Performance Metrics that Matter (Part Two)

Tracking the success and progress of any communications objective requires accurately monitoring company or brand mentions across not only traditional media, but social media, blogs, websites, online forums and beyond. Even more important? Utilizing the data that you collect to offer your organization’s key stakeholders actionable insights that can shape future strategy in a meaningful way.

We call this process media intelligence—a task that combines technology with human judgment and discernment in a way that should be the norm for any PR or communications pros looking to truly prove the value of their work.

In our two-part series, Performance Metrics that Matter , we’re exploring eight unique metrics that every professional communicator should be tracking for their company or brand. In part one,  we discussed the importance of visibility, trend and sentiment, the traditional media and social media landscape, key message penetration, and industry and market influencers.

In this post, we’ll explore four additional metrics to factor into your media intelligence program, detailing how each can provide valuable insight into your organization’s performance and showcasing how Nexis Newsdesk™ can streamline the process. Let’s take a look.

Competitor and Industry Benchmarks

Few things are more important for a company to understand than how it stacks up against the competition. The best way to do this is through comprehensive and ongoing brand benchmark analysis. This requires repeating many of the steps we detailed in part one of this series, only now with a focus on the brands your company hopes to stay ahead of.

The resulting data offers an apples-to-apples comparison between your organization and your competitors, including the volume, sentiment, quality and key message penetration of the media coverage you’ve both earned. Thankfully, Nexis Newsdesk™ makes this task relatively simple, providing automated visualizations of everything from spikes in coverage to top stories and coverage sentiment. You’re also able to save searches for each of your competitors, allowing you to return to them as frequently as required. There are even pre-built competitive analysis reporting dashboard templates you can apply that make it a breeze to set up, monitor and analyze competitor performance.

Brand Health

Assessing the health of your brand’s communications strategy begins with identifying the key performance indicators that are most important for success. This requires asking big questions. How should your brand be performing channel by channel? Which media outlets are the most important for your key audience? Where should your reach be in comparison to key competitors?

Once these are answered, your media intelligence program needs to track the short and long-term success of each goal. The ongoing assessment of your organization's visibility, sentiment, key message performance and beyond is critical to understanding what’s working …and what isn’t. Both are equally valuable for improving your strategy moving forward.

Social Media Engagement Rate and Sentiment

Measuring the engagement rate—that is, the number of actions (e.g., likes, comments, shares or retweets) taken on your content vs. the total potential audience reach at the time the engagement occurred—is an industry standard for tracking how your communications are being received via social media. But this needs to be taken a step further, also analyzing the sentiment of the social media discussions impacting your organization.

Measuring social media sentiment can help you to look beyond your core audience, tracking the perception of your brand across the wider landscape of all major social networks. Newsdesk can help to supplement the analytics individual networks provide, allowing you to conduct searches for a company’s name or specific topic only on social media.

SEO and Web Traffic Impact:

In a perfect world, all media coverage would contain your organization or brand’s keywords and backlinks. In the real world, it’s important to monitor long-tail trends and analyze how media coverage is impacting visits to your website. If your coverage includes backlinks, are they driving incoming website traffic or conversions? What keywords from your media coverage appear to drive the most organic search traffic? Do you see a spike in the days and weeks following media coverage? All of these are powerful indicators of how much impact a media placement or social media post has on consumers.

Building and maintaining a comprehensive media intelligence program isn’t for the faint of heart, but it is worth the effort. Thankfully, focusing on the eight key metrics we’ve covered in this series will help you get most of the way to that goal.

The Nexis^® Media Intelligence solutions are built from the ground up to make tracking and quantifying media efforts easier than ever before. Sign up for your free demo today!