As PR professionals (PR pros) we are often tasked with trying to maximize exposure for our clients across multiple forms of media, while actively listening to audience feedback and mining for emerging trends and conversations that we can leverage to keep our clients top of mind.
While standard reporting is important, how you report on your progress and wins is often as important as what you are reporting on. Let’s face it, no update from one’s PR team likely means there is no coverage to report. Worse, it might appear to clients and other stakeholders that PR has done nothing to secure coverage. As PR pros we know this is rarely the case, but it can appear to be so to outsiders.
One way to reduce potential concerns is for PR pros to maintain a consistent reporting cadence. This applies to specific pitching efforts as well as the firm’s ongoing activity at large. For diligent PR pros this should be relatively straightforward and often takes the form of a weekly update. This provides clients with the ability to quickly determine where activity stands and easily keep track of the moving parts.
The weekly updates also can be a good way to provide line of site toward progress to larger goals. For instance, maybe you secured 65 articles for a client last year and have a goal to increase year-over-year coverage by 20 percent in the current year. The weekly reporting can be a good place to provide updates that show whether you’re on track to meet or exceed your annual goal.
To initiate this process, it’s helpful to clearly outline your plan at the outset so you can manage the client’s reporting expectations in advance. This may seem like PR 101, but all too often this simply isn’t the case. Be explicit so clients know when they’ll get updates from you: weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually.
Additionally, a basic tracking document that can be shared with the client for real-time visibility can work wonders to bolster the client relationship. This level of access provides the client with the ability to monitor activity in between regular reports and further reinforces a collaborative approach.
Aside from maintaining a strong client relationship to enable successful PR efforts, reviewing coverage with a critical eye will help determine the success of the strategy and identify lessons learned to inform future efforts. When doing a deeper dive, consider the following questions:
- How much of the coverage comes from news items generated from press release distributions? How many are features that began with your pitch to a journalist?
- Have your executives been quoted from interviews?
- Are you securing enough thought-leadership articles with bylines from your executives?
- If pitching goals are geographically oriented, are you measuring them? Likewise, if a campaign is targeting certain vertical markets, then PR pros need to have an idea of the weighting of coverage across each one. This allows for corrections and strategy changes to make sure they reflect business objectives.
As PR pros we know transparency is often the key to collaboration and productive business relationships. As we’ve seen, it can be useful during the pitching process, too.