Why PR highlight reports are the equivalent of half shaving someone’s face? - Market View Online

Why PR highlight reports are the equivalent of half shaving someone’s face?

Market View Online / Innovation  / Why PR highlight reports are the equivalent of half shaving someone’s face?

Why PR highlight reports are the equivalent of half shaving someone’s face?

 

First off, what is a PR highlight report?

 

We define PR highlight reports as the static reports reporting on non-static coverage. The reports that have pages and pages of images of your coverage with maybe one or two metrics like engagement or circulation spread across the pages. This style of manual PR reporting is, unfortunately, all that’s really available to a lot of businesses and PR firms. If this is how you’re reporting, we can definitely help you improve. 

 

When developing our tool we didn’t only want to replace the way professionals do reporting, we set out to dramatically improve the efficiency, insights and aesthetics of reporting. 

 

You can now significantly improve your reporting, and create reports that show you the big picture and even help you inform on future decisions. 

 

What’s so wrong with highlight reports? 

 

You should look at creating picture-driven reporting (a.k.a highlight reports) as similar to half shaving someone’s face. The pictures are great but they make up half the job, they’re proof you created buzz but they definitely should not be the driver of your report nor should this be where you stop your reporting. 

 

You invest money into an event, you host the event, you see a picture filled PDF with the coverage generated around the event, great, your question should then be so what? 

 

If your report can’t answer these questions we have a problem.

 

After you’ve spent all that money on an event, you need to understand how you can improve on your event for next time, and whether the event was even a success. A good report should be able to answer all these questions:

Did this campaign compare better to a previous campaign? 

Did we:

Generate more mentions? 

Create a better value per mention compared to a previous campaign? 

Reach a different audience or the same audience? 

Increase the unique reach of our coverage or just the estimated impressions? 

Which influencers:

Drove the engagement of this campaign?

Drove the reach of this campaign?

Drove the impressions of this campaign?

Which channel drove the value of this campaign? 

Which mention from each channel drove the value of this campaign? 

What was the engagement rate of the campaign like? 

What value did we see from Instagram stories? 

Did we perform better than a similar competitor’s campaign?

Has this made a positive impact on our overall brand performance?

Did this help us to increase our share of voice (SOV) against our closest competitors (the market)?

 

The difference in insight-driven reporting vs picture-driven reporting

 

Our reports measure a lot more than just engagement on an Instagram post and this is the way you need to be reporting. Investing in reporting is the only way you will be able to improve your overall brand strategy and ROI. 

 

Not only does our tool save professionals hours in manual reporting it creates reports that are insight-driven. We do not just show you your mentions, we evaluate them, judge them, analyse them, value them so you can learn how to improve and where to invest your money next time. 

 

There is no point investing money into events and numerous campaigns if you are not going to truly evaluate each mention you generated to measure the success.

 

You spend so much money on events and PR you really can’t afford to not evaluate your coverage properly. How are you going to know where to better invest your money next time if you can’t independently evaluate if there are gaps in your campaign?

 

We are evaluation enthusiasts so it really hurts us when brands could be learning so much more from your campaigns and don’t realise the limitations of picture-driven reporting. You wouldn’t half shave a person’s face so please don’t half report on your events. Save time and money by creating insights-driven media evaluation reports.

 

Ellen Warfield
Specialist in Media Evaluation