Any seasoned PR professional in Malaysia will tell you that your efforts are only as good as the results they yield. Every single day, you strive to craft compelling stories, engage with your stakeholders, and shape narratives around your brand. But how do you know if your strategies are working? That’s where metrics come into play.
Picture yourself sitting in front of a computer screen, analysing data and unravelling insights into understanding the impact of your PR campaigns. Each metric you measure is like a puzzle piece, revealing a bigger picture of your life’s work. While there’s no yardstick on which you can lay your success, there are ways which have been developed throughout the years by PR practitioners to provide greater clarity for their work.
In this article, we take a look at some of the tools used by PR practitioners to measure their success and explore how they can help you assess the reach, engagement, and overall performance of your PR initiatives.
What Is Public Relation
Public Relations is the practice of managing the organisation’s public image and reputation. For laymen, the line is often blurred with marketing practices as some of its key targets are intertwined with marketing initiatives. However, in practice, you’ll realise that there are stark differences in the delivery of messages to the public.
For one, marketing involves paid media, aiming to drive sales and to ensure that the ROI for your marketing initiatives far outweighs the advertising costs, and in Public Relations, companies aim to drive reputational goals mostly through unpaid media, creating a favourable perception towards the organisation and its brands through organic means.
At its core, Public Relations in Malaysia is usually centred around the act of influencing key stakeholders to frame public perception towards the organisation through various methods. This includes the act of anticipating and interpreting public opinion towards your organisation which might have an impact on your organisation. In short, it’s about managing limited resources to achieve maximum impact with your stakeholders and acquiring much-needed data to be constantly informed on public sentiments.
KPIs And Metrics In Public Relations
What are Public Relations KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and metrics? The age-old practice of Public Relations didn’t come without doubts from the people around PR practitioners. In fact, for many years, most PR practitioners were unable to translate their efforts into quantifiable data to justify the need for Public Relations in Malaysia.
That is until when the results speak for themselves. Take the political landscape in Malaysia for example. In the year 2018, the paradigm shift within our political arena would not have been possible without a public relations team behind it. This did not happen overnight, instead, it took years of constant engagement with stakeholders to alter public perception.
In fact, public relations has more often than not altered the course of history. Internationally, the Vietnam War from 1955 to 1975 would not have ended without strong public opposition which led to the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. It even gave rise to an unintended effect by empowering the hippie movement, a popular pro-peace counterculture which thrived on anti-establishmentarianism values.
With that being said, we bring ourselves back to the main point of this article. In short, KPIs are the performance of a predetermined organisational goal, and metrics refer to the measurement of the effectiveness of a particular PR campaign. The distinct differences may not be apparent to the untrained eye, but they are nevertheless essential as accurate measurements of a company’s PR activities can both determine their worth and create more effective plans down the line.
Standard Public Relations KPIs In Malaysia
We’ve compiled a list of items you should keep track of for an effective communication strategy from a Malaysian’s perspective, so you won’t have to. As a PR practitioner, these items should always be available at your fingertips, and results should be measured based on these criteria:
- Active Coverage
- Passive Coverage
- Media Mentions
- Social Engagements
- External Sentiments
- Internal Sentiments
- Media Relations
- Quality of Coverage
- Key Messages
- Geographical Presence
- Earned Traffic
- SEO/ SEM/ Domain Authority
- Events
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Crisis Communications
Active Coverage
Active coverage is as its name suggests, active coverage is obtained through the proactive efforts of a PR team to generate media coverage through press releases, media pitches, or sponsored articles. A PR team would generally want to aim for more active coverage for new product/ service/ project launches, CSR initiatives, and sometimes a change in management.
As part of a corporate communications team, measuring active coverage should already be embedded in your daily activities. Most corporate communication departments in Malaysia employ the services of media monitoring agencies like iSentia, with some corporations falling back on more traditional methods like reading newspapers.
Media monitoring agencies typically capture keywords within articles which may have mentioned your company to ensure that you’re not caught off guard by any negative media sentiments in the market.
Passive Coverage
Passive coverage refers to coverage obtained from the media without actively seeking it out. Passive coverage usually happens when brands make a major announcement or there’s a major shift within the organisation. In some cases, passive coverage is obtained when there’s a crisis besieging your company because bad news equals more readership.
While the saying “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” holds true to some extent, you should still respond to any crisis while adhering to your crisis communication handbook or your share prices will begin taking a nosedive. Measuring passive coverage is basically done the same way as active coverage, i.e., by employing the services of media monitoring agencies.
Media Mentions
Media mentions are the number and quality of mentions that a company receives in the media. This covers both traditional and online sources and is usually monitored by companies via media monitoring agencies to be used as an indicator of your company’s visibility and influence. Statistics compiled through media mentions are usually utilised to measure market sentiments, allowing you to respond accordingly.
Social Engagements
Social engagements refer to the level of engagement a company receives on social media platforms. Some common units of measurement for social media include engagement rates, follower increase rates, click-throughs, mentions, impressions, etc. This can be a useful indicator of your brand’s performance in the social media space while keeping you aware of what members of the public are saying about you on social media.
External Sentiments
External sentiments refer to the overall sentiments of external stakeholders towards your brand. Depending on the nature of your business, your stakeholders may be customers, investors, businesses, the government, or the general public. Accurate representation of external sentiments can help you plan out your media strategy and include them in your future media plans.
