How PR can begin to implement true KPIs

Trevor Carver is account director at Method Communications.

I put myself through college doing sales — lots of phone calls and thousands of doors knocked. While I didn’t pursue sales as a career after graduation, something I liked about the role was knowing whether or not I was on track to hit my quota because the company had effective key performance indicators. This term is thrown around a lot in business, but I’m not convinced people working in public relations, and especially media relations, are applying KPIs as effectively as sales and marketing teams do. 

It’s time we as an industry have a deeper conversation about what meaningful KPIs for media relations should be, but first, we need a better understanding of what effective KPIs are and the data required to put them in place.

Comparing sales and PR KPIs

KPIs are not goals. They are the milestones along the journey that indicate if you’re on track to meet your goal. If our goal with media relations is positive, quality coverage, true KPIs would be metrics that indicate whether we’re on track to deliver on our coverage goal. 

In sales, the goal was to close the client and get them to buy the product. Our company knew that if sales reps made 500 calls per week, they could expect about 4% of those to turn into consultations. Of those 20 consultations, leaders could expect  about 10 would end up in closed sales. Calls lead to consultations which lead to closes. In sales, KPIs are determined by examining the entire sales process and identifying the key indicators that cascade into closes. While sales and PR are different in some ways, the media relations aspect is similar in the sense that it’s based on a relationship-oriented process, littered with unexpected or uncontrollable hurdles, and the goal is always a close (coverage).

Here is one example of a simplified media relations process:

• Gather content
• Develop a compelling storyline
• Pitch media
• Set up interviews 
• Conduct interviews
• Land coverage 

Of course the processes and timeframes vary by pitch type, industry and more, but, for the sake of simplification, let’s use the example above. Storylines lead to pitches which lead to interviews which lead to coverage. So, if we have a goal of two feature stories this month, how many interviews with a journalist do we need on average before a feature lands? How many pitches do we need to send before we land an interview? And so on.

The caveats and benefits

There are important caveats to KPIs we must understand. It’s not just a numbers game. In sales, if a rep yells at customers for 500 calls straight, it wouldn’t convert to 20 consultations. Similarly, in PR, if our pitches are long and sloppy, the media won’t bite. If our media lists are full of irrelevant targets, our emails could get blocked. If our spokespeople are bad at interviewing, they won’t get quoted.

KPIs show leaders where they need to do a quality check in the process. If we’re not getting responses from journalists, maybe it’s time to train the team on how to improve pitch quality. Do we need to train spokespeople on how to be more compelling so our interviews convert to coverage more frequently? KPIs also help us pinpoint which efforts are driving better than average results. Find those who are performing better than the KPIs and adjust processes to match best practices.

The data problem

KPIs are based on averages. One of the roadblocks to predictive KPIs is gathering enough data on process to generalize the results. This is a big barrier in PR. I don’t see many PR teams gathering data on their processes, partly because it’s too time consuming and manual. It would require daily tracking of the process in a spreadsheet like the amount of emails sent, interactions and responses; dedicated time to regularly cleaning, standardizing and analyzing the data; compiling reports on findings, etc. For PR agencies, that time is money. Sales and marketing teams have access to CRMs and entire software platforms where all interactions are tracked from beginning to end, making it simple to quantify processes, determine average timelines for various deal types and more. While PR has platforms and media databases that quantify some pieces of the media relations process, such as the average open rate of emails, they are not yet comprehensive or user friendly enough to replace the tried and true spreadsheet.

Working on a solution together

As an industry, if we want to get more scientific about our success by weaving KPIs into our media relations process, we need to collaborate more with media database tools to help them improve the user experience or better integrate and track our current processes. Let’s also talk to each other and share what KPIs we’re tracking and what our average conversions are in order to begin getting a sense of what success looks like. At the end of the day, without KPIs, we’re missing out on strategic direction that could help us get more results, faster.

Let’s start a conversation. What is your media relations process? What KPIs do you track? What roadblocks do you see getting in the way of PR becoming more data-driven? Take this quick survey and we’ll start to compile best practices for the industry and report back.