By: Matthew Kaiserman, Junior Account Executive 

In today’s environment, marketers and communicators are constantly tasked with quantifying their ROI.  All campaigns and marketing efforts must be justified in order to allocate budgets. Just 21 percent of companies consider themselves effective at measuring mobile ROI.

Companies and clients want to see quantifiable results and metrics from their PR and marketing efforts, yet many brands and agencies still have issues in gauging valuable insights. This is an age-old issue that has plagued marketers for years. While some tools are able to pull certain metrics, it is hard to differentiate between true analytics that move the needle and vanity figures.

Earned, owned and shared media provide brands with tons of value, but only if they can quantify and prove it. Below are three reasons why marketing metrics are so important in today’s landscape:

Show Your Value Compared to Your Competitors

By quantifying the impact of your and PR and marketing efforts, brands can compare themselves directly to their competitors. Our new Brand and PR Health Scores quickly pulls these metrics for you, to show how your brand stacks up to industry competition. Metrics alone offer value, but being able to show how far behind or ahead of the competition you are is a great way to assign value to  efforts and adjust budgets accordingly.

Gauge Campaign Success

When planning out a campaign, it is imperative to set realistic benchmarks and KPIs. While some of these goals can be qualitative, setting clear quantitative benchmarks keeps everyone on track and accountable. With our clients, we make sure to include clear metric based objectives in our strategies. Using our health scores we can glean detailed insights to see if we have reached certain objectives or need to adjust our efforts in order to do so. For marketing, this can be quantifying social engagements and for PR this can be gauging share of voice or impact of media placements.

Provide a Roadmap for the Future

Communicators need to stop guessing about their campaign efforts and utilize analytics to see trends and create metric backed strategies for the future. Our agency will look back to past campaigns and compare them to current ones to see what areas need to be improved upon and to show any improvements or regressions.  You can compare your efforts on a recurring basis to ensure current tactics are the most efficient. We compare our PR, social media and blog reports on a month to month and year to year basis. This allows us to show increases in success and see where efforts need to be scaled back or ramped up.

The PR and marketing industries have lagged behind in analytics, but they can no longer afford to do so. Metrics not only offer rationale as to why certain tactics were successful or not, but also to prove to stakeholders and clients the value of efforts. By seeing how certain pieces of content drive traffic, leads and sales, communicators can show their ROI, but only if they invest the time and resources into accurately pulling these metrics.