The value of PR has never been more clear

Public relations is an investment meant to yield positive returns over time. The only problem? Most marketing managers still haven’t found a way to quantify those returns.

Recent research from IBA reveals that 89% of respondents struggle to measure their campaigns’ effectiveness. What’s more, 88% suspect that much of their PR spend is wasted, and most believe they spend more time on status calls than achieving measurable results.

These statistics are alarming, but not surprising. The perception of PR as a marketing initiative has long been negative. Executives and marketing leaders want tangible results, but beyond counting the badges on their company website, they generally don’t know how to see those results.

Many PR professionals have used the decades-old Advertising Value Equivalency approach to explain the value of their work to industry outsiders. The method treats a PR piece as an ad and quantifies its return on investment by the cost of the print space it occupies. Unfortunately, this approach fails to account for a multitude of variables and ignores the reality that PR is not advertising.

So what’s the alternative?