Report: Measuring PR’s value remains communicators’ top challenge
A Muck Rack survey reveals that media relations savvy remains the most powerful skill in PR pros’ toolkit, but proving value to executives remains a struggle.
PR pros are crucial to their organizations’ success, but most struggle to prove it through numbers or tie it to business results.
Muck Rack’s “The State of PR 2019” report revealed that measurement remains PR pros’ biggest challenge with 72% saying they struggle to measure the business impact their efforts produce and 65% saying they lack quantifiable metrics for their campaigns.
Along with measurement, nearly two-thirds of PR pros (61%) grapple with finding and engaging relevant journalists, and the same amount feel pressured by shrinking budgets. Roughly half of PR pros struggle with properly tracking media coverage and mentions (50%), recruiting top talent (47%) and collaborating with both their teams and other departments in their organizations (44%).
Though PR pros are struggling to measure the value of their work, the majority (88%) use traditional metrics to evaluate their campaigns.
Most PR pros also use social media impact (80%) and affect on website traffic (67%) to measure their value. Less than half (45%) use brand metrics and only 29% measure the value of their efforts through the effect they have on sales.
Tools of the trade
Another element eroding PR pros’ value is wasted time.
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