It’s no exaggeration to say consumer PR teams are busier than ever.
Consumer PR campaigns now run across multiple channels, spanning a wide range of formats – and then there are influencer collaborations to manage. They’re standard practice today. In fact, 86% of US marketers and PR firms included influencer outreach as a key service in 2025, according to research from Sprout Social. And that number’s only going to rise further over the next few years, especially given the average influencer marketing investment has increased by 171% in the past year, research from CreatorIQ’s State of Creator Marketing Report 2025/26 found.
With modern consumer PR campaigns moving way beyond traditional media, the complexity of showcasing and attributing success has become quite the headache for consumer PR pros.
Effective consumer PR reporting is, however, essential to demonstrate value, secure budgets and guide future strategy.
“Consumer PR teams need to demonstrate which activities, channels and influencers are driving ROI. In a world of increasingly fragmented media, showcasing all this in one place can be a real challenge.”
Richard Benson, CEO at Releasd
Old habits die hard: consumer PR reporting still challenging
Despite the rapid growth in consumer PR, reporting remains a critical challenge for both in-house comms teams and PR agencies.
Almost half (44%) of PR pros struggle to align metrics to revenue or business KPIs, a report from Muck Rack found. When asked which tasks take up at least 25% of their workload, 44% of PR pros cited measurement and reporting among their top responsibilities, second only to media relations.
Let’s be real. Consumer PR pros have a lot on their plates. Creativity and innovation are required to cut-through the noise, and the management of events, experiential, sampling, popups and more are now required skills. Visual assets like imagery and video are produced as a matter of course. And then there are the channels and formats: so many channels and formats!
94% of creators are willing to work with brands for just free products, as long as they love the brand or the product value is high.
The State of Influencer Marketing 2024
The ‘reporting friction’ problem
It’s this innate complexity that presents challenges in the context of consumer PR reporting – whether to clients or directly to senior leadership teams.
The fact is that consumer PR professionals struggle to highlight their key activities, showcase assets, present coverage and measure overall impact. It takes too long, is highly manual – and the entire process relies on a mish-mash of docs, decks and dashboards.
This ‘reporting friction’ drains resources and makes it hard for clients or senior executives to appreciate the value of modern consumer PR – which puts budgets at risk.
How to solve reporting challenges in consumer PR
Effective consumer PR reporting is possible – with a few tweaks and improvements to existing processes. Here’s what we see from leading consumer PR teams.
1. Streamline the consumer PR reporting workflow
Consumer PR teams juggle a vast array of channels and formats – online publishers, Content Creators, UGC, Reels, Stories, event content, sampling activity and more. This fragmentation creates complexity: activity sits in different places, across screenshots, spreadsheets, decks and disappearing stories.
Streamlining the workflow begins with consolidating the data that’s already collected. Whether it’s coverage URLs, influencer content, social metrics or experiential results – bringing everything into one place helps reduce manual admin, save time and create clearer, more consistent reports that senior stakeholders can quickly understand.
Actionable tip: Create a single “reporting folder” per initiative with pre-set subfolders for coverage URLs, creator content URLs, event assets and social screenshots to eliminate end-of-month panic.
2. Highlight social wins more effectively
YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and, to some extent, Facebook are central to consumer PR. But each platform behaves differently:
- Vertical video vs carousels vs galleries
- Disappearing stories
- Inconsistent analytics
- Posts that spread across open social and dark social
Capturing these requires a simple system for collecting screenshots, URLs and metrics in good time – and then presenting them in a format that clearly shows what happened, where and why it mattered.
Actionable tip: Set a regular calendar reminder to screenshot or record disappearing social atories well before they vanish.
3. Leverage consumer-focused PR metrics
Beyond coverage volume, consumer PR teams need outcome-based metrics that show real influence on behaviour.
Here are some of the most popular KPIs used by modern consumer PR teams (and why):
- Coverage Views: realistic exposure to lifestyle and consumer audiences
- Domain Authority: essential for understanding the weight of key lifestyle titles
- Engagement: shares, reactions, saves, comments (typically higher in consumer PR)
- Sentiment: signals whether brand perception is improving
- Brand Recall: whether consumers will remember the brand later
- Prominence: how visible and central the brand was in coverage
- Key Message Penetration: whether key CTAs or product messages landed
- Attention Earned: how long audiences actively engaged with coverage
- ACE: compares the cost of Attention Earned to the cost of digital ads
Actionable tip: Pick 3 to 5 key metrics to track consistently every month, e.g. Coverage Views, Total Engagements, Prominence, Brand Recall and Key Message Penetration – and benchmark those same KPIs across time or campaigns to show progress.
The power of comparison: Turning PR data into proof of impact
4. Showcase key visual assets
Consumer PR is visual by nature. Reports should include imagery and video highlights from:
- product placements
- influencer collaborations
- event activations
- sampling moments
- experiential pop-ups
- lifestyle photography and UGC
Visuals provide proof of execution and are simply more engaging for busy clients and execs who are used to reading text-heavy reports. It’s a win-win.
Actionable tip: Use free software to create a “visual highlight reel” (6–12 images or clips) to help senior stakeholders instantly grasp the impact of consumer PR in a few seconds.
5. Tell the story behind the results
Coverage and metrics alone don’t give clients or senior stakeholders the full picture. Consumer PR reporting becomes far more persuasive when supported by a bit of context, including:
- Objectives & Targets
- Key Activities
- Result Highlights
- Key Learnings
Actionable tip: Create a simple text area with these headings in every report template so it becomes a consistent part of your storytelling.
Looking to elevate your consumer PR reporting process?
By adopting these five steps, consumer PR teams can streamline their reporting, communicate impact more clearly and give senior stakeholders the insight they need to make confident decisions.
And when teams are ready to bring everything together in one place – narrative, assets, coverage, social and outcome-based analytics – platforms like Releasd make the entire process faster, clearer and far more persuasive.
