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It often seems as if the PR portion of the marketing mix
is the poor step-child, garnering the smallest of
budgets and only receiving recognition for the largest
successes and failures. Some recent technological
breakthroughs are proving that PR not only is effective
in getting the word out, but it actually offers strong
return on investment (ROI).
For example, Procter and Gamble (P&G) has developed a
system called PREvaluate that assesses PR performance in
a quantitative way helping executives measure PR impact
against other marketing programs in an apples to apples
way. The system uses a marketing-mix model that utilizes
highly complex analytics to evaluate the sales impact of
all of the media approaches.
P&G recently used this measurement tool to analyze the
PR programs for six of its brands. Four of the brands
saw a higher ROI from PR than any other activity, and
for the remaining two, PR came in second.
A recent
PRWeek survey of CEOs echoes the notion that
PR is working and that it is under-utilized. While 49%
of the CEOs stated that they were either “extremely” or
“very” satisfied with the ROI from their company’s PR
activities, an additional 45% were somewhat satisfied,
leaving a meager 6% of CEOs to say that they were less
than satisfied with ROI from PR.
In addition, one of the top objectives the CEOs cited as
being impacted by PR is increased sales, a result
usually attributed to advertising programs. Mapping PR
to sales goals along with traditional PR objectives such
as raising brand awareness and enhancing the corporate
reputation, places PR squarely in the spotlight as an
increasingly crucial marketing strategy.
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