How to Track Campaigns for Marketing and PR Agencies

PR and marketing campaigns increase awareness of your brand and improve your public image, but how can you be sure that your campaigns are as effective as they seem to be?

That’s a common challenge for PR agencies when correlating the team’s efforts to real results.

While these efforts can significantly contribute to a brand’s success, it is also imperative to quantify their performance. However, some results, like heightened brand recognition, are hard to measure objectively. Others are way challenging to monitor consistently.

At the same time, you also invest considerable effort and money to build and launch a robust campaign. So how can you assess its impact and ascertain if your investment was worth it?

Besides, if you have spent countless hours researching media, crafting the story, sending out pitches, and conducting follow-ups, you would want to know if you are heading in the right direction.

There are several methods on how to track campaigns and digital marketers use various marketing metrics to evaluate their impact to find the answers they need.

Why Track Campaigns For Marketing And PR Agencies?

For starters, it helps quantify the results of your digital activities and ensures that the chosen strategy works well for you. This further allows you to create more cost-effective promotions to get your desired results within the budget.

Here are some reasons why monitoring your marketing and PR campaigns should be a vital part of your strategy:

Measure the Effectiveness of a Campaign

One of the primary reasons to evaluate your campaigns is to figure out if your marketing tactics work. Your clients would also love to know the answer to that one.

Tracking your web and social mentions lets you see your audience’s engagement and responsiveness to your content.

Sentiment analysis tools also enable you to monitor the sentiment behind their responses, which helps you measure how well your campaign performed on the whole. You can get all the data in real-time, so it allows you to make the necessary adjustments quickly.

Validate Your Supervisors And Client’s Efforts

ROI is a legitimate concern for PR teams who have to report back. That’s because supervisors demand hard data and analytics, making them incredibly crucial for their earned media campaigns. Tracking your online activities helps gather insightful information about performance and lets you quantify your campaign’s value.

Respond to your Followers in Real-Time

Since you track your followers’ responses in real-time, it enables you to get in touch with your social media audience and instantly reply to their conversations.

This is important because timely responses are valuable for increasing engagement rates. Tracking your social media followers in real-time also allows you to find and join conversations, giving you the ability to connect with them in real-time.

Furthermore, keeping an eye on your campaigns can help you avoid a PR disaster before it consumes your brand. Communicating with your audience is a handy crisis management tool that lets you respond promptly to questions and concerns in case of an issue.

Diligent monitoring tools enable you to know about a situation and take appropriate action before things get messy.

Refine your Future Campaigns

In marketing and PR, measuring your campaigns’ performance can be a daunting task, and you can’t gauge your real success rate.

The insightful data you gather from monitoring your campaigns can also help you plan and figure out what works well for you and your clients. That way, you can come up with effective strategies that improve overall results and ultimately drive satisfaction.

How to Track your Marketing and PR Campaigns?

Tracking helps you gauge the most compelling aspects of your campaign. This, in turn, allows you to make better and informed decisions for future campaigns. Social media management tools will enable you to do seamlessly for the most crucial metrics for your clients.

The evolution of digital monitoring tools has made it incredibly easier for businesses to measure their campaigns’ effectiveness in various ways.

Right metrics tracking for PR and marketing campaigns lets you determine how well your strategy is and tweak it accordingly to get you desired results. Here are some of the key metrics to analyze your campaigns.

Reach

Hypothetically, Reach indicates how many social media users have viewed your campaign. You can even narrow your search down by several parameters such as platform, date, or apply different tags to compare your campaign’s various aspects.

For instance, if your campaign comprises social media, influencer marketing, and PR outreach, you can leverage specific tags to compare different parts of your campaign. You can then allocate more resources to your strategy’s area that needs improvement.

Therefore, Reach acts as a starting point if you aim to influence your message and get desired PR outcomes. Towards accomplishing that, it’s imperative to reach the right audience with the right message.

Brand Mentions

It is crucial to assess the performance of you across different social media platforms. Your brand mentions fundamentally help you learn a lot about how you are doing and lets you compare your brand’s campaign on multiple platforms simultaneously.

