Based on research and digital indicators from LOOQME, Muck Ruck, and PRWeek, Agama’s Corporate PR manager, Yelyzaveta Zaremba, revealed for Mind the main aspects of work and challenges faced by PR professionals. This will help to understand how they affect business processes and how to promote effective communication inside and outside the company.

 

Challenges and issues

In a recent LOOQME study, Ukrainian PR professionals recognized multitasking, large workloads, and insufficient staff qualifications as the top three problems.

Foreign colleagues pointed to getting answers from journalists as the main challenge. For Ukrainian PR professionals (although this item received only 14% of the votes in the LOOQME survey), this is also one of the key challenges, especially after the start of the full-scale invasion, when media outlets were downsized.

Why is it important to know? First, understanding the tasks of a PR specialist will help the owner to more effectively influence the quality and pace of work and speed up problem-solving by attracting additional resources, such as increasing the team or mastering new automation tools.

 

Secondly, the media is a separate audience with which you need to build relationships. One of the factors that influence the possibility of publishing material in the media is its attitude towards the company owner. Therefore, knowledge of this area of work will help reduce the pressure on the PR specialist and create a more effective PR plan.

 

What takes the most time

Working on small tasks, preparing content for the media and social networks, generating ideas, and planning are the things that Ukrainian PR professionals spend the most time on.

85% of foreign colleagues spend more than a quarter of their time establishing and maintaining relations with the media.

 

Why is it important to know? Understanding what PR professionals spend a lot of time on allows the company owner to properly organize internal processes, create adequate budgets, delegate routine tasks, and implement automation tools. And it allows the PR professional to focus on strategic tasks and increase work efficiency.

Let’s move on to the most difficult and important point to understand and interpret.

Metrics to measure the success of the work

In a study conducted by PRWeek, 61% of respondents from around the world ranked this aspect as one of the four most important – the inability to effectively measure impact. The researchers delved deeper into this aspect and additionally learned from respondents about six challenges they face when aligning metrics with revenue or other vital business KPIs: 

• 50% have difficulty turning data into actionable insights; 
• 40% – measuring dependence on media impressions; 
• 41% – with the identification of the best tools for measuring efficiency; 
• 23% have access to effective measurement tools;
• 21% – with confirmation of the impact of PR top management.

Since PR measurement tools are few, expensive, and time-consuming, not everything can be translated into numbers, as the end customer wants. With this in mind, the three main KPIs for both Ukrainian and foreign PR professionals are: reach, number of publications, and social media engagement.

Top managers should stop chasing numbers and take into account in their approach to developing PR strategies that the basis for measuring the effectiveness of audience relations is not just quantitative indicators (Outputs), but their combination with qualitative indicators (Outcomes), such as:

• Awareness. Do not spare the budget for surveys and focus group discussions with the audience you need. And when conducting surveys, focus not on knowledge about your product or service, but on the PR activities that have been applied;

• Shifted perception. Don’t forget that PR is all about managing perception, in addition to communicating with the audience. How can we track this metric? Again, through surveys and monitoring the tone of references and comments from stakeholders, the media, and social media;

• Engagement. According to the study, this metric is among the top three. But it is important to remember not only about its quantitative measurement. This indicator will help you get invaluable information about audience behavior, which will allow you to adapt PR activities and achieve maximum impact. This means that it is important to pay attention to who is talking about you and what they are saying (whether it is your audience at all), not how much they are talking.  

Instead of a conclusion

Strong external communications are based on strong internal ones. And knowing the pains of the person responsible for these communications and how to overcome them effectively affects the process as a whole. 

And finally, almost half of global communications professionals (47%) now report directly to the CEO, and 30% to the head of marketing. This helps to make strategic decisions quickly and efficiently and to properly manage communication with the right audiences.