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Everything You Needto Prove PR ROI:Data-Driven KPIs, Tools, and Reporting Frameworks

Table of Contents

The Rise of Data-Driven PR 3The KPIs That Matter 3The Right Tools for the Job 4Shared Communications and Marketing Goals 5Assigning Values to Your KPIs 5

KPIs & Tools for Communication & Marketing Teams 6Public Relations 6Social Media 9Content Marketing 11Customer Marketing 13

Reporting Results 15Reporting Frameworks: Monthly, Quarterly, Annual, and Ad Hoc 16Sample Metrics 18

Bringing Data-Driven Communications to Life 19

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The Rise of Data-Driven PRPicture a world where everyone on your team has the information they need to be successful. Everyone has clear goals—and set timeframes for achieving them. They all track key performance indicators (KPIs) to quantify, measure, and optimize their programs. Everyone knows exactly where their projects stand.

This world is no longer a fantasy. But taking advantage of this brave new data-fueled world requires identifying the right KPIs, using tools that measure your performance, then presenting results in clear, convincing reports.

Our primary focus is PR and social media, but we also touch on content marketing and customer marketing, since the goals and actions of these teams typically overlap. While some of us neatly fall into one of these communications functions, others wear multiple hats. Reviewing the goals and KPIs associated with PR, social media, content marketing, and customer marketing will help all of us understand how our roles are interconnected in driving PR success.

Having goals keeps our programs moving forward. Identifying and tracking KPIs that correspond to these larger goals is a way to quantify what up until now has been unquantifiable. When you (and your boss) are wondering if you’re doing a good job, KPIs are there to provide clear answers and nudge you to even greater heights.

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Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) That Matter and Tools to Track ThemIt can seem overwhelming to identify the right KPIs, gather the data you need to track them, and show how your PR activities are contributing toward the company’s goals. Start by looking at your business goals, and breaking down what you need to do to get there. As you progress and compare results over time, you’ll gain significant insights into what’s working and what needs to be refined.

For a simplified example, let’s look at building awareness for your brand through thought leadership. You’ve identified key themes to emphasize in your outreach. Your goal is to increase media coverage associating your brand to these topics. If you know from experience that it typically takes three interactions with a reporter before you get a reply to your pitch, and you typically need to reach out to 10 reporters to get a month’s worth of coverage, your monthly outreach quota would be 30 outreach attempts. If your hit rate gets better over time, and your goals stay the same, you’ll be able to lower your monthly outreach quota, and dedicate your time and resources toward other KPIs.

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In addition to internal KPIs, which measure how you are performing against yourself over time, you’ll also want to benchmark your results against those of competitors and aspirational brands. This is important as it gives you an accurate picture of the possible results a company in your industry can attain.

The Right Tools for the Job KPIs are worthless if you don't have the right tools for tracking progress. The combination of tools that your communications and marketing team uses is known as your “marketing technology stack,” and choosing the right ones involves making big decisions. There are far too many companies to mention them all here. We’ve highlighted key tools every data-driven PR and social team should invest in. We’ve also included an overview of what your key collaborators in content marketing and customer marketing are doing to track success and the tools they use.

One universally necessary technology tool is the CRM. This cross-departmental, team-agnostic customer relationship management (CRM) platform is the heartbeat of your company. All customer data lives here. Many PR pros don’t currently interact much with their CRM system, but as you build new ways to track the impact of PR and social on customer behavior, you’ll want to get yourself familiar with how the CRM works. We’ll get you going in the right direction below.

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Shared Communications and Marketing GoalsThe communications and marketing teams will likely have several shared goals, such as:

• Increasing website traffic

• Growing brand awareness and engagement

• Generating, nurturing, and qualifying leads

• Driving marketing-sourced or influenced revenue

• Reducing sales cycles and increasing deal sizes

• Retaining clients and building strong brand advocates

These are all things PR and social can influence and measure. Yes, PR and social have its own distinct goals, but it’s important to understand the big picture.

When you understand what's important to your colleagues, you can better support them, speak the same language, and align your KPIs accordingly. For instance, PR might traditionally focus on media coverage and the number of brand mentions. But the modern PR pro understands the importance of measuring how coverage has both indirect and direct implications on leads, including generating web referrals and increasing domain authority. When the PR team demonstrates they are supporting business goals in this way, it helps move PR from being a “nice to have” to a driver of business growth.

