Ciaran Howley, Tangerine
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
A famous quote that captures the uncertainty for many around marketing effectiveness and performance. We know that getting in front of potential customers in the right place with the right message is important – but how do we know what’s really driving results out of the many channels we appear on?
As market conditions tighten and marketing budgets are often the first to get the chop to rescue profit targets, the need to prove value and secure continued investment is more pressing than ever. Not just understanding the impact ourselves, but communicating that value through the business too.
Construction firms rightly focus on tangible outcomes – projects completed, hours saved, emissions reduced – so it’s important to demonstrate how public relations and social media contribute to equally vital core business goals. The challenge is that the benefit of the work can be invisible on simple attribution trackers that struggle to track purchase decisions that take months or years.
We often miss the real impact because it’s measured in less direct ways. Like how familiar people are with our brand, how much they prefer us over competitors, and their level of trust and belief in us.
Brand Tracking
Across both PR and social media, you’ll want to be tracking your brand’s performance over time. Not just the bottom lines in sales, but also the metrics that contribute towards it.
Is your brand easy to recall and does it come to mind when your audience considers purchases? Which situations does your brand come to mind more easily than others? Does your audience have the key associations with your brand that you need them to – like being trustworthy, delivering quality products and driving technological advancement?
Comprehensive brand tracking tells you whether your marketing is delivering the right results in in the right buying situations. This can win you customers without having to compete on expensive lead generation campaigns when the audience has already built a preference for a competitor.
But this can be cost prohibitive for many businesses – and even the larger businesses find it difficult when spread across many territories and partnerships and dealerships. In which case, you’ll more likely approach with a combination of best practice (with supporting science and research) alongside key indicative results from your individual channels.
PR Measurement
Amongst other things, PR helps position the company as a trusted, expert voice in the industry. This builds credibility among potential customers.
It’s important to go beyond simple coverage trackers of reach and opportunities to see – trade titles appear to have less worth on a simpler tracker, but landing a front page on a highly targeted trade title that gets in front of a small group of key decision-makers can make a more meaningful contribution to your business.
When you’re building your measurement framework, make sure you’re accounting for the relevance of a title’s audience (we can account for this with manual adjustables). You should also be scoring for placement in the article, achieving headline mentions, levels of key message inclusion and sentiment.
We also work at a time with increased synergies between departments – and Digital PR is a key component of any SEM/SEO strategy. Are you tracking digital metrics such as backlinks, domain authority and whether you’re building follow/no-follow links to benefit from the mentions you achieve?
With the rise of AI in search behaviours from our audiences, you’ll also want to make sure you’re tracking how it impacts your visibility on AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini. With the majority of AI results powered by earned media in key titles, it’s essential you capture this in your picture of success – and many trade titles carry higher authority in these specialist requests.
Social Media
Social media complements PR by creating consistent, real-time engagement with target audiences – showcasing, for example, projects, company culture, and thought leadership. Without visible proof of impact, these efforts may be seen as “nice-to-haves” rather than key strategic investments.
Make sure your measurement has evolved to communicate this too – and you’re reporting strategically as well as tactically. Avoid vanity metrics like follower counts, which are increasingly irrelevant as audiences discover more content through recommendations.
We know from studies that the level of attention on a piece of content has a greater correlation with whether your brand is being remembered and recalled at important moments – far more than engagements.
So start to look at quality of the interaction you’re having with your audience. Are you capturing enough attention for your brand? And are you driving enough attention for each individual piece of content to make sure your key messages are cutting through and being understood?
You’ll want to be paying more attention to video metrics than likes… but you need to dig deeper than just video views. What’s the average watch time on your content? Is your key message delivered within this and is the brand prominent and seen? What’s your completion rate i.e. how often are users getting to the end and receiving all the key information?
For audiences with complex needs in a challenging market, it’s crucial that your audience hears what you have to say. Building strategies that make sure your content goes beyond fleeting glances, and having the reporting tools to prove that, is crucial.