Brand mentions primarily indicate the number of times your company’s name, your hashtag, or lets you track other chosen words during a PR campaign within a given period.

If you aim to raise awareness through your PR campaign, keep an eye out for the number of mentions. The spikes point toward that your followers talk about your offerings or activity.

Share of Voice

Useful social media monitoring tools have inbuilt sentiment analysis that lets you gauge your audience’s feelings towards your content or message, i.e., if it is negative, positive, or neutral.

For instance, if your client wants to launch a new offering, you can quickly know what the users think about it and respond accordingly.

Today, there are numerous accurate ways to monitor the sentiment around your content. The tone, language, and reactions of followers — you can gauge all of this in real-time. This, in turn, helps you figure out the issues and incorporate the changes more efficiently in your next campaign.

Media Impressions

It is unequivocally essential to monitor media impressions to calculate the projected number of people who recognize your brand or have heard about it within a specific timeframe. It is quite a useful metric that helps you determine the impact of your PR strategy.

Suppose you distribute a press release associated with a renowned publication. It is positioned at the top of the front page. Here, media impressions can help you figure out how many people read that page daily, see your brand name in these outlets, and read the piece of information your brand published.

While you aren’t able to gauge the reader’s reaction to this metric, you can certainly know about the number of people your post reaches. Of course, media impression isn’t a foolproof metric — combined with other vital metrics. It can be handy for PR and marketing campaigns.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tools allow you to evaluate the engagement level of your PR campaign. Moreover, they let you explicitly track people who share, like, comment, or engage with your published post or campaign.

Audience actions on your campaigns indicate how well they connected and resonated with your message and the overall effectiveness. That way, you can tweak the PR approach and content to align it with your followers’ preferences and interests.

With social listening tools, you can examine your audiences’ actions such as likes, comments, shares, etc., on your posts across multiple social media channels. The higher the engagement, the campaign will enjoy more visibility on social media platforms.

You can use specific hashtags, encourage your audience to interact with your social media posts. Above all, it is imperative to deliver the right content to keep your brand engagement alive on social channels.

Traffic on your Website

While numerous PR campaigns perform well on various social media platforms, your website still plays a crucial role in PR outreach. Closely monitor your website traffic through Google Analytics. When you are gauging your website analytics, it is vital to track the referrals and the qualified leads.

Qualified leads are those who found you through search engines and visit your website. In contrast, a referral is a person who heard about your business from a source and shows interest in your offerings.

It lets you know where your potential buyers are from and leverage their info to develop better strategies and content.

Traffic on your website is quite an apparent indicator of your campaign’s success. It increases the visitor’s inflow to your website.

Competitive Analysis

Conduct research and perform competitive analysis by tracking their share of brand engagement, mentions, and other quantifiable metrics that your brand gets. In other words, compare and analyze your brand mentions online versus your competitor’s brand mentions.

Ready To Track Your Campaign’s Effectiveness?

The bottom line is that you can leverage all the information you collect from tracking and devise a well-rounded strategy for your marketing and PR campaigns. It is imperative to get the most out of the data irrespective of whether it’s to manage a client’s expectation or drive higher engagement.

If you don’t measure the results, you can’t improve your campaigns to get the desired outcomes. It also helps marketers take on the right approach that works well for you and your clients.

A social listening tool like Mentionlytics allows you to understand and analyze customer reactions, which are pivotal to enhance your marketing and PR efforts. It provides you with a correct stance on how your followers perceive your brand and what you can do to get results.

Mentionlytics is a feature-rich platform that helps you identify and determine brand mentions, perform sentiment analysis, track multiple social media platforms, and monitor competitors’ brand mentions — this AI-powered tool lets you do it all.

On top of that, Mentionlytics helps you add a keyword as your competitor’s brand name and get comprehensive insights about them to improvise your performance.

Its exclusive advanced search functionality can help you create a detailed report of your digital channels such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and your website.

Monitor all your campaigns and all that goes on in the digital realm involving your brand and audiences. Begin your journey with Mentionlytics, step up your PR and marketing game, and, ultimately, your campaign’s success rates.

Original article: www.mentionlytics.com/blog/how-to-track-campaigns-for-marketing-and-pr-agencies