Assigning Values to Your KPIsAs you start measuring performance, you’ll want to determine aninitial baseline number as the starting point for tracking each KPI. This baseline represents the results you expect given normal operation. Instead of looking exclusively to industry standards, compare your latest monthly, quarterly, and annual results to your results from a similar time period. Choose whatever intervals make most sense to your organization. As your results improve, you'll want to push yourself by increasing your baseline.

Here we benchmark volume of coverage, comparing January of this year to the same period a year ago. The gold line, representing this year, shows that we were able to start the year off with more momentum and build on it.

TIP New KPIs are being developed and implemented all the time. Keep up with the latest trends by subscribing to a few marketing blogs, like Hubspot, Marketo, and Meltwater.

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KPIs and Tools for PR and Social Media TeamsAlthough social and PR teams each have their own metrics, many of their goals center around eyeballs and engagement.

• The PR team will measure reach, share of voice, and backlinks to your website.

• The social media team is tacking community engagement in a variety of ways, focusing on how this engagement translates to awareness, positive perception, and specific actions, such as website visits.

Public Relations KPIsHere are some KPIs you’ll want to consider tracking. Always begin with the items that drive greatest business impact. Don't forget to measure your performance against your competitors by benchmarking yourself against them.

Active coverage: Coverage secured by the PR team. You may want to create a subset of this KPI specifically focused on top-tier publications for your industry and audience.

Potential reach: Sum of viewership for publications and websites in which yourcoverage is featured.

Share of voice: Percentage of coverage—for your brand, products, or high-profile executive(s)—compared to competitors. Include several competitors to gauge your place within the industry at large, or benchmark one at a time and drill down into the corresponding media coverage to uncover key differentiators.

It's important to note that share of voice can be tracked by volume or reach. For instance, your competitor may have a higher volume in terms of mentions, but you might be in higher-reach publications.

Social engagement: How many shares and comments the coverage you generate receives.

Sentiment: Tone of the articles mentioning your brand or competitors. This metric lets you see if your brand is creating positive or negative associations.

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Media outreach: The number of press releases and pitches you are sending out and how they are performing. Along with the amount of coverage they generate, you can also measure your progress in building relationships with journalists (a good distribution tool provides metrics on open rates and even internal links clicked).

Quality of coverage: The placement of your brand mention (headline, body) and its prominence in the article’s content.

Geographical presence: Volume of coverage based on location. Assess your success at targeting key geographical demographics.

Key message penetration: Break your coverage down by key themes and measure how strongly you are associated with each one. You can also measure which ones your competitors are associated with and compare your results.

Overall media presence: Combine share of voice and sentiment to get a snapshot of your competitive landscape.

Earned traffic: The number of visitors that were driven to your website as a result of your earned coverage and link placement.

Domain authority: A metric created by SEO software company Moz to predict how well a website will rank on search engines, using a logarithmic, 100-point scale. By securing link placement on third-party sites, PR can have a big impact on your site’s domain authority and SEO. To learn more, watch our webinar on PR’s SEO superpowers.

Event promotion: PR's success in driving event attendance, garnering media coverage of events, and building relationships with speakers and attendees.

Crisis communication: When trouble hits, you’ll want to measure how quickly PR gets things back to normal. Throughout the crisis, benchmark volume and sentiment to baseline levels from before the crisis started.

In order to measure these KPIs, you’ll want to use the following tools for tracking and visualizing your data:

Media intelligence platforms. Comprehensive platforms like Meltwater’s allow you to track PR metrics in one place, and provide automated reporting capabilities.

Robust outreach and distribution tools. A full-featured media contacts database enables you to identify journalists, distribute pitches, personalize them, and measure pick-up.

Social echo. Meltwater Impact lets you paste in the URL of a press release or article to measure its reach and impact on social media.

Meltwater analytics dashboards enable you to easily keep track of your KPIs.

Meltwater Impact lets you measure the suc-cess of individual press releases and articles.

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Social Media KPIsAlthough the PR team is measuring social engagement on coverage, the social media team has a unique set of KPIs to monitor, aligned to their own business contributions and achievements.

Community size: The number of followers, by channel and overall. Rather than focusing on the size of your community, keep in mind that bigger isn’t always better as vanity metrics, such as followers, are easily inflated. In fact, sometimes a small niche community is more valuable than a large, but less relevant one. You may simply want to show that

community growth is trending in the right direction over time.

