3.10.2023
Looking at your PR performance in isolation may present big wins for your beauty brand, but it’s only when you benchmark against your competitors that you understand your strategy’s true impact. So, where do your PR efforts sit within the competitive landscape? Here, we reveal the metrics to track and the activities to analyse in order to get a market-wide view of your success…
Are You Tracking the Right Media?
Before you begin to monitor your PR performance against competitors, it’s important to understand the differences between paid, owned and earned media. This may sound simplistic, but the lines have blurred and definitions have shifted in recent years. Here’s how you can accurately separate the three:
1. Earned Media
This is the organic coverage you gain as a result of your PR efforts. If a journalist or influencer promotes your brand without monetary gain, the mention can be classed as earned. And, even though product samples and press events must be declared as ‘Ad - PR product’ or ‘Ad - press event’ in social media posts, the relevant mentions will still count towards your PR-earned coverage. It is useful to understand the paid and earned elements of this type of media but, essentially, they are all ‘earned’ in the market mix.
2. Owned Media
The clue is in the name. Any beauty blog content or social media posts that sit within your own channels will be categorised as owned. This includes everything you publish on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Twitter.
3. Paid Media
All paid-for advertising counts towards paid media, including social media ads, retailer ads and print or digital advertorials.
The Metrics You Should Measure
Of the three, the type of media that best reflects your PR performance is earned media. That’s why it’s important to home in on organic coverage when trying to understand where you sit amongst your competition.
But what metrics should you be monitoring in the earned media space? Look at:
- Reach
- Views
- Engagement
- Earned media value (£)
- Sales
- Share of voice
The right tool will enable you to automatically capture these metrics, so you can easily understand your PR strategy’s performance.
Delving Deeper Into Competitive Advantage
You can compare the above metrics against those of your competitors to identify the impact of a mention, and in turn you’ll have a quick, clear snapshot of your PR performance. However, gaining the full picture means going more granular. These are just some of the extra insights you should consider:
1. Your Category Ranking
The beauty industry is vast and ever-evolving, with a raft of categories that sit within it, including haircare, skincare, colour cosmetics and fragrance. To compare your brand across all of these categories would be to skew your performance metrics, which is why it’s important to use a media monitoring tool that can categorise coverage.
Because mmi is beauty-specific, we enable you to filter your mentions by category and product type. This means you’re even able to drill down to data showing mascara or face serum mentions.
2. Opportunities to Thrive
There are two ways you can use competitor benchmarking to your advantage: you can mimic a power player’s successful strategy or you can find out what they’re doing and take your brand in the other direction. Either way, monitoring competitor media allows you to spot missed opportunities, and then refine your PR strategy for maximum impact.
Analyse where your competitors are gaining lucrative mentions, then decide on your tactic. Will you target the same journalists and influencers? Or will you reach out to the press they might have missed?
3. Share of Voice
A high share of voice (SOV) will often correlate with a high share of sales, and by layering the two, you may see patterns that indicate how successful your PR strategy has been. We offer a SOV measure in mediaPRO, which allows you to see your brand’s percentage presence amongst your competitors. Add in your value market share (VMS) over a given period, and you’ll have useful insight into the impact of various PR activities.
Want to learn more about benchmarking your PR performance in the beauty industry? Book a demo above.
