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by
Marsha Friedman
EMSI Public Relations
 I'm
frequently asked about the value of PR in relation to the
business goals it’s designed to enhance.
People wonder what will
happen if they’re able to achieve a picture-perfect PR campaign
and get the media to notice them and generate coverage for them.
They wonder if the upside is increased sales, or if it’s in the
branding or maybe it’s just the increased exposure for their
company or projects or their book.
The short answer is yes, but the long answer is a bit more
complicated than that. First thing’s first. When we do a print
campaign, for instance, we rate it based on the reach of the
publications in traditional print outlets and online outlets. We
use two key terms – circulation and visitors per month (VPM) –
and while one of those terms is old and the other is new, they
are based on the same principle.
When we use the term VPM, we're applying it to the online
publications in the same way that newspapers and magazines use
circulation figures to apply to their audience numbers.
Back in those primitive days before the Internet, when paper and
ink were still a popular means of communication, PR firms rated
the success of their print campaigns by adding up the
circulation figures of the newspapers and magazines in which
they got coverage for their clients. So if an article was
written about you in the Philadelphia Inquirer that would be
rated as a pretty good hit, because that paper has a circulation
of about 300,000 readers daily. Now that's not to say all
300,000 people read the article that was about you. It's simply
a measure of the potential readers of your article.
Then along came the Internet. We now live in a time in which
almost every newspaper or magazine article is repurposed online
and more people get their news online than offline. In an
attempt to present advertisers with a "circulation" figure for
the Internet versions of their print publications, publishers
created the tracking of unique visitors to their news pages, and
that number is called VPM.
For example, if we place an article on a Web site like the
Huffington Post, which has a VPM of 22 million, it doesn't mean
that 22 million people are reading your story. It just means
that your story was placed on a site that has an online
"circulation" of 22 million. It’s just like the Philadelphia
Inquirer example above, where the circulation of that
publication is 300,000, but there’s no way to calculate how many
of those 300,000 readers actually read your article.
So VPM is simply a “circulation” figure for the Internet and
it’s how campaigns are tracked in the era of new media, which
isn't much different than the way it was tracked "back in the
day."
Just as in the above example, it’s also impossible to track
specifically how many people watched your TV segment or heard
your radio interview. The ratings systems for TV shows are not
specific enough to track who was watching at the moment you were
on the air, and the ratings system for radio is not universally
used, so extrapolating accurate numbers for specific days and
times is also near impossible.
With radio PR for example, the measures we look at are the size
of the market, the wattage of the station (5,000 watts is good,
500, not so much) and in the case of national radio shows, how
many stations carry the show through syndication. These are
broader brushstrokes than what people can achieve through
advertising on the Internet and tracking clickthroughs, but it
is also far less expensive. In online advertising campaigns,
advertisers can track exactly who visited their Web site, what
Web site referred them, what they viewed on the site and even
how many minutes they spent on each page. Coming from that
experience, it can sometimes be difficult for marketers to
understand why the same kind of granular audience analysis
doesn’t exist in PR.
But, keep in mind advertisers are paying for that infrastructure
with their fees, which are often many times the cost of a solid
PR campaign. In addition, those ad campaigns lack the power of
third-party verification that exists in PR – when a host has you
as a guest on a radio or TV show it’s a tacit endorsement of you
as an expert. It’s someone of authority saying you’re credible
and authoritative in your field. With advertising, the media
savvy audience knows you paid for the space, so the only
credibility those ads carry is that you had enough money to buy
the ads.
How does all that factor into your bottom lines? Well, sometimes
they do, sometimes they don’t, because reaching a lot of people
with your message does not equate to making them want to buy
what you’re selling. So many other elements are factors in the
“buy” decision – your Web site, your specific product or
service, the topic of your book if there’s one in play, your
price point compared to your competitors, your distribution and
availability – I could go on and on here. The truth is that both
PR and advertising can only inform your potential customers that
you, and what you are marketing, exists.
In the case of PR, it not only informs people, but it also adds
credibility to your reputation, as PR coverage carries more
“endorsement” weight than any advertisement you can ever
purchase.
The key idea to take away from all this is that you won’t
necessarily make sales just because you’re doing PR, but you’ll
be hard-pressed to make sales without it.
Marsha Friedman is CEO of
EMSI
Public Relations, a national firm that provides PR strategy
and publicity services to corporations, entertainers, authors
and professional firms. She also is author of the book,
Celebritize Yourself.
marsha@marshafriedman.com
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