PRWeb Guest Post: Did It Work? How to Measure Your PR Success

Monique Trottier, founder of Boxcar Marketing, has a guest post on PRWeb.com talking about how to measure the success of your PR campaign.

A professionally written press release that is well optimized for the social web is only one factor in managing a successful PR campaign. What matters most to your business is not that your press release received 1 million impressions or 1,000 media pick ups but whether the results met your business objectives. Did the coverage result in actual revenue or increased brand awareness? Did your content resonate with its intended audience?

See the full post on the PRWeb Blog.

Measuring your Social Media Marketing: KPIs for Product & Brand Awareness

Marketers know that the ability to measure success online is far more accurate than measurements offline. Tracking, analyzing and responding to the data is your key to success. Begin by defining the key performance indicators, or KPIs, for your campaigns.

With your marketing goals in mind, what is measurable? As Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook notes, social media’s goals are about increasing online visibility. This means creating awareness about your products, services and brand. When determining metrics, think of actions that indicate people are aware of your brand and, from these actions, what is measurable.

The development process for KPIs can be visualized as a funnel:

Goal > Action > Measurement (KPI)

Web Stats To Measure

KPIs linked to product and brand awareness should focus on visits your website and how they found it. Are people aware of, and visiting, your site? If they are, how did they get there and were they aware of your brand before they visited? The following is a list of web stats that can help gage awareness about your product and brand.

• Unique Visitors. This shows how many people are visiting your website.
• Direct Traffic. This shows how many people are coming directly to your site by typing the URL in their address bar. These visitors are coming to the site having already heard about your product or brand.
• Referral Traffic. This shows where your visitors are coming from. This is important because referrals are like recommendations. You will want to build a relationship with the sites that are directing traffic to your site.
• Keyword traffic. This shows how people are finding your site. Are they using your brand’s keywords? This shows that they already knew about you before they visited your site. What other keywords are visitors using? If familiar keywords are seen month over month, then it shows a strong interest in a topic or category, which you may want to profile on the home page. Trending keywords should also be used in your site’s content, for example, as blog posts and page titles, in order to capitalize on new traffic sources.

With these KPIs, you can create a KPI scorecard. Fill in the scorecard monthly and go back over previous months to determine a baseline. Looking at the numbers month over month, are they the same? Where do they fluctuate? What does this mean in relation to your marketing activities? What should be repeated, modified, or discarded for something new?

Internet Marketing: How to Measure Success

3 Steps to Measuring the Success of Online Marketing Campaigns
Presented Sept. 18 as part of BookNet Canada and ABPBC’s Defining Success: Accountable Online Marketing for Book Publishing

If you’re not measuring the results of your marketing efforts, then you are wasting money. Here are 3 steps to planning, measuring and improving online campaigns.

Step 1. Establish measurable indicators (or KPIs, key performance indicators) for every marketing effort.

Make sure they are measurable! For example, saying “we want to increase sales” is not something you can measure. Many factors influence a person’s decision to buy. Sales are an indicator of success but the exact marketing effort that led to a sale is not measurable. Sending out a postcard and driving people to a specific URL is something we can measure. How many people came to this page. Further to that, if the page has an online form, how many people completed the form. These 2 things are specific and measurable.

A specific, measurable goal might be:
* visiting a certain webpage
* signing up for a newsletter
* completing an online form

By using free tools like Google Analytics you can precisely track how many people complete your goal and where they came from.

Step 2: Determine your cost per conversion.

A conversion is any time that someone completes a desired action. It doesn’t have to be a sale. A conversion is the completion of a measurable, specific goal.

Your cost per conversion is the amount of money you spend divided by the number of conversions you achieve.

If your campaign involves mailing out postcards that direct people to a specific URL with an online form, your goal is getting people to fill out the form. The campaign costs $500. You track the number of online form submissions and receive 50 submissions.

Cost per conversion = $500 / 50 submissions
$10 per conversion.

