Tracking PR results

It's simply one of the toughest things to do in marketing: tie PR hits to your bottom line. So your product was in the "New Gear" section of a major men's magazine. How many units did you sell because of it?

Well, #1, you can't look at it quite like that or you will never have a successful PR program. While that hit may certainly move units and that's a great thing, a PR program is more about the totality of hits over a longer period of time. It's about branding and raising your awareness in the marketplace (wow, that was marketing speak and we hate that. Sorry, won't happen again).

But, we know of a way to tie PR hits to actual money and when we hear of a better one, we'll let you know. Until then, we love the idea of physically measuring a hit and comparing to ad rates.

For example, we got Anthony Gallo Acoustics Reference 3.1 speaker into Playboy magazine's Holiday Gift Guide. The speaker took up about 1/4 of the page. I looked up Playboy's ad rates in my media guides and it was about $100,000 for a full-page ad (these rates can vary drastically based on frequency and whatever you are able to negotiate. This is ballpark).

Now, as you may know, you get a better deal for buying bigger ads, so it's not $25,000 for a 1/4 page (unless you negotiated that, in which case, bravo). Let's conservatively estimate that it would cost you in the $33,000 range for 1/4 page.

PR does have more value than an advertisement, as there is an air of objectivity that comes with it. Most people don't know that someone like me called Playboy numerous times to try to get that product in the gift guide. Many assume that these media outlets find all of this stuff on their own.

In PR circles, they say that PR is worth 3x as much as advertisements as far as impact. So let's apply that, and now that Playboy hit is worth approximately $99,000.

Yes, these are estimates, but it's the best way we've heard to judge your PR results.