Engagement: Shares, comments, likes, retweets, replies, direct messages, etc. You may also want to call out the engagements you have with current customers and the response time for these high-value, time-sensitive interactions.

Engagement rate: Number of people who actively engaged with your posts (RTs, likes, etc.) divided by your total number of followers per channel.

Average engagement per post: The average number of times a typical post was shared, liked, and commented on.

Mentions and social reach: Number of times your company was mentioned by name on a social network and the aggregate reach of those mentions.

Sentiment: Tone of the social media posts mentioning your brand or competitors. This metric lets you see if your brand is creating positive or negative associations and how that compares to the competition.

Influencer engagement: The number of posts that influencers engage with and the subsequent spike in reach that these posts attain. You can also include brand mentions by influencers that result from social relationship-building.

Niche community outreach: Your community is out there, but you might not be crossing paths on your brand channels. Measure your efforts to track them down and engage with them in niche social communities, including LinkedIn Groups, Slack communities, Twitter chats, etc.

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Content optimization: Social platforms make it easy to determine what kinds of content and interactions your audience is most receptive to. Even if your experiments don’t all work out, find new ways to engage and measure results (for example, sponsored posts, polls, and contests).

Brand ambassador activity: The average number of social shares generated from your employee (or customer) advocates.

Lead generation: Track which links embedded in your posts are most clicked, especially those that result in new contacts, lead-qualifying activities, or hand-raiser actions.

Crisis management: Monitor hot-button keywords that signal crisis. As trouble hit and they start to spike, measure your ability to change the conversation by tracking the frequency and sentiment of these keywords as compared to the messages you are actively promoting.

Listening for LeadsTo contribute to your lead gener-ation KPI, you’ll want to listen for leads by looking at keywords that indicate interest in your products or services. Engage with these potential prospects, and when appropriate, pass on their infor-mation to your sales team.

Meltwater Engage allows you to schedule and publish posts all from one place. It also includes built-in reporting for your brand channels.

Meltwater media intelligence dashboards allow you to monitor your brand on your own channels and on social media at large. It also creates standardized reporting and visualizations.

Social media channels have greatly improved their reporting over time. However, consolidating that data into a presentable format often still involves spreadsheets. Here are two tools that can save a significant amount of time and allow for more frequent evaluation and fine-tuning:

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Cost per Engagement and the Increase in Pay-to-Play Social

As social-platform algorithms change over time, brands wanting to ensure wide distribution have been forced to incorporate social advertising into their social media mix. While wider distribution and increased impressions may be the short-term goal, it’s important to measure more than just vanity metrics. Track your post engagement rates, and the cost per engagement over time to optimize your campaigns.

UTM parameters and link shorteners enable you to accurately measure all the moving parts of your social campaign. This will allow you to generate better reporting from your analytics tools. Without taking this step, you may not be able to accurately track the contribution of individual posts and links.

If you’re just getting started with paid social, it’s important to start small. Think of social as your real-time focus group and to fine tune your approach as you go. Only by testing and learning will you be able to document what works for your audience. Without taking a test-and-learn approach, you may be throw-ing precious budget away, and make it difficult to justify your social budget next time around.

Now that we’ve given you a comprehensive overview of the must-have PR and social media KPIs, let’s do a quick survey of the metrics that closely allied teams are measured on, starting with content marketing. Although you are not directly responsible for these KPIs, it’s important to understand how other people responsible for brand building and messaging are being measured, to better incentivize cross-collaboration.

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KPIs and Tools for the Content Marketing TeamYour content marketing team’s goal is to increase and build loyalty, brand awareness, and drive engagement through thought leadership, and when appropriate, direct tie-ins to your company’s products and services. This team includes or works with colleagues responsible for search engine optimization (SEO), conversion rate optimization, and business growth. They often collaborate with the same customers and influencers as the PR and social teams, and create content that you may want to use in your media outreach.

Your content marketers will want to track the following content effectiveness KPIs:

Content readership and engagement: The number of people reading and responding to your blog, ebooks, and other content. This activity is measured by number of unique

blog readers, content downloads, and the amount of time spent on the page.

Content amplification: How often your content is being shared by your audience. Track the number of social shares for each piece of content plus backlinks. Separate organic amplification from

paid social when possible.

Leads generated via content: When your content inspires unknown readers to provide their contact information, you're helping to create a lead. Track the number of leads gener-ated through hand-raiser actions taken on your blog (e.g. request a demo) or having qualified through repeated interactions with your gated and ungated content. Also track where these people came from—organic search, paid search,

social, backlinks, etc. If possible, take this metric a step farther by looking at the revenue generated by these leads.