If your campaign involves sending out an email newsletter that directs people to a specific URL with an online form, your goal is still getting people to fill out the form. The campaign costs $200. You track the number of online submissions and receive 16 submissions.

Cost per conversion = $200 / 16 submissions
$12.50 per conversion

Now that you have this information you can make some better judgements about how to spend your marketing dollars. With the cost per conversion, you can see that the postcard generated a better (cheaper) cost per conversion than the email newsletter, even though the total cost of the postcard was more.

Cost per conversion helps you determine the actual cost instead of just looking at price. (It is like the cost per pound when buying meat.)

Step 3: Determine the Value

To determine if your marketing effort is worth the money or a waste, you need to determine the value of your activities.

Is it worth it to spend $12.50 to get one person to fill out an online form? Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on the context. If the form is an order form for a product costing $100, maybe yes.

The value per conversion is $100. The cost per conversion is $12.50.

With both sets of numbers in hand, you can look at all your marketing efforts and decide where to allocate your resources: people, time and money. Don’t stop just at the online marketing activities, look at the offline marketing activities.

It drives me mad when online is asked to justify a spend but offline is not. In these scenarios, you’re wasting money. You are making decisions based on gut instinct and experience. We have experience doing x, y, z and it makes us feel good. It’s safe.

Safe can also be a waste of money.

When a conversion is not related to a sale, how do you set value?

Create a point system. You’ll assign an arbitrary number, but it works as a comparative measurement. You always want specific, measurable goals.

1 person opening and reading your email newsletter = 5 points
1 person viewing a specific video = 5 points
1 person signing up for a newsletter = 10 points
1 person creating an account on your ecommerce site = 100 points

Looks arbitrary, but it works.

If you run Campaign 1 and have 300 people viewing a specific video:
300 people * 5 points = 1,500 points

If you run Campaign 2 and have 200 people sign up for your email newsletter:
200 people * 10 points = 2,000 points

The $ value of each campaign is unknown, but we can see the relative effectiveness. Instead of saying, “we should do more of Campaign 1, it drove the most people”, we can see that Campaign 2, although it drove fewer actions, these actions are of higher value.

Before spending any money, always consider what your specific, measurable goal is worth. As long as you can measure relative effectiveness, you can evaluate whether you are wisely spending money.

Armed with the cost per conversion and the value per conversion, you can make a lot of sense out of the results data. You can easily determine which marketing activities are most effective.

Having trouble figuring out a point system?

Understand the relative value of your online and offline activities. Start with your gut instincts, set the arbitrary numbers, and, as you collect accurate, specific and measurable results, refine those arbitrary numbers into actual dollar values.

For example, if your gut tells you that in-person networking events generate a value of 10 points, but posters only generate 5 points. Then you have the beginnings of a scale.

Posters = 5 points
In-person networking = 10 points

If you and your marketing and sales team can agree that online networking and social media is equal to in-person marketing, then online networking is 10 points. If your team is skeptical, then you can negotiate. If online networking is of greater value than posters but lesser value than in-person networking, agree to give it 8 points.

From chaos to order.

Posters = 5 points
Online networking = 8 points
In-person networking = 10 points

Here is how I’d pair off some common online and offline marketing activities. You have to determine the value order and points based on your business context, but you can use these pairings to help those who operate on gut instinct, or those with little experience online, begin to create a point system.

Advertising (radio, print, direct mail) • Online advertising (email ads, banner ads, search ads
Articles in print (circulation numbers) • Articles Online (unique visitors to site)
Marketing messages with telephone hold music •  Email signatures
In-person networking   •  Online networking
Posters •  Web badges and widgets
Press releases •  Electronic press releases
Letters to the Editor •  Blog comments, Online reviews
Referral program •  Online affiliate program
TV ads •  YouTube videos
Word of Mouth (real world)  •  Word of Mouth (virtual world: blogs, forums, wikis, email forwards)

The Return on Investment (ROI) of Online Communities

I’m often in the position of being an advocate of online communities. I think that when they’re well conceived and executed they work incredibly well to connect people across roles and organizational constraints. But it can be a hard slog to prove it.

