How do you measure your PR campaign's impact on brand awareness?

1 Set your goals and objectives

Before you launch your PR campaign, you need to define what you want to achieve and how you will measure it. Your goals should be aligned with your overall business and marketing goals, and your objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, your goal could be to increase brand awareness among a certain segment of customers, and your objective could be to increase the number of mentions, impressions, and engagements by 20% in six months.

2 Choose your metrics and tools

Depending on your objectives, you will need to select the appropriate metrics and tools to track and analyze your PR campaign's impact on brand awareness. For example, you can use Google Alerts, Mention, or Meltwater to monitor your mentions in the media, social media, blogs, forums, etc., and compare them with your competitors. Additionally, tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or Twitter Analytics can measure the number of times your brand is exposed to your target audience. You can also use Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or BuzzSumo to measure your engagements and sentiment from your target audience. Lastly, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Qualtrics can be used to measure your brand awareness, recall, recognition, association, and preference through surveys, polls, quizzes, etc.

3 Benchmark and compare your results

To measure your PR campaign's impact on brand awareness, you need to have a baseline and a benchmark to compare your results with. A baseline is the current level of your brand awareness before you start your PR campaign, and a benchmark is the desired level of your brand awareness after you finish your PR campaign. You can use the same metrics and tools that you chose for your objectives to measure your baseline and benchmark, and compare them to see how much you have improved. You can also compare your results with your competitors or industry standards to see how you stand out.

4 Adjust and optimize your strategy

The final step in measuring your PR campaign's impact on brand awareness is to use the data and insights you gathered to adjust and optimize your strategy. You should review your goals and objectives, analyze your strengths and weaknesses, identify your opportunities and threats, and determine what worked and what didn't. Based on your findings, you should make changes to your PR campaign to improve your performance and achieve your desired outcomes. You should also keep track of your progress and report your results to your stakeholders.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?