you know, and we've found from our experience um, presenting the c-suite, um amec plan for pr is incredibly powerful because suddenly they they see the connection between what you're doing, the great work you're doing, and the business objectives and the business objectives. And yes, you can't always demonstrate a direct ROI, but it just makes PR so much more accountable.

Chris Norton 53:23

Yeah, definitely, and the halo effect from PR. As we said before, we're building brand here. This is a long-term thing. This is reputation, brand, as well as the more performance marketing stuff that we've been talking about. So, in summary, then start campaigns with clear objectives in mind. It'll help you establish what an ROI looks like. What are your objectives, both business-wise and communication-wise? Tag each new campaign with a UTM code if you want to track what a link's doing, for a clear picture of where your conversions came from.

Chris Norton 53:51

If you've got online conversions, always plan with the Amec framework to focus your efforts and make sure you're measuring

Impactful PR Measurement for Increased ROI

Chris Norton 53:57

the right things and you can tweak things. So, yeah, use that or the framework that we've developed. Produce a wrap report on the total impact of all initiatives so we do this for all clients. If we do a campaign for a client, we'll measure the sentiment before, the effectiveness, before, during and after. So you've got a wrap report.

Chris Norton 54:15

So, like, if they say, oh, we've got 10K to spend on a project, then we'll do a wrap report before and after, so you can see the difference that that 10K has had on all the different things that we've talked about today. Obviously, it depends on what the client wants to affect and what they're trying to change if it's behavioral change, media exposure, whatever, whatever and it also gives you a chance to review and see what's what to do next. So remember, pr often won't drive the most sales directly because it's not performance stuff. However, that doesn't mean it's less important and it does drive sales, which I we've justified like we said, it's a very technical issue, you know, and it's it's something.

Will Ockenden 54:52

Um, if you get it right, it's just a brilliant way of of. I mean, suddenly, if you can demonstrate impact from pr, suddenly your budgets will increase, you know, and and it's easier to have those conversations with your chief exec or whoever about getting you know, getting more budget released, because you know why would you not invest more in pr if you can demonstrate the impact?

Chris Norton 55:12

so exactly if you've invested 10k in a pr project and you got 50 000 pounds out the other end and you can justify it like you say. But why wouldn't you?