How do you know if you’re headed for a public relations fail?

We’ve developed a set of questions to help you assess if your PR is on track to effectively manage your most precious intangible asset: your reputation.

If you answer ‘yes’ to all of these questions, congratulations, your PR foundations are in good shape.

If you answer ‘no’ to any or all of these, consider partnering with a professional PR agency to give your corporate reputation a health check.

1. Do you select tactics that link clearly to your strategy?

Are you posting home-spun TikTok videos because everyone else is? Or do you have an evidence-based strategy that shows you can reach your target audience via TikTok to deliver a desired business result? If your PR is generating activity but not results you may have a set of tactics without a strategy. This is like the tail wagging the dog. Being strategic involves deliberate decisions about where you will invest your finite time, budget and resources to deliver the strongest possible results aligned to your organisation’s strategy.

2. Do you regularly share your results with your executive and discuss your next steps?

If you find yourself preparing a monthly PR report that no one reads, then you may have an executive buy-in problem. Showing how PR is delivering business results is the best way to ensure a seat at the boardroom table. This may require data as well as persuasion. Become familiar with the performance metrics your executive monitor and develop a set of indicators that show how your PR campaigns are contributing to these targets. If you still find your PR team only gets a seat at the executive table during a crisis, use that to your advantage. Successfully managing a crisis can give your team a strong platform from which to seek executive buy-in to greater investment in proactive reputation management.

3. Do you assess results against your targets and make changes when needed?

Ever heard of the saying data-rich but insight-poor? It’s a common affliction and can come about when businesses attempt to measure everything because they don’t fully understand how they achieve their results. Give your PR the gift of clarity by setting measurable objectives and mapping the data points you’ll need to assess progress towards your goals. Data points should include top line metrics that show progress towards targets, as well as next-level-down metrics that help you understand your performance. For example, an average click through rate on social media is useful to demonstrate performance, but drilling down to see what type of content generates the most clicks will help enhance performance.

4. Do you regularly listen to your target audience and know what matters to them?

Blasting your key messages in one-way bursts is like having a one-sided conversation. It can be useful for raising awareness, but if your PR strategy doesn’t include listening to your audience, you won’t know if your message is gaining cut-through. Social media platforms provide rich insights into what your target audience is thinking, feeling and doing in relation to your brand. Invest in the capability to capture, analyse and report the feedback you get through social media or other forums that may be relevant to you. This could include community consultation programs, focus groups or surveys to really listen to your audience and capture actionable insights.

5. Do you respond constructively to criticism of your PR campaigns?

Believing your PR is great because you say so is unsustainable and unwise. Failing to apply objectivity to PR campaigns fails to support genuine evaluation of whether your PR is working. Gone are the days – if they ever existed – when a positive newspaper headline was considered an adequate return on your PR investment. Aligning your PR to measurable business objectives is essential. Demonstrating growth in awareness or conversion directly attributable to PR is a great position to be in. But we get it – not every result can be measured with a click through rate. Less tangible objectives, such as a shift in sentiment, may need a bespoke research program to demonstrate success and capture feedback to inform future direction.

So how did you go? Were you unsure or answered ‘no’ to some of these questions? BBS can partner with you to evaluate and build your PR capability. Read more about our corporate communications, media relations and content strategy and copywriting expertise or get in touch to discuss today.