Posts Tagged ‘Evaluation’
On Evaluation
Proving the ROI of PR activity and comparing it with other marketing disciplines has always been a tricky business, and something of a holy grail for the industry. Of course, in some ways this is impossible and misses the point of what a good PR campaign ought to be about (building trust, gaining credible endorsement, interacting with audiences, delivering messages consistently). That’s all very well, but pretty much all clients need to be able to translate their PR activity into some hard facts and figures to put in front of the marketing director and to justify the investment. The COI are, understandably, especially keen to evaluate and measure their PR campaigns in relation to advertising, DM etc… It’s also something that we as an agency need to be able to do, to allow us to understand whether what we are delivering is a) good value and b) achieving something for the client.
We recently developed our own evaluation system called Sherlock which, among other things, calculates the “cost per thousand” figure for all of our campaigns (we reached 1,000 people for every it £x invested). Almost all of our campaigns are coming out at a CPT of less than £1 and in some cases much less than that. It struck me that this is an incredible figure (even allowing for the occasional over-estimate of some media reach figures when accurate ones aren’t available) and really does emphasise the value that PR can deliver. Of course, sometimes the coverage will be subtle and lacking the immediate impact of a full colour DPS ad, but we all know how influential the right editorial coverage can be, and how often advertising is simply ignored.
