Media Impressions and Public Relations: What’s the Relation?

Public relations are extremely important for a brand and, while there are numerous strategies one PR expert can use to boost the brand’s image, the options to measure their success are often limited. When it comes to gauging the effectiveness of the PR methods used, one method stands above all others – media impressions.

💡 Read Digital PR Explained: Best Strategies and Tools

Think of social media impressions as the digital form of the first handshake. Measuring PR efforts is not as simple as measuring, let’s say, your advertising strategies. However, media impressions are a very direct, unique metric for measuring how effective a campaign is – and your PR campaign is no exception to this.

Now, it is important to keep in mind that media impressions are just the beginning – though quite a crucial one. Your targeted audience will not necessarily take action having seen your brand’s message once. The famous marketing principle called ‘the rule of 7’ suggests that customers need to see a brand at least 7 times before making a purchase decision, which makes this only the starting point. 

With all of this in mind, we’ve created this post to teach you more about media impressions, what they mean, and how you can use them in public relations. 

What are media impressions

If you have a business or an organization that aims to improve its brand awareness or simply looking for ways to grow, media impressions are a very important factor in this. This reflects the number of times an advertisement or post is displayed on the targeted audience’s social media feed, regardless of whether they click on it, like it, or share it. 

And it is not just about the social media feeds, either. A media impression explores how many people have heard about your brand via different channels. 

For instance, this helps you learn if your company’s product was mentioned on TV shows or in movies – how many times and to how many viewers. If a TV show mentions your product and 100,000 people watch it, you can count this as 100,000 media impressions. 

Now, let’s be clear – media impressions are just one of the KPIs that can help you measure a PR campaign’s success or efficacy – albeit a very important one. Impressions give you a general image of how many times your content was shown to the audience. Other top ways to do this include:

• Market surveys exploring the awareness of your brand
• Website traffic data before, during, and after the PR campaign 
• Social media mentions to see what people say about your brand online
• Content analysis to see if your narrative is reported accurately in the press

Media impressions are the beginning of it all. Without your brand reaching the targeted audience, you can’t really expect people to take action i.e. make purchases, put items into a cart, recommend your brand, and so on. 

Your PR campaign tracking starts with media impressions and here, we will teach you why this matters. 

Strategies to increase media impressions

If you wish to stay ahead of the competition by boosting impressions, there are a few strategies that work best, including:

Quality, versatile content

The number one way to reach and convince your audience to convert is through quality, informative, engaging, and appealing content. We are talking about content that shares your PR message clearly and resonates with the audience, as well as helps you reach out to a diverse pool of potential customers. 

With that in mind, if you want to reach more media impressions, you need to think about versatility. We aren’t only speaking of photos and videos or live content – we are also talking about audio and video content, subtitles, and even translations to different languages to reach a wider audience. 

This is far from a difficult feat these days – you can translate audio from video within minutes and with minimal effort automatically, and make your content more diverse to boost media impressions and reach. 

Proper targeting and retargeting

A good PR strategy begins with identifying the target audience and planning your efforts based on your buyer persona. We are, of course, talking about geographics, demographics, and behavioral data. 

Next comes retargeting, otherwise known as remarketing. This involves showing content to users that your brand has interacted with in the past. It’s a way to re-engage prospects you lost along the way, boost their impressions, or simply nurture potential customers. 

Influencer marketing

Another good strategy to amplify your reach, connect with new audiences, and generally make more media impressions, is through influencer marketing. Influencers are trending people in your niche, and working with them can not only boost your impressions but also enhance your brand’s credibility. To measure the success of this strategy, you can track the ‘share of voice’ metric.  

Media reach and media impressions: what’s the difference

Media reach and media impressions are rather similar and often used interchangeably – but they are, in fact, very different. Reach refers to the total number of people who will see your content. Impressions refers to the total number of times the content is displayed. 

One follower can view the same piece of content that is part of your PR campaign two or three times, for instance. That would count as three impressions. But, since it is the same person, it counts as one media reach. 

When it comes to media impressions, there are four primary types you should pay attention to, and each will serve a different purpose in your growth strategy. 

1. Organic impressions: These come from the natural exposure of content on different platforms i.e. when people naturally discover your brand by searching in search engines or watching a TV program that features it.
   
2. Paid impressions: As the name suggests, these are the ads and other methods you use by spending money, such as PPC advertising and sponsored social media posts.
   
3. Earned impressions: You earn these by impressing people with your content or brand. These depend on voluntary sharing, commenting, or liking on your content i.e. by spreading word of mouth. As for measuring them, use the earned media value metric to keep track of your progress.
   
4. Owned impressions: Originating from your brand’s channels like your blog, website, or your social media platforms. For instance, if you publish a blog post on your Instagram or Facebook page, the resulting impressions are owned media impressions.

Read Building a Media Strategy: Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

Why do media impressions matter

Media impressions help assess how many people your strategy is reaching. By using these impressions, you can achieve four major goals:

1. Evaluate the overall success of your PR campaign. A higher number of impressions shows you that your content has reached a larger audience. 
2. Identify the areas of improvement to increase social media reach (or reach in general). A declining media impressions number tells you that your PR campaign isn’t a success and needs some improvements.
3. Calculate the expenses and allocate your budget more effectively
4. Make new strategies and changes to boost your brand’s image and presence

In addition to these four major goals, here is what else you can achieve by tracking media impressions:

5. Benchmarking. Media impressions are a quantitative KPI that you can compare over time – both with your previous data and against industry standards. This will, without a doubt, help you assess the performance of your PR efforts.
6. ROI assessment. You must be thinking – how do media impressions measure ROI? Even though they don’t do this alone or directly, they are a big part of assessing the success of your PR campaign. Combine them with metrics like sentiment and engagement, and you can have quite a comprehensive view of your ROI. 
7. Client reporting. PR agencies often need to show reports to other parties, such as bosses or clients, as proof of reach and visibility achieved through work. If you want to show your customers that your PR efforts are well-planned and executed, media impressions can give you the evidence you need to impress. 

Time to measure those media impressions!

The majority of the platforms you use will have options that allow you to measure social media impressions, but the numbers don’t always paint the big picture. Not to mention, it can be exhausting to do it all manually. 

If you’re not up to doing it alone, PR experts now have plenty of platforms and resources that can give them insight into their media presence as a whole, and even help them analyze the data to gain the best possible insights. You can easily measure impressions with Determ across multiple accounts, which is ideal for multi-location businesses, busy PR experts and entrepreneurs, and social media marketing managers in general. 

So, what is your excuse for not leveraging media impressions to boost your campaign just yet? The time to begin is today! Remember, media impressions are the starting point – everything begins with them. 

Author’s Bio Nadica Metuleva is a senior content writer with experience of over eight years in the freelance market. Her specialty is blog posts, listicles, and articles in the business, SaaS, gambling, and lifestyle niches. Over the years, Nadica has deepened her understanding of SEO strategies and developed a passion for storytelling. She holds a Master’s Degree in English Literature and Teaching and speaks four languages. You can find her on LinkedIn.