To try and help the New Year ‘back to school blues’ fade I often start thinking of what makes me feel good about my job. Immediate hits are the feel good factor of front page news or seeing a good story appear that you have created, nurtured and then have the impact that you confidently told the client it would.
The slower burn, and more satisfying, feel good comes over the long term when it’s evident that the agency is making a difference to the client’s business objectives and how it manages the communications programme.
Demonstrating that you have made a difference to the client and proving a return on investment (ROI) was traditionally the awkward part of a pitch meeting, because it was genuinely thought to be difficult to prove.
From a marketing perspective, however, technology has made marketing intelligence much more sophisticated and the ability of marketing teams to connect spend to results is much clearer. This makes for more effective marketing campaigns but since we still frequently asked during pitches how we demonstrate an ROI the PR, our activity is still not widely recognised (Roland Cross: Proving the Value of PR to clients) as being measurable.
The Barcelona Principles that Roland referred to are part of the story but as he states, the most straightforward way to demonstrate ROI is by connecting the results of the campaign to the business objectives of the client. To do this it’s important to take the time when a client relationship starts to interrogate senior management to allow us to articulate how PR can aid their business ambitions and also be measured.
Only by understanding what a client wants the business to get out of PR can we, as agency, use our professional expertise to create KPIs that are meaningful to a client in terms of their expectations. This works from both agency and client perspective since it forms the basis for ongoing evaluation of a PR campaign and the basis for a long-term working relationship.
The KPIs we use are diverse across our range of clients, which is refreshing since they are designed to fit each individual business. For example, we measure web-traffic, clippings in very specific titles, increases in assets under management, reducing media coverage to a minimum and the number of broadcast appearances.
Crucially, we also measure changes in perception; in our opinion the key metric to demonstrate change. Perception of a business and its operations provides the key to understanding how PR can help its objectives because PR can help overcome objections and make distribution of product easier. What a company thinks it is, might not necessarily be what its customers or clients think. Understanding this, gives us the knowledge to create a PR campaign that is designed to create change in specific areas and therefore its results are connected to the ambitions of the client.
So, in the first week of 2012 that’s what I’m looking forward to achieving with our clients and, actually, why it’s not so bad to be back at work after all.
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