Justin Mauldin — Founder, Salient PR. Salient runs earned media programmes for technology companies. Figures below come from our own outreach database and are updated quarterly.
Most PR goals are written so that they cannot be failed. “Increase brand awareness.” “Build thought leadership.” “Strengthen our position in the market.” Twelve months later nobody can say whether it happened, which is usually the point — an unfalsifiable goal protects everyone who signed off on it.
A useful goal has a failure condition. You should be able to say in advance what result would mean this did not work. Everything below is about getting to that sentence, including the arithmetic that tells you whether the number you picked is achievable.
On this page
- The test: could this have failed?
- The base rates, so the number is realistic
- How long before it counts
- The goals worth setting when you are small
- Measuring it without fooling yourself
- Frequently Asked Questions
The test: could this have failed?
Take your current PR objective and ask what outcome would have counted as failure. If you cannot answer, it is not an objective, it is a sentiment.
| Not a goal | A goal |
|---|---|
| Increase brand awareness | Be named in three of the five trade titles our buyers read, by the end of Q3 |
| Establish thought leadership | Our CTO quoted as an expert source in two pieces we did not initiate |
| Improve share of voice | Move from fourth to second by mentions in the four publications on our list |
| Get more coverage | Twelve placements in outlets our sales team recognises |
The right-hand column is harder to agree to, which is exactly why it is worth doing. It forces the argument about which publications matter to happen at the start, when it is cheap, rather than in month nine when someone asks why a placement in a publication nobody reads is in the report.
The base rates, so the number is realistic
The reason most PR goals are vague is that setting a specific one requires knowing what a normal result looks like, and almost nobody publishes that. Here is ours, from outreach to named journalists between December 2025 and August 2026.
| From every 100 pitches | You get |
|---|---|
| Delivered | 99 — the bounce rate is about 1% |
| Recorded as opened | 51, and the true figure is nearer 71 |
| Median time to that reply | 4 days |
So a target of twelve placements is not a target of twelve emails. Working backwards, it is a few hundred well-targeted pitches over a quarter, which is a real amount of work and a real amount of list building. Setting the goal without doing that arithmetic is how programmes end up judged against a number that was never reachable.
Your own rates will differ — ours are B2B technology, and a consumer or trade programme behaves differently. The point is to have some rates before you commit to a number.
How long before it counts
A reply is not a placement. In the chains we can trace end to end, the median gap between a reporter answering and the piece running is six days, but the range is one day to eighty-five. Six of nine ran inside a fortnight; the slow ones were analysts writing considered pieces rather than news.
Practically, that means a quarterly goal is really a ten-week goal, because the last two weeks of work lands after you have reported. Build that in rather than discovering it.
The goals worth setting when you are small
Small companies are usually told to do more with less. The more useful advice is to do less, deliberately.
One publication that your buyers actually read beats eight that they do not, and it is a goal you can pursue for a quarter without an agency. Pick the title, find the two reporters who cover your category, read six months of what they wrote, and pitch them something that fits. That is a real objective with a real failure condition, and it costs nothing but attention.
The tactics that work at this size are unglamorous: responding to journalist queries, offering yourself as a source on a beat you genuinely know, and being fast. Two-thirds of every reply we get comes from the first email — speed and fit beat volume.
Measuring it without fooling yourself
Two rules that remove most of the self-deception.
Count syndication separately. A release picked up by forty aggregators is one story, not forty. When we cleaned nine years of our own coverage records, removing wire pickup and the same headline appearing across five or more outlets took out roughly half the rows. If your report does not say how it treats this, the number is about double what it should be.
Separate what you bought from what you earned. Sponsored segments, paid placements and wire distribution can all be worth the money, and none of them is evidence that a journalist chose your story. Keep them on their own line.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the main objectives of public relations?
In practice, three: being understood correctly by the people who matter to the business, being credible enough that a third party will vouch for you, and being findable when someone goes looking. Everything else is a tactic in service of one of those.
How do you measure PR?
Against the failure condition you set at the start. If you did not set one, you will end up measuring whatever is easiest to count, which is usually volume — and volume is the metric least connected to whether the work is doing anything.
How long does PR take to work?
Six to ten weeks to a first meaningful placement, assuming you have a story and can supply a spokesperson quickly. The first four to six weeks are list building and relationships, and there is no way to buy past that.
Can a small business do PR without an agency?
Yes, for one publication at a time. What an agency buys you is breadth and maintained relationships. If you only need depth in a single title, you can do that yourself.
Sources
- Salient PR outreach database, outreach to named journalists, December 2025 – August 2026
- Salient PR coverage trackers, 2,917 organic placements across nine years and eleven clients, syndication excluded
- Nine reply-to-publication chains traced individually
What our outreach data shows
Between December 2025 and August 2026, 63% of graded replies to our outreach were a yes and 19% were not interested. Across the four company types we measured, response rates — which count auto-replies — sat between 8.2% and 11.4%.
Source: Salient PR outreach database, December 2025 – August 2026.
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A goal you cannot fail is not a goal. How to write a PR objective you can check, with the base rates from our own outreach to make it realistic.
