Ultimately, PR is about getting other people to talk about your brand favourably, and that’s an abstract metric which is hard to quantify. With today’s smaller budgets, quick wins are important, and it’s easier to look for quick wins when you’re measuring more traditional marketing metrics, like click-through rates and impressions.

Attention and sentiment don’t directly correlate to a brand’s bottom line, but strong brands are able to weather economic insecurity, and attention and sentiment are key to brand strength. Despite their abstract nature, we still need to measure and track these metrics effectively, and the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework gives us a template to do this.

How the AMEC Framework can help to measure PR performance

AMEC is the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and it describes itself as ‘the world’s largest media intelligence and insights professional organisation’. Its Integrated Evaluation Framework is designed to help PR professionals define their objectives, make a plan to achieve those objectives, and effectively measure the performance, outcomes, and impacts of their work.

Success starts with the brief

Already this month, we've spoken about how it’s essential to define success ahead of a campaign. Without a clear measure of what constitutes success, you’ll have no way of knowing which metrics you should be measuring and which ones can be ignored. As AMEC says: “activity without meaningful outcomes is irrelevant”, so you need to decide what those meaningful outcomes look like before you get started, and that begins with the brief.

Define what you want to achieve, be it lead generation, a certain number of backlinks, or visits to a landing page. From there, you can gear your activity towards achieving those goals, which is the most efficient way of working.

One piece of content can’t do everything

You can’t send a press release out into the world and expect it to do the work of a cohesive campaign. Putting the burden of maximising leads, conversions, and engagement onto a single piece of content won’t deliver the impact you want - it’ll just generate underwhelming results.

This is why starting with your objectives is so important. Types of content have their own strengths; some are more useful for engagement, some are better aligned with lead generation, and the list goes on. Establish your objectives and then determine which types of content are best suited to achieving them.

Pushing to demonstrate brand authority? Thought leadership pieces can show that you have something of value to share, that you’re a voice to be trusted. Looking to drive sales? Benefit-led videos can slot nicely into your social media strategy, with endless scope for creativity.

Identify the objectives, assess which types of content are the best fit, and focus on those. There’s not a single type of content in existence that can adequately cover all your bases and hit all your targets.

Context matters more than vanity metrics

A bigger number doesn’t necessarily equal better content performance. Pieces with huge reach aren’t worth much if they’re not driving your audience to take the action you want them to take. A piece that achieves relatively low reach can still drive significant action if it delivers value to the right people.

Content should be designed for each stage of the customer journey

We’ll keep banging this drum - metrics should follow your objectives, not the other way around. Awareness, consideration, engagement, conversion; each stage of the funnel has its own needs and nuances, and you should measure your metrics accordingly. Content designed to drive awareness shouldn’t be judged on how many leads it generates, just like content designed to drive conversions should be measured on how many conversions it drives, not how many clicks, views, or likes it gets.

Defining these objectives (and their relevant metrics) should also inform your creative approach. Setting goals and defining the appropriate metrics will help your creative team deliver strong work that will support your messaging and retain cohesion and brand consistency.

How AI citations are changing the game

AI citations is a relatively new development, and it’s one where PR really shines in terms of quantifiable results. Analysis shows that earned media drives 84% of AI citations, and for PR professionals that’s solid proof of the value in the work they’re doing.

Knowing what AI is reading can help teams identify the forums and channels they need to build AI citations and feature prominently in the answers AI gives its users.

It’s not without its challenges. Some top-tier publications, for example, prevent ChatGPT from crawling their site, so if you land coverage in such a publication, some AI agents won’t be able to access it, which can affect citations.

How the AMEC Framework can help to shift mindsets

Today, many people are using AI chatbots in the same way they used Google, which means PR professionals need to think about what they focus on, and what their markers of success look like. People accept that measuring AI is important, but many still aren’t doing it. The AMEC Framework starts at the beginning: it helps teams define what they’re trying to achieve, which dictates their targets, the channels they need, and the queries they want to be cited for.

By using the framework in the planning stage of a campaign, teams can define what success looks like at each stage, determine the best methods to achieve this success, and then evaluate their results against that framework.