The age of technology and the Internet is continuing to blur the distinction between marketing and public relations. Monitoring the effectiveness of your public relations efforts is now essential for maintaining an efficient bottom line and keeping your company’s reputation in good shape.
More than ever before, businesses are turning to their websites, blogs, e-newsletters, blogs, podcasts, and other media on the Internet to direct information towards customers who are currently or potential buyers, as well as their public relations objectives.
They also utilize social media platforms like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter with increasing sophistication as marketing and public relations tools.
Apart from using public relations programs to help build and maintain their reputations, businesses today rely on such programs to get customers involved in purchasing and creating income.
The outcome: Monitoring your communication efforts’ public and marketing relations results requires more than just recording news clips or media mentions. This means that at each stage where your company has online or in-person contact with prospective clients as well as other important audiences, you need to ask the following question:
“How did you hear about us? “
If you ask this straightforward question, you can assess the influence and impact of traditional PR efforts such as community and media relations.
You can also assess your website’s online and in-person connections through its or company blog, newsletter and news releases, emails, announcements, and social media engagement.
Through this data, you can determine the success of specific communications initiatives and their impact on important business objectives like product sales and inquiries and lead generation for sales, attending events, questions from resellers, and investor engagement — goals that link public relations directly to your bottom income.
The process of asking this question and tallying the responses is simple and efficient. However, the devil lies in the particulars. It is essential to put procedures in place to ensure you ask the question and collect the answers at every online or in-person point you and your intended audience members contact.
Here’s a list of the places where communication occurs between your business and its customers or PR goals:
- Points for purchase
- Pages on the website
- Special occasions
- Request information about a service or product on the phone or online form
- Information request lines for investors and web form
- Sign-up for newsletters and the website form
- Warranty forms for products
- General Information Request Line and web form
- Exposés and trade shows
- Appointment line (for doctors, hospitals, attorneys, etc.)
- Blog of the Company
When a potential customer or someone else is looking for details about your services, products or special events, or even your company’s general offerings, the list of options can be endless -the first call they make might be via your website, news announcement, a hotline for a product or magazine article blog article executive presentations or any other.
