How to prove Public Relations value?

Excellent public relations should help an organization cope with the uncertainties. This can be achieved only with data and useful information.

 In our data-driven world, it’s a challenge to show dollar-for-dollar the value of PR as it is less tangible than other services. To prove a campaign’s ROI, PR professionals need to report on meaningful metrics that relate directly to business goals and objectives.

Despite the potential of public relations for marketing, reputation, investor relations or recruitment, many managers neglect their value, as it is an activity that remains tied to their own metrics, often with no connection from the reality in which we live.

Nevertheless, PR is more important now than ever - the need for greater transparency and disclosure presents an opportunity for a company when it comes to ensuring that the audience understands its intentions in a way that positively enhances the company’s reputation.

If agencies, media centers, media and other advertising media vendors cleverly knew how to create a powerful sales model, supported by metrics focused on business objectives, public relations professionals never knew how to truly defend their activity and allowed themselves to be vulgarized by using unobjective metrics in evaluating their results.

Thus, the large share of the investment of the brands was absorbed by the most varied forms of advertising and public relations were being relegated to the background, the poor relative the marketing mix.

That happened because the inherent value of public relations is less palpable than advertising and a lot more difficult to explain.

However, communications programs can be tied into business objectives such as making the public aware of products or services offered and by providing a context for news that alters the tone of discourse.

Failing to communicate by not having public relations programs in place has consequences of value as well.

All the studies done to the consumer in recent times, indicate that people increasingly trust advertising and, on the other hand, rely more and more on people who, not being representing the brand, talk about it – when someone with proven credibility as a journalist or blogger writes about a brand, manages to impact thousands of people, so it influences sales, causing them to increase or decrease.

Public relations metrics, such as "potential reach" and "impressions", do not define the actual audience reached by the message or demonstrate people's engagement with the brand.

Much less, the AVE – Advertising Equivalent Value, which many agencies and brands continue to use to evaluate their PR work and which evaluates the news as if they were advertising – which is on the one hand a nonsense because the value of a news can not be compared to advertising, on the other hand it is a lie, since the advertising tables have huge discounts. AVE is simply the calculation of what earned media coverage, or editorial coverage would have cost if it were advertising.

AMEC has launched a major global education initiative to help eradicate the declining demand for the much-derided AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent) metric. Here you can find the definitive list of 22 reasons why AVE’s shouldn’t be used.

The true value of public relations is based on the effectiveness of contacts with the audience, which in the absence of objective news analytics, have to be counted based on the analysis of the prominence factors of the news, its content, favorability and messages it transmits.

 Public relations metrics should, like all business metrics, focus on converting potential reach into real reach, in a funnel that will allow you to conduct impact assessment in order to drive sales.

Impact, real reach, engagement, favorability, messaging, reputation and sales are the new units of business communication, which lay the foundations for earned media to represent an investment compatible with its importance and place it as the top priority of the business communication strategy.

By pushing quality content out to the public, a company’s search engine optimization will increase, making it easier for prospective clients or partners to find you when searching the internet.  Therefore, PR creates awareness and credibility of that company which paves the way for a positive reception to sales messages - this becomes increasingly more important as a company continues to grow in size and scope.

So, effective PR is about keeping an eye on a brand’s reputation and image – therefore, focusing on relevant metrics and setting up a good measurement program is key. Measuring allows for analysis into the customer base and target markets, it can dissect what PR is working and, more important, what isn’t and shows to the customers that the company is making changes to benefit them.

Overall, to move from perceived to actual value, public relations have to show a direct correlation to corporate objectives, or at least a dotted line to corporate revenue. Simply defining and quantifying awareness is a move in the right direction. By providing market intelligence, not just results, the public relations professional can become a strategic source of information for the C-level to approach in order to make more informed business decisions.