The best-funded teams DON’T measure PR this way

This month I trained my Inner Circle on how the best-funded PR teams measure and report their media relations efforts.

Thanks to some very generous and very anonymous PR people, I had access to reports from:

• five organizations with more than $5 billion in annual revenue
• one of the 10 largest companies in the world, you interact with it every day
• two consumer brands with $200M+ annual revenue
• two privately held brands with estimated $200M+ annual revenue
• two nonprofits with $280M+ annual revenue

Do you know what NONE of these well-funded PR teams reported?

Not one report highlighted any metric that would not be intuitively understood by a non-communicator.

There were no proprietary media quality scores. No index of placements to sales. Not even domain authority of placement outlets.

I’m not necessarily saying this is a best practice, but it is telling.

My experience indicates that most PR people live in a constant state of FOMO that other PR teams have discovered a silver bullet for tying their results to their organization’s bottom line.

And what I’m telling you today is that’s not the case.

I’m sure there are exceptions (two people alluded to such but wouldn’t show me), but:

The best-funded PR teams only report metrics and impact over which they have direct influence.

These would be metrics that aren’t tangled up in other marketing activities, and don't depend on the ecommerce or sales teams, or anyone else. They focus on what they can control. I know our friends in the analytics world don’t want to settle for this, and I hope they don’t. They’ll figure it out someday and make it industry standard. But that day isn’t here yet.

I showed Inner Circle members how these teams design and format their reports. And most importantly, which metrics they DO include. I also updated them on the capabilities of common measurement platforms, plus a few software hacks that aren’t as well known.

You can access the entire training if you join the Inner Circle during our next enrollment period.

This is the last call for joining our Wait List and gaining access to the free Mini-Lessons I’ve designed for you to give you a taste of what the Inner Circle is about. The next Mini-Lesson is about measurement.