measurement

Measurement & Evaluation for PR and Social Media

How do you gauge the success of your PR, social media and marketing efforts? We focus on the metrics that matter, ruthlessly focussed on business impact with stats that stand up in the boardroom.

Smoking Gun is recognised for its measurement and evaluation by the most prominent bodies in the comms sector; our seven AMEC awards and PRCA Measurement Champion Agency status are evidence enough. Two years after we were established, the CIPR banned AVE— or Advertising Value Equivalent— from its award entries, and in doing so caught up with Smoking Gun’s founding principles.

You might think you have scored a great hit in the press, or garnered impressive exposure with your latest social media push. But assessing the actual impact is more complex than it may seem. It’s not acceptable to simply compare value for money against advertising prices when ads lack the breadth and scope of great marketing and PR. This is where our evaluation framework comes in.

We only provide clear proof to show the strength of a campaign, and don’t hide behind vanity metrics or nonsense figures. So hits in the press should be as big as possible, but also reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time. Social media should not simply look at follower and fan numbers, but broader engagement metrics too.

It’s what we mean by transparent performance measurement and evaluation. Keep reading to find out more.

Quantity & quality: PR measurement and evaluation

Our modern measurement framework gives you the intelligence you need.

You can loosely divide the process of analysis into two categories. On one hand you have ‘quality’. This takes into consideration the sector your brand works in, weighing this up with the status of the platform that has given your brand attention— including newspapers, magazines and websites; and the influence of the person who actually produced the content.

None of which is to say that ‘quantity’ can be ignored. A company that produces professional microscopes might be best off with a name drop in a prominent science journal— read by people who work in and around labs. That audience is the target market.

A foreign language movie primarily made up of silent, black and white scenes in a sparse kitchen will likely benefit most from a review in the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound, not a national red top. By comparison, a fashion brand with a new line in festival wellies wants a daily newspaper.

More specifically still, measurement and evaluation of media hits must take into account the quality of the person who produced the content. A good PR agency understands that a high-profile columnist or critic can add plenty of impact to the coverage.

And when it comes to digital PR, we create stories that are strong enough to hit a high quantity of high quality sites.

Social media measurement and evaluation

There was a time when all social media marketing valued was follower numbers. This is no longer the case and more tellingly, it should never have been. The Barcelona Principles are followed by experts in the PR industry, measuring campaign effectiveness in an ever-changing digital landscape. In order to truly gauge the effectiveness of your brand’s social media work, a range of aspects must be considered. These include:

Direct sales conversions – Data collection has never been easier. It’s possible to track the sales journey all the way back to a social media post with the right tools.

Leads – This doesn’t just apply to situations wherein a social media campaign is aimed at getting more enquiries, data capture, or email sign-up. Every effort should be made to understand the cause of an increase in new business leads, be they from LinkedIn, TikTok or anything else.

SEO and search marketing campaigns – Mentions, and the content you create and share via social networks, contribute to the visibility of your brand online, including search engine results pages. As such this should also form part of your social media measurement and evaluation.

Engagements – Beyond passive views, we analyse whether content has stirred the audience’s emotions enough to interact, from likes to comments and shares.

True reach – Numbers still matter; you want to increase your followers and fans, and you want accounts with high numbers of followers and fans to share your content. But any new disciples you attract, and the audience of any influencers you work with, must be engaged themselves.

Sentiment measurement and evaluation

The evaluation practice of sentiment refers to what people are saying, rather than simply judging success based on the fact they are saying something. It spans the real, print and digital worlds, and is about much more than brand mentions. For example, you can:

Gauge public attitudes towards subjects, news stories, and companies

Understand emotional responses to particular types of marketing and advertising

Gain a first-hand view of the user experience and how this affects customer perception.

The process of comprehensive sentiment measurement and evaluation is labour intensive but gets to the heart of the true impact of your story and content.

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