January 16, 2020

Measuring Media Placements

By Lynsey Winters

The age-old public relations question: how do we measure the effectiveness of our media placements?

Often times, PR professionals strive to measure the value of their work using a fancy formula, counting impressions and tallying up top-tier wins, but one important factor is missing… When these media placements are hitting and PR is winning, is the client also winning?

At Olive, we measure our wins differently for each client.

When we kick off with a new campaign, we ask them a simple question: how will we know when it’s time to celebrate? Everyone has a different response and goal in mind that works for their company. The truth is, you cannot measure a media placement’s worth simply by looking at the numbers—you have to look at the result of the result. We use our clients’ answers to create an entire PR plan that is centered around what will lead to success for their business.

For some clients, a media placement is successful if it generates sales. For others, it’s a win if a top-tier publication positions them or their brand as a thought-leader in their industry.

That’s why a huge part of our philosophy is being transparent and having an open conversation with our clients about what’s working and what’s not working.  We may think that an online feature on a new product would lead to several sales, but that’s not always the case. That’s why we work with our clients to find out if they saw any additional traction come out of a new placement. If they did, great it’s time to celebrate! If they didn’t, we come up with a new strategy to test other types of placements through a different medium that could lead to an even larger win.

At the end of the day, when we measure the success of a media placement we don’t hide behind impressions or vanity metrics. We take a look to see how media results actually affect your bottom line. That is why we create a PR plan, goals and objectives for each and every one of our clients, so that we can tailor our success to match theirs.

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Interested in working with a team that wants to see you win? Send us an email at info@olivecreativestrategies.com!

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