Fed up with “one size fits all” PR metrics that don't truly measure your goals? Tired of being tied down by traditional PR metrics when your team is striving to move with the times? We don't blame you, that’s why we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to advance PR measurement.
During this article, we’ll explain how Meltwater is using innovative technologies to bring the PR industry's measurement capabilities up to the same standards as marketing reporting with our new ‘PR Custom Scoring’ solution.
The problem with one-size-fits-all PR measurement
We understand that not all press mentions are created equal. A mention of your CEO in the headline of a tier 1 target publication is likely to hold more weight than a mention of your brand alongside your competitors in the body of a tier 2 target publication. Despite this, coverage has typically been ranked and reported in the same manner, that is, unless public relation professionals conducted manual PR measurement.
Traditionally, custom PR reporting required extensive manual work, and as a result, was often more expensive compared to off the shelf ways of measuring public relations. Now, thanks to advances in technology such as predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, we’re on the cusp of a new generation of PR measurement solutions. This is resulting in PR teams moving away from generic, static and legacy metrics like AVE and Barcelona Principles towards public relations measurement models that are as flexible and agile as their businesses. For example, analysing the impact of coverage in a way that digital communication pros define, tailored to their individual KPIs.
What is PR Custom Scoring?
When it comes to measuring and evaluating PR campaigns, we understood that a blanket approach doesn’t always cut it, that’s why our clients now have the power to effectively apply weight to the metrics important to them in a completely customisable fashion, all within our Media Intelligence platform.
Built from the need to have flexible and dynamic PR measurement, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to find a solution to this problem. And we’ve found it - PR Custom Scoring.
PR Custom Scoring allows PR pros and PR agencies to define their own success metrics to effectively rank PR campaign coverage and better quantify the value of earned media. Using Meltwater, public relations teams can create unique scoring models, including custom weights, and even custom metrics to assign a value to each piece of earned media. For example, you may assign more weight to the prominence of coverage, or maybe its social media reach is more important to you, or maybe it's domain authoritative that's of increased importance.
Through PR Custom Scoring, digital PR teams can now consistently measure the value of their PR campaign media coverage based on their own goals and objectives. This means saying goodbye to static legacy metrics and hello to bespoke reporting that doesn’t blow your budget!
How PR Custom Scoring Works
Each piece of editorial content is given a score associated to six key metrics; each metric can be toggled on and off depending on your needs.
You then have a custom value applied to each metric, which will contribute to a total score.
Once all of the values and metrics have been selected, the content of this search will be tallied to provide a total score, along with an average and individual article score.
Meltwater automates the calculation of metrics for each article and summarizes the total value points across all articles in the specified search - drastically reducing the manual work and removing the risk of errors or inaccuracies.
It’s as simple as that to configure your own custom score within a few steps! What’s more, PR Custom Scoring has the ability to support multiple scoring models, so you can have different measurement metrics for different projects. For example, for one project you may want to customise how negative media affects the overall score or apply my weight to certain social media conversations.
Why use PR Custom Scoring to prove ROI
Gain Buy in With Flexible Reporting
Too often than not, PR professionals spend hours gathering data to report on that the CEO doesn’t know or care about. With PR Custom Scoring, you can now measure what’s important to both them and you. After all, it’s a lot easier to prove business impact, ROI, and gain buy-in internally if you align PR metrics with wider business goals and what your c-suite cares about. Speaking in the same data-driven language as your board will help them understand your PR efforts, therefore increasing your influence at the table, as well as the chances of being allocated higher budget next year. This way of evaluating and measuring PR ROI creates synergy between the PR department and c-suite and the adaptiveness of the new model means you can edit the scoring at any given time as your business needs change.
PR Analytics to PR Insights
PR Custom Scoring also gives your PR team a shared understanding of what’s being said about your brand, and the opportunity to optimise future PR work. It’s easy to view the total value of all your earned media coverage and how this trends over time, for example, compare how you did this month vs last month, and provide presentation-ready reports to your stakeholders to show the value of your work. This type of PR measurement help you gain insight into the value of a given article with a full breakdown of scores and compare to other pieces of earned media.
Discover Meltwater, the brains behind PR Custom Reporting
Meltwater continues to invest in delivering a wide breadth of content to more than 30,000 brands worldwide. We're doing this by growing the World’s largest news and social media database. Our industry-leading AI-powered crawlers, and a network of global partnerships with content providers such as Twitter and Reddit, help us capture more content than anyone else. More content means more reliable analytics that help you find the insights you need. We utilize artificial intelligence to discover content from all corners of the internet, pulling our results from over 1.3 trillion documents. What's more, we add over 500 million new documents every day! While this all sounds very tiring, from a client perspective, it's a smooth ride! We do the work for you.
We understand that the modern user expects simple and elegant consumer applications. That’s why our PR solution prioritizes simplicity and efficiency with a sleek new intuitive navigation and design that has streamlined user experience at the core. Fill out the form to learn how you can transform every stage of your PR strategy and workflow with our PR solution today!
Finally, you can quantify the impact of press coverage using metrics that are tailored to your business and aren't held back by legacy metrics like AVE! So if you want to step away from traditional measurement and learn more about how PR Custom Scoring can help you prove ROI of brand awareness and more, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.
