It’s budgeting season. Everyone’s favorite, right? Okay, maybe not. One of the biggest challenges of comms is justifying costs and proving ROI. When your job day in and day out is building relationships and testing messaging, how do you translate that into actual business value? In this post, I’ll break down 3 ways to demonstrate value with readership.
1. Uncovering readers of your coverage at an article level and in aggregate reveals your true impact.
For over a decade, PR teams have been so hungry for a value metric, they’ve resorted to circulation numbers (impressions) and social engagement, both of which are wildly inaccurate. In fact, both are likely undercutting your actual impact.
First off, less than 10% of article traffic comes from social media. Social metrics should only be used to indicate success of your social strategy. Second, not every article is read by everyone that visits that publication in a month. Common sense. That said, some brand coverage attracts more readers than a unique monthly visitor average reflects. Readership frequently reveals more value than impressions, social engagement, and volume metrics show.
2. Readership-driven media strategies save your team valuable time and resources.
Using most-read topics, publications, and reporters to back your media strategy helps your team focus resources on the areas you know perform for your brand. Particularly in times of crisis, readership can save you from spinning wheels responding to something that no one is reading about.
3. Calculating what it would cost to drive the same traffic to a landing page uncovers dollars saved.
If we know how many people read an article and, in some cases, where they came from, you can easily calculate how much it would cost to drive the same amount of traffic to a piece of content via cost-per-click rates. Memo Readership Value (MRV) is exactly that. We use real cost-per-click rates based on how each unique visitor found the article.
TL;DR
When you’re fighting for budget and justifying resources, proving ROI of your efforts should be the easy part. Readership helps you equate results to actual business impact by uncovering how many people are actually reading about your brand. It saves your team time and resources by allowing you to focus on what you know performs. Finally, MRV provides you with a realistic ad dollar savings metric that puts you on the same playing field as the rest of your marketing team.