SEO: How is your content impacting the website? Track the amount of traffic from organic search, domain authority (a metric created by SEO software company Moz to predict how well a website will rank on search engines), rank increase of target keywords, and conversions from organic search.

What Is A/B Testing and Why Should PR Care?

When your content team engages in A/B testing, visitors to your website will be randomly shown one of two (or more) variations of a page, and conversion stats are recorded for each variant to determine which one works best. As a PR professional, you are in a position to notice how topics of discussion shift in your indus-try and, therefore, suggest A/B testing specifically around key messages. Collaborate with the team conducting A/B testing on the website to help them improve their outcomes.

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Content is integral to every aspect of communications and marketing. The following tools are ones that content teams use, and you may want to access important information from them as well:

Social sharing analytics platforms. Tools like Buzzsumo or Lately allow content marketersto see social shares by channel for each blog post or other piece of content on your website.

Google Analytics(GA). Your GA dashboard can track all of the blog and website-related KPIs you measure, including conversions.

Lead collection landing pages. Requiring interested readers to fill out a form in order to access premium content, such as white papers and webinars, is simplified using marketing automation tools, such as Marketo or Eloqua.

Marketing automation platforms. Marketing automation platforms such as Hubspot and Marketo allow the content team to develop a multi-touch attribution model that shows each content piece’s affect on your funnel.

Content marketing platforms. Major players in this space include Newscred, Contently, and Kapost. In addition to measuring content influence on the sales funnel, these tools can help with content curation, workflow, and guest posting. They make it easy to identify the kind of content your visitors prefer and how they like to consume it.

KPIs and Tools for the Customer Marketing TeamYour customer marketing team is focused on amplifying positive customer feedback. This team uncovers compelling stories and solid proof from happy customers, and elevates them. They also identify loyal customers who are likely to become brand advocates and nurture these relationships alongside your social media team.

The voice of the customer is also an essential part of your PR pro-gram. Customer marketing is who you collaborate with to acquire the case studies and customer quotes you use in your media rela-tions efforts. As there is increasing crossover between customers and influencers, PR and social will need to build a strong relationship with this team.

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At a minimum, your customer marketing team will track these KPIs:

Net promoter score (NPS): A metric built from survey responses, where a ten-point scale is used to determine the likelihood of a customer referring business to you:

0–6 = Detractor 7–8 = Neutral

9–10 = Promoter Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to arrive at the net promoter score.

Customer retention and lifetime value: It’s significantly more expensive and time-consuming to gain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. Keep an eye on the number of customers expanding their product use, buying additional products, and the number of customers who leave.

Referrals and brand advocacy: Your best leads often come from happy customers who put in a good word and do the selling for you—whether directly through a referral or indirectly through reviews and testimonials. Measure the leads generated by referrals, deals influenced by testimonials, and the number of newly identified and activated brand advocates.

Understanding how to interact with customers helps inform everyone in communications and marketing. Here are the tools the customer marketing team can use to cultivate productive relationships with them:

Brand advocacy software. Tools like Influitive and Zuberance enable your customer marketing team to discover and nurture customer advocates and mobilize them to pro vide testimonials, reviews, and product feedback. These tools also help you discover the profile of “superfans” so you can create more of them by repeating your most successful nurturing processes again and again.

Referral platforms. If harnessing happy customer to generate new business is a goal, customer marketing may want to consider a referral platform such Ambassador or Extole. They provide an easy way to solicit, track, and reward customers who help bring in new prospects.

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Reporting ResultsAll the software in the world won’t help if you can’t extract the data, interpret it, and present it in convincing reports. Your marketing and communications department may have a data geek to manage the process. But with the right tools, PR and social media professionals can learn not only to determine what needs to be measured, but create professional reports that best show off business value.

Tools like Meltwater’s media intelligence platform include dashboards with data visualizations (such as graphs, heat maps, and word clouds) that you can easily export and include in your reporting. Armed with this data, you’re ready to tell a data-driven story that illustrates your perfor-mance on a monthly, quarterly, annual, and ad hoc basis to prove the communication team’s business contributions.

