Measuring the Effectiveness of B2B PR (Part One)

By Benjamin Gorelick on January 31, 2012 - 2:59pm

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time lately thinking about the practice of measurement and evaluation in public relations.

Most serious PR practitioners will agree: measuring the impact of media relations work has become an all but mandatory part of any campaign.

Particularly in the B2B world, the ability to describe, and where possible, quantify the effects of media outreach is increasingly seen as a make-or-break competency in clients’ eyes.

But while agreement on the importance of evaluating the impact of PR on business outcomes has reached a sort of critical mass (thinking of the Barcelona Principles and the Lisbon Consensus), agreement surrounding the ‘what and the how’ of measurement has been slower on the uptake.

Luckily for us in the industry, however, there is more research on these questions being published today than ever before.

Studies out of organizations like the Institute for Public Relations’ (IPR) Commission for PR Measurement & Evaluation, and the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) are providing rigorous, data-driven advice for how to approach the problem(s) of measurement.

Putting Measurement in Context

Here’s a useful oversimplification - historically, the practice of PR measurement has progressed through three major stages:

Early in the 20^th century, measuring and monitoring public opinion was seen as key to informing business decisions and engineering publicity in a still-emerging PR industry.
By the post-war boom era, measurement of the volume of media coverage became the norm, giving rise to such gems as the now defunct Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE).
Since the late 1980s, there has been slow-and-steady movement away from the bread-and-butter metrics of the ‘volume’ era (AVE, clip counting, number of ‘impressions’, etc.) and towards objective-oriented measurement.

How to Think about Measurement

I'm sure everyone in PR is frustrated occasionally by overly skeptical attitudes from businesses on the “real value” of PR services.

But this skepticism is about more than the obvious difficulties in unpacking the *many* relationships of influence that drive businesses’ key performance indicators. There is convincing evidence that we have been measuring the wrong things.

In the B2B world, the challenge of connecting media outputs (news articles, features, opinion pieces, speeches etc.) with objective successes has led to insights on how to demonstrate that public relations can actually add value for businesses, even when that value is not easily quantifiable in dollar terms.

The key is to think backwards; the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is the client’s business outcome, whatever it may be (increased sales, more contract awards, etc).

Such outcomes are a result of the actions taken by the players in the client’s marketplace. And these actions are driven in large part by the players’ beliefs and intentions, which themselves are subject to the influence of the messages and information they consume.

This way of visualizing the process (which hearkens back to our industry’s early obsession with public opinion) gives us three basic concepts to work with: outcomes are driven by outtakes which are influenced by outputs.

A client’s desired outcome (say, winning more contracts from the government or increasing its market share) is more likely when the decision-makers in the market have the right outtakes. In other words, when the messages or calls to action they “take away” influence their beliefs, and their actions, in favor of the client’s product.

The idea, supported by IPR research, that the right outtakes can directly and positively influence business outcomes validates the emerging consensus on measurement and evaluation.

We shouldn’t be trying to measure and quantify the value of communications itself with metrics like clip counts, AVE and ‘simple’ content analysis, because doing so implies that communications is the goal, when in fact, outtakes are the goal. And they have to be; any PR firm’s goals must be married to the goals of the client.

In the next part of this blog, I will talk about some practical ways that PR firms, even small ones, can use these insights to design campaigns that are more easily measurable, and actually deliver insights that are useful to both agency and client.

Ben is an Account Executive at Spector & Associates. A graduate of Brandeis University (with majors in economics and politics) and a native of Namibia, Ben has prior work experience in public policy and market research, including time spent working at the UK Department for International Development.He can be reached at ben@spectorpr.com

Measuring the Effectiveness of B2B PR (Part One)

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