Internal Sentiments
While there is a clear distinction between external and internal sentiments in the public relations industry, completely favouring one over the other is creating a false dichotomy in the narrative surrounding your brand. Internal sentiments are the perception of your internal stakeholders towards your company. They include employees, investors, and board/ IP members.
Internal sentiments take precedence in all your communication initiatives because internal information has the potential to become external information and vice versa. You will want your employees to hear first-hand information from within the company rather than from external sources. Monitoring internal sentiments usually involves filling out anonymous survey forms or collaborating with the human resources department.
Media Relations
It goes without saying that public relations go hand in hand with having a close relationship with the media. Strong media relations can be a key factor in generating positive media coverage to promote your organisation’s key messages. This should be a top priority in a list of KPIs for any PR teams, and keeping track of all media relation activities will ensure that journalists and editors are right at your fingertips.
KPIs for media relations are usually measured by the number of touchpoints with members of the media. E.g., media luncheons, outreach programmes, quality of coverage etc.
Quality Of Coverage
The quality of coverage refers to the placement of your brand in an article. This usually points to the prominence of your story in delivering your key messages. Was your brand mentioned? Was it a positive or negative message? Did the headline mention your brand? Any prominent visual? All these are determining factors in the quality of your story.
Key Messages
Key messages are the what, why, when, where, who and how of your media pitches and serve to communicate your messages to the general public. Measuring this ensures that your messages were communicated in the coverage, carry the right tone and connotations, and produce the correct sentiments.
You would generally want to measure these in at least 3 coverages for a more accurate representation of your key messages. Also, remember to chart out all coverages annually to measure the average rate where key messages have been mentioned in publications.
Geographical Presence
Most PR teams around the world have been localised to cater to their respective market’s language and culture, but if your business crosses international borders, you may want to target your pitch to foreign media, especially if you’re an MNC. As this is not a common practice for in-house PR teams and agencies in Malaysia, you may want to consider venturing into foreign markets to give you a competitive edge over your competitors.
Geographical presence also covers localised state-based publications like the New Sarawak Tribune, Buletin Mutiara, and Daily Express. These news portals usually offer localised content with increased relevance to their respective states. Measurement of geographical presence generally includes data like demographics, readership, online analytics data, relevance, and the states or countries which have covered stories from your company.
Earned Traffic
Earned traffic is web content produced by outside sources about your company. They’re shared by people who found your site or product via word of mouth where the most common media for dissemination are through social media. Other methods of dissemination which are considered earned traffic include forwarded newsletters, referral programmes, and organic inbound links you didn’t pay for.
This is extremely valuable as they provide an impartial perspective on your brand by external stakeholders. To measure this, analytics data for your website or social media pages will usually provide insights into the number of visitors to your sites and their general geographical location.
SEO/ SEM/ Domain Authority
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is typically a marketing practice. Used interchangeably with the term SEM (Search Engine Marketing), it is the practice of optimising a website’s content to increase traffic by utilising specific keywords related to your messages.
While not exactly applicable to all Malaysian companies, utilising SEO can potentially connect you with a niched audience. It’s a common practice for companies in Malaysia to upload their Press Releases online, which may help a bit with your site’s ranking. Again, through the use of analytics data, you can measure the impact of your press releases through the number of visitors to your website.
Events
Measuring the effectiveness of your events is a complicated process. At best, you have a limited number of tools at your disposal to measure your campaigns. Unlike tradeshow organisers, exhibitors run on a whole complete set of KPIs and are confined to their booths, reliant on the organiser’s data sets to justify their participation in that event.
Because of this, Malaysian companies who participated in these tradeshows devised their own strategies to provide some semblance of data to measure the effectiveness of their events instead of being solely dependent on their organisers. E.g., name card collections, visitor forms, QR codes etc. Basically, anything that would get your visitors to leave their information behind before moving on to other booths.
The data sets collected can improve upon:
- Providing adequate justification for your company’s participation in that event
- Providing new leads for your company’s business development team
- Providing insights for any areas of improvement for future events
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been a mainstay of PR practitioners’ repertoire since the inception of the industry. In fact, the first recorded CSR initiative can be traced back to the mid to late 1800s. Their popularity has been increasing throughout the years with the advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media because public coverage of your company’s initiatives has become a much more attainable goal.
Supporting causes can do wonders for a company’s reputation, but only if they’re practised in tandem with other PR strategies as an effective means to gain coverage. E.g., sponsoring a student and covering his/ her progress throughout the years will result in greater PR value as opposed to a one-off contribution.
In Malaysia, the types of causes supported by businesses also differ depending on the size of that company. Metrics concerning smaller companies seem to skew towards the number of initiatives they took part in as opposed to macro initiatives conducted by larger companies.
Examples of metrics for micro initiatives include the number of orphanages supported for the year, or KGs of groceries distributed whereas, for macro initiatives, they’re usually measured in terms of metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MTCO2e) emissions avoided, or by trading carbon credits.
Conclusion
In the ever-changing landscape of the corporate communications field, PR metrics serve as a compass which provides you with valuable insights into the impact and effectiveness of your initiatives, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to demonstrate the value of your work.
Beyond the numbers, PR metrics reveal trends, patterns, and emerging opportunities, empowering you to stay ahead of the curve. By embracing a data-driven approach in your corporate communication practices, you’re able to eliminate redundant initiatives and prevent wasting precious time and money, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately achieve more impactful results.