Signs That Prove a PR Strategy is Working

The key to effective Public Relations is to attract attention from brand influencers and customers who can help push your announcement to your target audience. A successful PR strategy is a multi-step process that involves research and goal-setting before execution. Firstly, you need to:

• Create goals- whatever the ultimate goal of your PR strategy is, it is important to define clear goal and objectives.
• Measure the results- to evaluate success, strategies will need to be measured.
• Outline Strategies & Tactics- Create a plan to implement strategies to achieve business goals.

• Define target audience- Based on your company goal and objectives, tailor PR strategy to reach the target audience.
  
  

How to prove PR strategy is working?
Measuring PR performance and impact can be tough. These KPIs will help to track PR efforts and determine the effectiveness of your PR strategy.

1. Backlinks- These are links from a page on one website to another. If someone links to your site, then you have a backlink from them. If you link to another website, then they have a backlink from you. Backlinks help with:

• Rankings. The more votes your page has, it was rank higher in terms of relevance. 
• referral traffic- Refers to visits to your websites from links that appear on another website.
•  discoverability- search engines revisit popular pages more often than unpopular ones so your content may be discovered quicker if you get backlinks from more popular pages.
  
  

1. Brand Mentions

Brand mentions are a measure of how many times your brand is referenced on social media. Brand mentions help to augment brand awareness and function as a vital metric for measuring PR effectiveness. Tracking brand mentions is made possible by multiple tools that can give brands an indication of brand performance.  Google Alerts is a free detection and notification service. While it doesn't monitor social media, it monitors the Google search engine for your chosen keywords and puts all of the results in one place. However, the feedback from brand mentions is only as good as the keywords input in the app.

1. Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement is basically those activities and responses on social media platform including, views, likes, shares, comments and impressions. This is particularly important because it aids in measuring the quality of social media reach to the target audience. The greatest measure of social media success is an engaged audience and not just a big one. Social media engagement reveals the periods when your audience’s activity online is at its highest. With this information, you can plan and schedule your posts to reach and engage this audience when they are online.

1. Social shares are the acts of sharing videos, photos and links from your brand’s blog or website on social media platforms.  This is a powerful indicator of your brand’s impact  and reputation because it indicates that your target market is so confident about and in tuned with your content that they willingly share it on their own personal social media platforms.

This is a critical metric because it tells you that your audience enjoys your content.
It is important to note, the quality and nature of content being shared because this will give a clear indication of the type of content your audience prefers.
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1. .Conversions

Businesses that successfully create conversions can identify the target audience and create behaviour-based marketing from market research. By researching your target audience you deliver messages that resonate in a channel that is convenient for your audience.
Customer conversion can be measured by conducting customer surveys after-sales that ask questions such as ‘how did you hear about our product/service?’  These responses will show which of your PR strategies are producing results. You can also gauge your PR plan’s impact by using a tool like Google Analytics to learn about your customers’ conversion paths.
With the right approach, you can keep accurate track of each PR tool and determine its usefulness and use this information to improve your brand’s overall PR strategy.

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