(Not that I really believe in proving things with numbers. I believe marketing is practice of faith, not reason. Yet I have to be able to discuss numbers with some familiarity, and report on progress and results.)

Then today, via the Will Pate experience, I discovered a great post from Bill Johnson on the ROI of Online Communities, with numbers to boot!

Bill and Joe Cothrel presented the following numbers at the Online Community Business Forum.

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users (AT&T, 2002).
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006).
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options (ASP, 2002).
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options (Forrester, 2006).
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007).
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail (Jupiter, 2006).

There’s also an accompanying ROI of Communities powerpoint presentation (PDF). So now there are some good numbers to talk about when we talk about how to quantify the ROI of online communities.

Now the nubmers aren’t perfect. In fact, to me they’re more valuable for their consistency with each other and with my experience of conceiving and executing online communities, than as standalone factoids. Basically, people involved in online communities are more engaged in every behaviour you want to foster on your website and for your organization.

What more can I say? Connect with your people and you’ll discover in practice what makes communities so special. But don’t expect a flood. Online communities work more like drip irrigation than a fire hose—small, discreet interactions that accumulate in effect and momentum over time.

The Return on Investment (ROI) of a Blog

Over at the Marqui Software blog they have some great feedback for the popular question: What is the ROI of having a blog?

The case study they point to is from Stormhoek, a South African winery who marketed the launch of their new white wine through blogs and online word-of-mouth advertising. Essentially they invited a bunch of bloggers they thought were a good fit for the product launch to try to the product. Free wine? Quelle tough sell.

The venerable Telegraph called the story A very fruity sauvignon blog and did a fantastic job writing it up in their business pages. After an intro pandering to their audience, they get down to the How They Did It:

Last May, six months after Stormhoek launched, Dymoke-Marr despatched a bottle of his mid-price Sauvignon Blanc to 150 of the UK’s most frantic-fingered “bloggers”, the burgeoning community of internet diarists.

It was a plan that didn’t lack bottle. After all, since their emergence at the end of the 1990s, bloggers have become a nightmare for businesses the world over. Microsoft, Tesco and McDonald’s have all fallen victim to vicious blogs written by irate customers or seething employees.

But Dymoke-Marr’s gamble elicited barely a sour grape. “We were just really honest,” he says.

“We didn’t say we were selling the best wine in South Africa. We just said: ‘Here’s a nice wine, reasonably priced, tell us what you think.’ “

The bloggers got to work, tapping away about the virtues of the vino. Estimates of how many bloggers there are around the world range from 15m to 30m. Up to 80,000 blogs are thought to be started each day. If you had punched Stormhoek into Google last June, 500 references would have popped up. That figure stood at about 85,000 last week.

...

Of course, anyone who doles out free booze might expect to get a good write-up. But the pith of the Stormhoek story is that the chitchat in the virtual world has generated real sales.

Since last summer, monthly sales of Stormhoek’s bottles have doubled. It has won contracts with J Sainsbury and Majestic Wine. The internet dialogue has also led to greater demand from retailers such as Asda and Threshers with which Dymoke-Marr already had contracts.

Stormhoek now accounts for 20 per cent of all South African wine sold at above £5 a bottle in the UK.

“Blogging has been really, really fundamental to what’s happened over the past year,” Dymoke-Marr says. “Our retail buyers say customers go into their stores and supermarkets and say we’ve heard about this through blogs.

“But it hasn’t just seen our sales rise strongly, it’s totally disrupted the business and completely changed the way we think.”

Hmm. So this blog thing seems to have caught on.

Are you interested in how your company can capitalize on blogs and the market forces of the web? Well we’re interested in helping you do that. Contact us and and we’ll get to work.