Work.
Leading professional services firm.
Providing insights into media effectiveness – demonstrating how media coverage contributes to brand strength and commercial results.
As a leading professional services firm in the UK, our client’s brand generate substantial media interest. The question for the Director of Communications was, how much of this media interest actually influences consumer behaviour and contributes to business growth?
Knowing instinctively that PR and media activity plays a vital role beyond building awareness and shaping reputation, the firm’s Communications team wanted to gain robust, data-driven evidence demonstrating how media coverage influences brand strength and commercial outcomes.
To achieve this, they commissioned Metricomm to undertake a benchmark analysis of their media coverage over a 12-month period to obtain insights into its impact and effectiveness, using metrics that demonstrate how their media coverage was contributing to brand strength and affecting commercial results.
Metricomm uses audience data as the starting point for impact evaluation, which is far more reliable than the volume and sentiment metrics used by traditional media monitoring companies to demonstrate ‘effectiveness’. We quantifiy how media coverage impacts both consumer behaviour and the tangible business and commercial outcomes that senior executives care about. Our metrics are consistent over time to illustrate what ‘business as usual’ looks like, as well as to showing and measuring the impact of campaigns or significant events.
Our analysis and reporting included:
- a retrospective look at daily coverage over a 12-month period, to understand patterns and trends over time, including the size of audience generated
- revealing which topics, themes and issues in the media narrative are making the greatest contribution to audience engagement and shaping brand perceptions
- quantifying the contribution of online media coverage to commercial outcomes, using data from:
- Daily Google search trends
- Website sessions of several types, including direct and referral traffic, paid and organic social, LinkedIn, email marketing etc
- Internal business development and sales data
- considering brand reputation and positioning, from the perspective of the audience engaging with online news coverage
- identifying the named media (and media type, e.g. national media, consumer media, etc) which are contributing most to brand and business outcomes.
Working closely with the client’s website team, we were able to receive daily time series data from their GA4 (Google Analytics 4), segmented across different session types. By correlating these completely independent data sets with Metricomm’s proprietary media audience data, we identified and analysed the relationships between what was appearing in the news and volume of each type of website session, at a statistical significance level of 99.999%.
Once our report was complete, we ran a debrief session with members of the Communications and Marketing teams to discuss key insights including the fact that, in some cases, as many as 86% of website visits for a particular session type were influenced by the audience generated from online media coverage. We also started to explore how the findings could feed into communication strategy and planning.
Metricomm’s media impact analysis delivered clear, actionable insights that were extremely well received across the client’s business. By identifying the specific topics and issues that most effectively engage audiences and drive traffic to the client’s website, the analysis is helping to inform and sharpen their communications and content strategy. This includes strengthening the visibility of areas where the firm has deep expertise, while enabling that expertise to be more effectively leveraged through PR and marketing activity. The identification of the named media outlets contributing most strongly to brand strength and commercial outcomes is also allowing the client to adopt a more focused and efficient approach to media relations.
