Where to start with measuring impact?
Defining the goals of a communications strategy is the first step in deciding how to measure its success. Working with your PR agency, you need to define what success looks like, across social and traditional media. This can include general goals, like increased brand awareness, lead generation, and expert positioning, or more specific objectives like influencing a particular audience segment or driving support for an initiative. In all cases, these goals need to be aligned with and feed directly into your core business objectives. Once your goals are clear, then key metrics worth tracking, can be identified.
Focus on value over volume
Reach, impressions, media mentions – these provide a sense of volume, but not context. These metrics, while useful, don’t provide in-depth answers to essential questions like: What does this coverage say about us? Who is it reaching? And how does it support our wider goals? A thousand mentions mean little if they appear in outlets with little relevance to your target audience. Conversely, a single mention on a small LinkedIn account or trade blog may have more impact with key audiences than multiple mentions in mainstream media.
Which communications metrics matter?
While it’s difficult to define a set of metrics that apply across the board, since these need to be based on business or campaign objectives, here are some useful, modern metrics:
- Sentiment analysis: This classifies coverage or social engagement as positive, negative, or neutral. It helps answer the question: How are people talking about your brand? This is vital because reputation management is not only about visibility but perception. A spike in coverage may appear successful, until sentiment shows most mentions are negative.
- Audience profile and engagement: The most critical aspect of success for any PR campaign is reaching the right audience – securing brand mentions in highly relevant media or building a presence on the right social platforms, will drive greater impact than a broader mention with little audience alignment.
- Share of voice: Comparing mentions against competitors can show whether a brand is leading conversations or falling behind. However, it’s not about dominating every discussion (volume doesn’t equal value), but strategically ensuring that your brand’s voice is present in the areas that matter most.
- Key messaging pull-through: Measuring how often your key messages appear in coverage or across social content, gives your PR company insight into where narratives are landing and where they need to adjust outreach.
While these metrics don’t replace volume counts (it’s still important to know this information), they do provide much-needed insight about the true success of any communications strategy.
Ready to measure what really matters?
Be-cause is a South African PR, social content creation, and communications agency based in Cape Town – we work with innovators, disruptors, and changemakers across the healthcare, renewable energy, technology, education, development and property sectors. If you’re ready to work with a company that measures the metrics that matter, send us an email at connect@be-cause.co.za.