Working with ConsultantsBefore diving into what your reports should include, you may want to con-sider making a case for outside help. Whether you’re reading this ebook to take your reporting to the next level, or just getting started with data-driven PR, a consultant who specializes in measurement and reporting can help ensure you’re extracting the most relevant information and presenting it in a way that will clearly:

√ Align to business goals

√ Account for the full ROI of your PR and social activity

√ Help you make a strong case to increase your budget

Meltwater’s industry-specific con-sultants help ensure clients are delivering boardroom-ready reports on a timely basis. Let’s face it, while keeping track of the data is invalu-able for setting strategy and guiding day-to-day activity, carving out time for gathering and presenting it can be a challenge. Consultants can also develop more advanced com-petitive metrics, specific to various industries and business types.

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Reporting Frameworks: Monthly, Quarterly, Annual, and Ad HocA comprehensive, insightful report is critical for making better, data-driven decisions. Don’t wait until the end of the year, when every department is asked to account for itself, to start measuring your KPIs. We’ve outlined how to best present your results at timely intervals. You’ll also find guidance on ad- hoc campaign reports as well as crisis reports, when the stakes are high and everyone’s paying attention to your every move.

Monthly Reports

AudienceYour manager (and potentially their manager too)

OverviewDetermine whether you’re on the right track with numbers that are (hopefully) trending upward. If a program is surpassing expectations, this is your chance to shuffle resources and do more of what’s working. If results are less than stellar, you can make adjustments or make a case for turning a pro-gram off and trying something else (or at least keep a careful eye on it while you formulate plan B).

Quarterly Reports

AudienceSenior Director and/or VP of Communications, CMO (and potentially CEO)

OverviewThink of monthly reports as test scores, and quarterly ones as your report card. Here you’re not just tracking trends, but presenting and defending results. Do your KPIs demonstrate business value? An effective report will be able to account for every dollar spent and how that expenditure contributed to business goals. Certain programs will enable you to clearly tie dollars spent to revenue. For example, placing links that lead to landing pages that lead to sales. Others won’t, but you’ll still want explain the business benefits of your results.

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Annual Reports

AudienceCMO, CEO, Board, Investors

OverviewAt the end of every fiscal year, the executive team makes decisions about next year’s budget. Your report will inform their longer-term strategy. This is your opportunity to make a case for additional tools, resources, and program spend. Or at least, set very clear expectations on what your efforts can yield given available funds. Don't leave any doubt as to the benefits this budget will yield.

Campaign Reports

AudienceSame as monthly or quarterly reports, depending on campaign size.

OverviewCampaigns should kick off with a very specific goal, for example, launching a new product, entering a new market, or getting the word out on a specific promotion, event, or theme. Your report then tracks your success in achieving relevant outcomes.

Crisis Reports

AudienceDepending on the crisis and its trajectory, this could range from your manager to the very top.

OverviewA crisis can break a brand. It can also be an opportunity to prove your commitment to customers and community. Most importantly, you’ll want to show how PR and social helped quell the controversy, turned the conversation around, and got back to typical levels of volume and sentiment. While benchmarking will help guide you every step of the way, you’ll want to be sure to report on what’s going on at any moment. Automatically updated, real-time dashboards are critical.

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Whether you're creating a monthly, quarterly, or annual report, you'll want to include a clear summary of activity that indicates how your programs are trending. Here we see detailed brand and coverage summaries.

Benchmarking, especially important for quarterly and annual reporting, allows you to compare yourself to the competition as well as your own performance in previous periods. In the charts above, share of voice is benchmarked both by reach and volume.

An annual report is where you want to highlight your position within the industry (for instance by message penetration) and sythesize multiple factors (for instance, volume and sentiment) to illustrate your overall media presence.

Sample Metrics

Summaries

Benchmarks

Competitive Intelligence

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Bringing Data-Driven Communications to LifeNo one ever said it would be easy. Instilling a data-driven philosophy involves a tectonic culture shift for most communications departments. But it’s not impossible, especially if you start with business goals, create a strategy for delivering measurable value, track your success, and get to know what team members in content marketing and customer marketing are doing in tandem to your efforts. If you follow the path we’ve led you down, you’ll eventually get team members on board, tools in place, and executive buy-in. While you now have an in-depth understanding of what’s needed, that will only take you so far. But with the right mindset and some hard work, you’ll be able to support your initia-tives with rock-solid numbers that prove ROI—and the indispensable role of PR and social media in your company’s success.

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To learn more about data-driven marketing and how media intelligence can shape and measure your programs, take a look at additional resources:

Meltwater Insights