Your reputation is among your most valuable assets.
Significant work goes into building and managing reputations. It requires time and effort to preserve the positive attitudes your most important stakeholders hold for your organization. The value of this work and the results it generates cannot be understated. Effective media relations can shift perspectives, inspire positive feelings or compel action.
Yet results produced by media relations are tough to measure and we often see earned media support marketing goals. This is logical – a well-placed story can increase an organization’s awareness and possibly spur inquiries or transactions.
But public relations drives reputation primarily, not sales. Its impact is attitudinal as much as it is behavioral. The public relations industry relies on metrics like publicity value and audience impressions to demonstrate ROI. These metrics can be meaningful but at times may be meaningless.
Traditional PR Metrics Aren’t Enough
High publicity value does not necessarily mean high reputational value. A story in a niche publication may have half the viewership of a legacy media outlet, but the niche outlet captures the hyper-targeted audience you aim to reach. Advertising value equivalency and audience size will tell you this media placement is worthless, but you know its true value is high.
These data points fail to capture elements of a media placement that are difficult to quantify. What numerical value can be assigned to a story that reaches the right audience with the right message at the right time? Can you really prescribe a dollar value to a front-page story? And, if you did, would your calculation reflect the feelings of pride, joy or optimism it elicits?
So, how do you measure the impact of strategic media relations? And moreover, how do you generate coverage that has this value for your organization’s reputation?
Introducing the AKCG SMART Score
The AKCG SMART Score (Strategic Media Analysis Reporting Tool) is designed to connect PR to bottom-line business goals by going beyond audience-size and advertising equivalency. It answers the question “was the story seen by the right people?” and “what does this mean for our organization?”
Each earned media placement is evaluated against multiple criteria that demonstrate the non-quantifiable value of media relations, like how well the outlet aligns with your target market or how visible and authoritative your voice is in the piece.
The result is a quantifiable score for a news story representing the impact the story has on an organization’s reputation. While stories are assessed on a 100-point scale and fall under a category ranging from Marquee Stories to clips that Build Awareness, a variety of coverage is essential to the reputation-building journey. Our team helps build a healthy mixture of stories to reach organizational targets.
Each AKCG media relations program is strategically designed to earn coverage that moves the reputational needle to reach an organization’s overall aims. Our media relations specialists design media efforts that speak to each piece of the SMART Score’s criteria, working to maximize impact on reputation with every media placement. This strategic media relations and coverage can move business goals.
Ready to land coverage that builds your organization’s reputation? Reach out to the AKCG team to learn more about our public relations services and how media relations can support your bottom-line objectives.
